How to sell with digital tools

What technological tools are sales people using? Which ones should they be using? To hit their sales targets, what tools should companies invest in, as far as time and resources? And finally, how should technologies be used to boost efficiency and effectiveness in sales teams?

These are some of the fundamental questions that every organization should be asking, in light of the deep digital transformation affecting so many corporate functions, to include sales.

Yet the true economic impact of adopting technological tools in sales networks is still for the most part unclear. In fact, we know very little about how these tools really shape the work methods and performance of salespeople.

To explore these questions, we studied a sample of hi-tech companies (G. Petruzzelli, P. Guenzi, Exploring the impact of digital tools adoption on salespeople performance through behavioural adaptations: an empirical investigation). Our findings show that by using digital analytics tools, sellers can better adapt to their customers and get better sales performance.

From our findings, we identified four main macro-categories of digital tools that salespeople can use:

1. analytics tools for purchasing and data analysis on customers, markets, products and competitors;
2. process automation tools, for example, to send and track emails and handle follow ups; or templates for various stages of the sales process;

tools to facilitate interaction and contact with customers via social media (Facebook and Twitter);
1. professional use of LinkedIn, which we distinguished from other social media platforms in the context of our analysis since it is the most prominent and most widely-used.

The combined use of these tools enhances the capacity of salespeople to adapt their behavior to the specific situations and characteristics of their customers, as well as the various sales opportunities and negotiations they find themselves dealing with. And all this has positive ripple effects on their performance.

Our findings also honed in on four forms of adaptation that salespeople can action in their work. These relate to: the information they provide to customers (content and quantity), how they manage the stages of the sales process (the number of stages to follow, the time to dedicate to each, who to bring on board, etc.), the type of solutions they offer (the mix of products, services, guarantees, terms of payment, etc.), and the language they use in their communication.

We then turned our attention to a sample of 118 salespeople from hi-tech companies (such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce) to take a closer look at how they actually make use of technological tools and adaptive behaviors. Our aim here was to measure the performances of salespeople with the parameter of the percentage of targets hit in the timeframe in question.

Our results reveal a strong inclination to use analytics tools, in particular those that extract value from data relevant to the markets where customers do business. Similar results came up for the advanced use of LinkedIn, in particular the functions Sales Navigator and InMail. The first is an ad hoc tool created by the social network to do social selling and tap into users’ network of contacts for sales; the second lets users send messages directly to a LinkedIn member outside of their network of contacts.

Technological tools can be applied to automatize back-office processes as well, which helps to make initial customer contact quicker and to personalize sales proposals effectively and rapidly. We found average values with regard to the use of these tools. Lastly, the lowest numbers were recorded for the use of social media for sales.

Our causal analysis highlighted the fact that the adoption of analytics technologies enhances the ability of salespeople to adapt their behaviors in all the forms we analyzed (adapting the information to give to customers, the language to use, the solution to offer and the sales process). What’s more, our study demonstrates that behavioral flexibility associated with the information given to customers is the only form of adaptation that significantly impacts whether or not salespeople hit their sales targets.

Companies should prioritize their investments to give their salespeople analytics tools and train them on how to use these technological instruments to improve their ability to adapt to their customers, in particular in terms of the information to provide them with.

Sales departments have activated digitalization processes for some time now, but the new challenges arising in an increasingly competitive market call for another push forward. Salespeople, for their part, should abandon old, outdated sales methods and be open to constant and continual updates on the most effective sales techniques and cutting-edge technological tools.