Business-to-business (B2B) sales in today’s world are very different from the pre-covid era. The new environment also brings with it a new set of challenges. For starters, today’s B2B buyers are more informed. They look for personalised solutions. Moreover, business leaders are also getting involved in the decision-making process. This means sellers must be more informed and stay updated about their client business, the industry they operate in and the customer needs they are trying to address. However, sourcing all this information requires a lot of effort and sellers cannot afford to spend time on non-sales activities.
B2B sales have always been a people-driven business. A typical sales journey includes three stages. Firstly, sales enablement which is the intelligence engine covering market and company intelligence and lead database. Secondly, sales engagement helps in engaging with prospects and clients through various campaigns. And thirdly, sales performance and forecasting helps in keeping a track of sales performance through various reporting and performance dashboards.
Sales teams increasingly adopt new technology. This trend has been going on for the past few years. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a particularly huge factor in these efforts. It has driven automation and process improvements within B2B sales. Several prominent use cases are now being driven by technology across all sales stages that we mentioned earlier.
For example, within sales enablement, delivering real-time targeted insights by filtering out the noise while monitoring data on the targeted industry, company, or competitor. Prioritising companies leveraging algorithms based on propensity modelling and ideal customer profile. Prioritising leads based on a trigger-based automated intent scoring method that analyses the online behaviour of targeted customers on the company’s digital sources.
Within sales engagement, sales reps are leveraging tools such as email and meeting notes automation tools which automate these workflows to bring in efficiency. While using email automation tools, the sales rep just defines certain rules around the content, target customers, personas and timelines for running email campaigns. This enables the tool to send the right message to the appropriate person and at the right time. Meeting notes automation tools help reps maintain meeting records and create automated call transcripts which can easily be searched and referred to at any point in time. In this stage, sales reps are also leveraging content and product recommendation tools that recommend the next best action by analysing data such as customer industry, the product being positioned, the geography of operation, past conversations, and many others.
Within sales performance and forecasting, sales reps leverage various automated reports and dashboards which help reps to track performance and forecast sales through predictive models which analyses historic sales and customer segments.
B2B sales technology is becoming a crowded and competitive market. Many players such as Craft, and Lusha have entered the sales intelligence market, acknowledging the potential of technology in sales. A lot of players in the market have identified their niche and are addressing specific use cases across the sales journey. However, we are now witnessing some established and early entrant players like Demandbase, and Zoominfo expand their offerings through acquisitions to serve clients across the sales journey, positioning the same as their proposition.
GlobalData’s sales intelligence solution is uniquely positioned to serve organisations across the sales journey. The solution is powered by a universe of unique industry data and company signals, that help in providing targeted, succinct and easily accessible 360-degree actionable insights – sector, company and competition, to account sales executives. As a part of its sales intelligence solution, GlobalData also supports its clients in creating unique messaging content leveraging its seasoned journalists and analysts, and generating leads by engaging with the right persona with the right content. To know more about GlobalData’s sales intelligence solution, click here.
Clearly, technology in sales has made sales reps more efficient and productive and will continue to evolve in automating repetitive tasks. Yet, there are areas such as building relationships that will always be driven by human intelligence and skills.
