Enterprise Sales 2.0 — Disrupted by Technology, Now Fuelled by It
How technology has changed the way organizations do enterprise sales today.
Heraclitus said, ‘Nothing endures but change’.
We live in a world where the speed of change itself is being disrupted. Rapid digitization fuelled by rapid technological innovation is transforming the global business landscape at an unprecedented pace.
To remain relevant and flourish, companies need to be at the forefront of adopting new technologies to enable digital transformation, both for themselves and for their customers and partners. Enterprise sales, a critical business function, is no exception.
What worked yesterday is unlikely to work today as a sales strategy and organization, whether you are a large corporate or a start-up.
It is in this context that we examine the question:
How is enterprise sales evolving and leveraging technology to be effective in winning, retaining and growing customers?
It is perhaps widely accepted that the adoption and impact of emerging technologies like data analytics, machine learning, robotics process automation, IoT and more recently block chain, is pervading across the entire business and beyond IT, to multiple business functions including sales, delivery, customer service, product management, platforms, R&D, supply and distribution, finance, legal and the workforce.
As enterprises drive their transformation and digital-first agenda, we see multiple use cases emerge where one or more of these technologies play a critical enabling role.
In this scenario, enterprise buying is no more a prerogative of the CIO or the IT organization alone.
We are seeing democratization of enterprise buying. In some instances, the role of the CIO has evolved into that of a Chief Digital Officer, responsible for business and process transformation, with IT as an enabler.
And in most cases, technology buying associated with business use cases is no more a decision that is left to the CIO alone to make. Business stakeholders are playing a critical role in these buying decisions, either as co-sponsors or as main buyers.
Forrester in its report dated July 2018, cites that more than 51% of technology buying decisions now involve business stakeholders, either as sponsors or co-sponsors, with 16% of cases where business is the lead decision maker.
Firstly, this necessitates that technology or services companies including new age start-ups, hire, re-skill and equip their sales-force to have meaningful consultative dialogues with both IT and business stakeholders.
Often this involves effective sales organizations developing a playbook that aligns products, services and the value proposition being offered, to the business challenge or transformation objective that a prospective enterprise customer is aiming to solve.
The consultative sales approach must be based on a discovery-led model of engagement and involve multi-domain solution specialists to shape the right solution for the prospective customer, in dialogue with their business, digital and IT teams.
Secondly, we see that the complexity involved in stitching together a technology solution, is leading to extended sales cycles that require salespeople to be engaged widely, collaborate effectively across multi-stakeholder groups within the enterprise, and be more patient and creative when pursuing a customer opportunity.
This necessitates that organizations provide training to their sales people not just on emerging technologies, but more importantly, on the softer skills necessary to orchestrate an effective sales process.
Thirdly, as we increasingly deal with transformation-led deals, we see the emergence of a trend towards the ‘frozen middle’ in organizations, often stalling the sales process midway.
It is important as a counter-strategy, that enterprise sales teams develop a clear stakeholder map upfront, covering major stakeholder groups.
They need to build advocacy with actual user groups and get the necessary buy-in of the top leadership responsible for bringing in change, besides managing IT and procurement professionals. This calls for ambidexterity.
Lastly, we cannot over-emphasize the need and importance of leveraging technology and tools to transform the traditional sales process to become more efficient, data driven, customer-centric, personalized and effective, across the customer and deal life cycle.
We have seen the emergence of an active and innovative start-up ecosystem around tools and technologies leveraging AI and machine learning to help empower sales and customer facing teams with critical data insights and recommendations throughout the deal life cycle.
There is also a distinctive shift to online or on-demand ordering. Customers today, including B2B customers, are extremely tech savvy and have access to a lot of comparative information readily available to them. This makes the sales process harder.
The key to winning in this competitive landscape is through hyper-personalization — every pitch needs to be tailored to that one customer.
Technology enables this process. Sales automation tools across the whole gamut of the sales process right from prospecting to outreach, lead prioritization, AI based sales assistants, quote to order, on demand demo and PoC environments, automated bid management, demand-side price benchmarking, and reporting, have changed the way sales teams work.
By using these and various AI-powered analytics tools on top of the existing data companies have, a typical salesperson today spends less time on menial tasks and more time on meaningful interaction with customers. Predictive analytics tools further leverage technology to help create better forecasts, generate future leads/opportunities, predict churn and recommend actionable strategies to win.
In summary, the enterprise sales landscape has shifted and continues to get disrupted by the adoption of emerging technology that is making the enterprise buying process complex, slow and demanding.
To be effective, sales teams need to be ambidextrous in terms of managing multiple buying centres within a large corporate, be consultative as well as solution oriented, and imbibe the use of advanced technology and tools to transform how they engage with their customers across the customer life cycle journey.
This article was written by Ankur Jindal, VP, Global Head Corporate Venturing and Innovation of Tata Communications, a leading global digital infrastructure services provider, serving the Fortune 500 and large enterprises across all major verticals and regions of the world.
Ankur has served in consulting, strategy, M&A, global sales and customer facing roles, working across major geographies, and is currently actively engaged with startups internally as well as externally.
Note from the author:
Tata Communications’ digital services stack spans across connectivity, cloud, UCC, security, mobility and IoT. We are increasingly embedding emerging technologies into our digital service offerings. Our globally spread out enterprise sales and solution teams are engaging our strategic as well as prospective customers in the digitization dialogue.
We have undergone, and continue to further evolve, our own transformation journey to serve our customers and partners better. We are also incubating start-up ideas within our company and helping these teams engage in the business development process with enterprise customers, as part of our endeavour to help them grow to product-market fit, and eventually achieve scale.
It is with this perspective and experience in mind that I share some of my learnings.
