A Change in the way we work Has created higher golf handicaps, plus more importantly – the shifts your buyers have already made – and wish you would make too.

A while back I wrote a couple of blogs in a little series called “We are all inside sales now.” At the time I wrote it – I wondered if it was a temporary thing or a permanent shift. I’m not sure if we’re permanently inside sales but we are certainly more digital than before. It seems that we must be as there has been a super shift in buyer expectations. And they wish we would speed up OUR shift.

In this blog we cover how to shift to digital selling for the long run. Specifically, how to Get Digital Selling Right with Dynamics 365 sales – without a big consulting project


Rising Handicaps and Buyer Expectations

Why are so many salespeople so good at golf? For many years golf was a great way for a buyer to get to know a company and its salesperson. The way people consume information has changed. The experiences they expect accelerated dramatically during the last two years. Now they find out everything about you and your company with LinkedIn. No need for golfing. These shifts have created a lot higher handicaps and at the same time have changed the way we interact with buyers.

Many folks in sales felt the shift and even started to believe that everyone is now inside sales. Those shifts happened on the buyer side as well and it is super important that we as sellers – even as we are able to get out and about- transform as well.

We have all heard the statistics that customers are interacting with salespeople later in the cycle.
A deeper dive suggests that we’re in the midst of a bigger shift than even that. A Gartner report spearheaded by Brent Adamson says that by 2025 over 80% of B 2 B sales interactions will occur in digital channels. They also say that right now about 43% of us prefer a Rep-free experience in sales for B to B.

Crowded Tee Box – Buyers Don’t Buy in Sales Stages

Why is there always a backlog of players at a par three tee box? Did the ranger let too many folks on the course? Similarly – Customer buying now involves 6-10 buyers – each with buckets of information they’ve often gone out and gathered on their own. As you can imagine this process becomes quite nonlinear and can even result in multiple loops. So, when a traditional sales manager looks in your CRM system at the sales stages and expects a normal progression – it may not be your sales rep’s fault. More than likely the game has changed.

Just like in the game you used to play called golf – there is not just one Golf Club in the bag, and they do not always get used sequentially. Nor is there a standard sequential sales cycle or sales playbook. Adamson suggested in his Gartner article that we should focus instead on four “jobs” that buyers must do in a modern complex, mostly digital sale. Those jobs are problem identification, solution exploration, requirements building, and supplier selection.

Good News, Bad News, Great News

The good news is that according to a recent study – Digital-selling companies are 5.7 times more likely to secure prospect meetings and hit 150 percent of their quotas on average. The bad news is that about 50% of the time the CRM technology that is implemented does not work out.

Let us get back to the good news. In fact, great news. After many years and hundreds (literally) of implementations – congruentX has created a new way to get digital selling right – in only 30 days – without a big consulting project. We have had such success and are so confident you will too – we will guarantee it.

Our Framework

We thought a lot about it and decided to call it Get Digital Selling Right. We have built a framework to support helping our clients get digital selling right. Here is our top-secret framework –

Get Some Modern Clubs – Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Digital Selling Solution

The golf clubs your uncle gave you were great in the 90s, but times have changed. Software has changed along with buyers and sellers’ needs. First, start with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales. We recommend the premium license. It is worth it because you get access to the sales accelerator which unlocks all the digital selling features you will need to get rid of your wooden golf clubs.

Check out the video below – you will see how AI-driven personalized sequences of activities, AI-driven call preparation, automatic deal scoring integrated teams calling conversational intelligence featuring customer sentiment and automatic AI driven call summaries, and follow ups, not to mention AI based forecasting – can make a dramatic shift in how your team meets and exceeds new buyer expectations.

https://www.microsoft.com/videoplayer/embed/RWQCj0

There are some great folks from Microsoft that we like tofollow on this topic:
• Lori Lamkin – Corporate VP Dynamics 365 Customer Experience Applications
• Pooja Bhalla – Microsoft Principal Product Manager

Get a Swing Coach – at Least in the Beginning.

What is Get Digital Selling Right?

What to Expect

We will bring IT and Business together with a fast-moving, 30-day interactive engagement featuring design thinking for the purpose of identifying Digital Friction. We will lead Envisioning of the Art of the Possible learning on the D365 Sales Accelerator. Finally, we will help your team to Make it Real with collaborative sprints leveraging CX Templates to walk out your solution.

Week One
Align GTM with People and Tech. Create Journey Maps. Discover digital friction in selling. Prioritize 10X ROI

Week Two and Three
Rapid, iterative sprints to develop the components of your digital selling solution that make the biggest impact now

Week Four
Action Plan to Onboard Adopt and Achieve Outcomes with the Initial Digital Selling Solution

What You Get
Digital Selling Maturity Assessment. High fidelity prototype, 10X Outcomes Plan, Backlog for 3 impactful solutions, plus a 12 Month Roadmap

Conclusion

In this blog we discovered that buyers have made significant shifts in their expectations of us, and they wish we would hurry up and make the shifts too. They want to spend less time with salespeople and that for the time they do spend with us, it should be of higher quality and provide insights…not product pitches and brochures!

We also learned that buyers work in teams with each member of the team often assigned to get different pieces of information that they must bring back together. This causes a much less linear and predictable buying cycle than we are used to. Gartner has suggested that we look at things a little differently and look at the jobs that the buyers must do in the cycle, which will help us address this.

We talked about how buyers want us to make this shift and the good news is digital selling companies are much more successful than companies who do not make this shift. We also talked about a framework to make this shift in the right way – in a way that will provide a return on the investment back to the team and the business. This investment would align the people with the process and some digital selling technology.

CongruentX has a Framework called Get Digital Selling Right that starts with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Premium, combined with a 30-day Challenge format where we bring together groups that do not often collaborate– use design thinking to envision and then rapidly develop a prioritized digital selling solution with 10x Return on Investment. In addition, the team builds a blueprint together to continue the journey.

Question – Have you noticed that you have deals that are stalled at the finish line? In what way can a shift to digital selling help?

If you are having trouble figuring out where you are in your CRM journey overall – That is ok too and not uncommon. CongruentX has a Guide and Assessment that you can check out as well here.