The ways that customers learn about and buy products and services is constantly evolving. Companies try to adapt their business models to the rapidly changing environment but these traditional method of only having hands and feet on the ground is not an effective sales strategy.
As new competitors emerge, tech companies are heavily relying on vendors and partners. Channel transformation is a challenge for many vendors that struggle getting partners to adopt new business models and as a result, profits are feeling the pressure.
Customer experience (CX) is the key priority to success in the digital era, with hyper-connected customers demanding a new level of involvement and support starting from first lead to post-sale with a consistent level of responsiveness, speed and the right interventions from brands.
With today’s connected, cloud-based and always-on platforms, the boundary lines between “product” and “service” are blurring. As margins of the traditional products shift, technology is rapidly adopting services with its significantly higher margins. For example, Apple’s fastest growing revenue comes from services, which it plans to double in business size within the next four years.
Advertisement
Large players are aligning traditional sales efforts with online distribution channels and cloud marketplaces. Microsoft Azure and AWS have cloud offerings for purchase online while Cisco has its own marketplace for technology and solutions. However, online tech sales presents its own set of challenges; primarily in how to enable buyers to make better-informed decisions and deliver a simplified purchase experience.
As high-tech companies increase sales through partners, there is a widening gap in the relationship between the technology company and the customers. As business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) models become increasingly more common than business-to-consumer (B2C) models, it makes it slightly more difficult to attain real-time customer insights. For example, Intel does not really have a connection with the actual users of its chips anymore, and the same goes for storage companies.
Approaches To Digitalizing Sales Channels
Digitalization of sales channels will play an integral role towards differentiation in a saturated market, revenue growth and improved profitability. The approaches outlined below will help.
Mapping and tracking the customer journey: Journey mapping can deliver insights on questions such as who is buying the product or service, how to make the purchase journey easier, how to resolve partner queries more easily or how to better deliver information.
Creating a self-service digital store: Online sales platforms can optimize the customer experience through factors, such as usability, searchability and simplicity, and cater to all aspects with well-thought-out workflows. These online stores can yield better opportunities to upsell or cross-sell through personalized recommendations based on data analytics, customer history and through customizable bundled solutions.
Automating sales operations: Bots can realize seamless and more efficient sales and marketing operations. A mix of AI, marketing automation and robotic process automation (RPA), when used for pushing content, updating technical documentation or to supporting admin tasks will streamline processes and enhance the customer experience.
Leveraging the deluge of data: An overwhelming amount of data from partner channels remains underutilized. While this may be spread across disparate information systems, artificial intelligence and data management tools can help derive superlative customer insights despite the complexity. This will help sell more through product recommendations or precise targeted campaigns.
Digital transformation of the sales and channels management can address the core issues of profitability and ultimately give them a competitive advantage in the hyper-competitive marketplace.
David Ranjit William, has more than 20 years of IT experience working in the communications and high-tech industry. William is responsible for driving the digital strategy for the Technology BU at Wipro Limited. As part of this role he is responsible for demand generation, competency building, solution enablement and brand building initiatives for the digital business within the Technology BU.
