Digital Sales Transformation: 5 Essential Tips

Digital sales transformation is the process of modernizing your business to increase the lifetime value of a customer. An essential part of the transformation that often gets overlooked because of its specialized nature is the addition to or changes in
your sales team. Some companies think they can go without a sales team or don’t have the expertise to build one. Others simply outsource but don’t know how to vet companies due to a lack of experience in the field.

Digital Sales Transformation is essential to certain industries:

• Publishing | Media Companies
• MarTech | AdTech
• Advertising | Marketing
• Healthcare | Insurance

I spent the past 6 years running the search, content, and voice group for two agencies. Their sales strategy was responding to RFPs with no outbound efforts. From my experience at JumpCrew, I know that building an incentivized sales team would’ve made them more successful. A biz dev group that relies on RFPs from brands and consultants in order to pitch is like waiting for fish swimming upstream to jump into your mouth.

What works for bears during salmon mating season is not a sustainable growth strategy for media companies.

Some have found success with that model, but it doesn’t scale and will fail during hard times when fish (clients) are scarce.

Where To Start with Digital Sales Transformation

1. Outsource vs building an in-house team

The decision to outsource your sales operation or build an in-house team is big for digital sales transformation. This comes down to available resources and choosing the most cost-effective business model.

Criteria to outsource your sales:

• Are you launching a new product or entering a new market?
• Is your current sales team complacent?
• Do you have executive leadership with sales insight and experience?
• Has your sales leadership previously built and managed successful inside sales processes and teams?
• Do you have training resources to oversee, manage, and help guide the process to success?
• Do you have marketing and operations resources to support a successful lead gen program?
• Do you have a company culture that supports all of the above?

If you answered no to any of the questions above, keep reading.

2. Experience is priceless

Hiring sales leaders with the right experience will help avoid some of the most common mistakes that organizations make when building an internal sales team or choosing the right outsourced partner.

Effective sales leaders understand how to develop, manage, and iterate on the process, develop individuals on their team, communicate clearly and effectively, and track both short and long-term goals. Finding top tier talent that fits the mold is challenging and competitive, but will pay dividends long term. Experienced and flexible leaders and reps are key for digital sales transformation.

3. Software

Empowering your team with software is essential for building and scaling a successful sales operation. When used at the right points in the sales process, technology can help organize and automate the process, which frees up your reps to focus on what they do best…selling. There are hundreds of sales tools out there, but the following are essential to digital sales transformation.

• CRM: A CRM tool is the foundation of any sales team and serves to house, track, and manage prospect data. Salesforce, HubSpot and other customer relationship management (CRM) software is crucial for any sales team to build and close a pipeline of new customers
  
• Sales Enablement: Tools like Outreach.io augment a salesperson’s daily activities by providing detailed reporting on calls and emails, sequencing tools for automated or manual prospecting, setting meetings by meeting type, and sorting lists of prospects.
  

While technology is instrumental in supporting the sales team’s efforts, be wary of tech overload. Too many tools mean significant switching costs for your sales team. Switching can result in disorganization and loss of momentum during the sales process. Employ only what’s absolutely necessary or it will have a noticeable impact on the team and be cautious of adding redundant technology where it’s unnecessary.

4. Training

You need a long term training plan to make sure your salespeople learn quickly and constantly. Having a custom enterprise learning platform will help scale and grow your sales teams. You should also consider partnering with top sales training programs to help you get the best training quickly as you develop your own curriculum. We recommend that you have your sales team learn the basics like:

• How to structure their days
• Understanding your value prop
• Handling objections
• Qualifying criteria
• Following up
• Working with a sales cadence
  
• Managing a pipeline
  
• Logging activities
• Forecasting
• Asking for the money
  

These skills are some of the most effective elements of making a sale so they must be learned as soon as possible.

5. Optimize the sales process

It’s important to implement and optimize a repeatable sales process. Here are the basic steps to selling:

• Preparing: Finding information about your potential prospects. Collecting social information, email, phone number, etc.
• Prospecting: Reaching out to potential clients to see if they are interested in taking a meeting to talk about your product or service.
• Qualifying: Finding out quickly if the prospect is actually the right fit for your product or service. Do they have problems that your product or service solves? If the answer is “yes” then you set up a pitch. If the answer is “no” then let them be on their way. Don’t waste your time or theirs.
• Pitching: This is when you put a proposal together and pitch the client a solution that will solve their problems. Pitching is important because you should also use the time to ask more questions in case you have to adjust the final contract.
• Closing: Closers get prospects to sign a contract and pay you money.
• Collections: I added collections to the process because people forget that the point of selling is to get paid. If you sell something for a million dollars and never get paid, then it’s not a sale. I would advise that you have a separate collections team. I would also make sure that your pitch team and customer success team introduce your collections team during the first onboarding meeting. This way the new client knows to expect to be billed and called by the collection team. It also allows you to double- check that you have the right contact information for the billing team. Usually, your main point of contact is not the person who pays the bills.
• Check-in: The closer should check in with the client once a quarter to make sure that things are going well and the team is solving their problems. This is important for customer satisfaction and makes it easy to upsell or cross-sell new products and services. It is much cheaper to upsell clients and grow organically than it is to bring in new clients.

Make sure that you have your junior salespeople doing the preparing, prospecting, and qualifying. Then have experienced salespeople do the pitching and closing. Once you have this process locked down, you need to build dashboards in a CRM like Salesforce to track performance.

Optimize for the following:

• High Qualify Rate: Prospects should be turning into qualified leads at a high percentage
• High Conversion Rate: Qualified leads should then turn into closed deals at a high rate
• 100% Collection Rate: You need to collect 100% of your fees
• High Up Sell Rate: Make sure your check- ins are turning into up-sells
• Low Churn Rate: Client churn should be as low as possible

Digital sales transformation is not easy but I hope this helps you get a sense of everything you need to do to build a successful sales team or find an outsourced sales partner.