How sales organizations use technology to drive revenue

The sales profession is going through a transformation. Social, mobile and digital media (omnichannel experiences) are enabling buyers to be significantly informed at each step of the buying journey. Sellers are transitioning from selling individual products to a singular point-of-contact to increasingly complex solutions to buyers who are often only a small part of the stakeholders involved in the final decision. And finally, the core sales process is rapidly changing due to the addition of new technology and greater contact touchpoints.

Since we understand how the sales process has dramatically changed, we must now look to understand how this transformation affects sales organizations – particularly in top performing teams. How can organizations decrease seller burden and build engagement while navigating an increasingly complex sales process?

Microsoft recently talked to 48 sales leaders about this very question to learn how they use sales technology in their organization and how they think about the future of sales transformation1.

We discovered many organizations focus on sales technology to drive productivity to gain a better view into their sales pipeline, yet these efforts face challenges surrounding unmet expectations and poor user adoption.

However, there our study discovered an outlier of organizations that grew at a significantly faster rate than their peers. The common thread we saw was these organizations used technology to move beyond productivity: they achieved increased results by gaining customer insights to drive personal engagement.

It turns out that there may be a direct correlation between digital transformation and revenue growth. Those identifying as technology “Drivers” enjoyed a 50% increase in revenue growth.

Join me in an on-demand webinar to go deeper into this sales transformation curve and walk through the four sales profiles that we discovered.

Discover the sales transformation curve

 

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1 Study of business-to-business sales executives in the U.S., conducted by phone in a detailed 1 hour live interview. The survey was commissioned by Microsoft in 2Q16, and included approximately 50 sales leaders from over 13 industries. Companies in survey ranged in size from approximately $20M in revenues to over $1B in revenues.