Читать книгу Revenue Operations - Stephen Diorio, Chris K. Hummel - Страница 11

Sales teams are tasked with converting interested prospects into transacting customers, increasing revenue per account, and managing relationships to increase loyalty and trust. These activities exist at the center of any drive to expand revenues.

Sales is a powerful function. The skill sets of sales reps, account managers, and other sales personnel can vary widely, though, and often depend on the sales model, product sophistication, and buying cycle. Because sales manages the pipeline of business, it has unparalleled visibility of the upcoming revenue streams. It also represents the “last touch” before the transaction with the customer. Sales leaders leverage that control point to exercise authority in many areas beyond their official remit. The surety of that dominant position, however, is now starting to fade as sales confronts transformation in its own area.

 Selling has become more capital intensive. More buying happens within digital channels, and sales people rely on analytics and automation to engage customers with the speed and personalization they demand. Sales leaders now hold two responsibilities: managing both sellers (the people) and selling (the system).

 Selling has become a complex team sport. No single organization controls all of the revenue growth levers, so the ability to move information quickly between functions helps get marketing, sales, and service silos working as one revenue team with a single common purpose.

 Selling teams are more distributed, digital, data driven, and dynamic. The role of sales has evolved to rely more on digital channels and collaboration technologies and less on planes, trains, and automobiles over time. The recent pandemic has only accelerated the move to sell bigger and more complicated products through digital channels. It has also created a skill gap for sales leaders and people who did not grow up with the skills to be effective in this environment.

 More business models create more revenue streams going through more channels. New approaches like subscriptions open up alternative and derivative products that can be monetized more and more through owned digital infrastructure outside of and in parallel with any traditional sales channels.

 We lost visibility of what the customer is doing. The volume of data we now collect on customer interactions dwarfs what we've been using to analyze transactions, but the fragmentation of that engagement data actually creates gaps in visibility for the sales teams that frustrate their efforts for a 360-degree understanding of their customers.

 The old-school “art of selling” is struggling against the new school analytics. Like the battles in Major League Baseball between grizzled old scouts and the new crop of data-driven analysts, the utility of many historical traits once considered critical for performance in sales are now being questioned as the selling process becomes more engineered.

 Selling now requires less human interaction to enhance relationships. The increasing automation of customer engagement, when used effectively, should unburden sales people from many administrative or low-value activities. Sellers now need to balance the volume, content, and frequency of digital interactions with person-to-person outreach to find the optimal revenue yield.

Even where sales leaders recognize the value of other functions in driving more and/or bigger transactions, they struggle with a lack of access to full information on all the touchpoints with customers. Technology needs to be seen as more of an asset than a tool. At its peak value, sales can act as a true customer advocate, serving as the bridge between customer and company and using its performance-driven culture to push accountability across all functions to serve the customer's needs. If not, sales may find itself stranded as the king of an increasingly less relevant hill.