Let's cut to the chase. Sales is still selling at the end of the day. All the social, digital, transformational behaviours may well up the lead generation game, driving far better awareness of your brand and you at a personal level. You still need to walk the walk of the sales process, be it inside sales, field sales, complex professional services "sales". You still need to be able to sell.
What all of this is starting to show is that there is a wealth of information in the digital marketplace for organisations to leverage. The problem is this - is there now too much? What do you do with all of this "social engagement". When do you react to it, or not. How do you know what is relevant or not? You could spend all day just combing through all of this data and get nowhere - you would get a better hit rate doing no research and hitting the phone 100 times a day. Ah, those were the days....said no-one ever.
This is why we are starting to see the rise of the Virtual Personal Assistant in CRM. It still (at the moment) requires human input around what you want to track, follow, get the sentiment on (another blog on this coming) and so on. All of this surfaced in a meaningful way to the salesperson, giving them more time to do what they do best - sell. The question is this - will the salesperson still know what to do with these curated sales triggers?
Must dash, my VPA tells me I am running late for my next sales call based on a tweet she has seen from a customer last week.
Invest 5 minutes a day to become a successful social seller. The Social Selling Assistant recommends personalized actions for you, like which posts to share, based on machine learning. No need to spend hours to spot relevant content or crawl through hundreds of updates anymore.
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