Relationship selling is all about empowering sellers to drive customer engagement. In the digital age, engagement isn’t just about in-person interactions.
Adapting to the ever-evolving behaviors of modern-day B2B buyers is impacting sales teams within B2B companies. It’s also impacting marketing teams that are aligning their sales and marketing strategies are setting themselves up for success.
When B2B organizations originally implemented a CRM, sales management focused on sales productivity—visibility into forecast, pipeline and activity tracking. This ended up driving a sales management agenda that manages our sellers versus empowering them to deliver value to buyers.
It’s well known that B2B buyers have access to information at their fingertips, and even prefer not to engage with sellers at the beginning of their buying journey.
CRM, for many organizations, has long been about a focus on sales management and less on seller empowerment. And this article reinforces the need to evolve from the linear processes of today.
Sales alignment is the first step in your journey to introduce a new sales model, one that is a hybrid model combining the best of the digital journey of your buyer combined with the expertise and knowledge that a personal interaction with your sales team is able to provide.
As sales leaders, we have a strategy problem. We have spent years focused on sales productivity–visibility into forecast, pipeline, and activity tracking–to drive an agenda for sales management.
As we head into the new fiscal year at Microsoft, we continue to see the transformation of the buyer-seller dynamics. Buyers unequivocally have higher expectations and more influence.