B2B buyers now demand personalized, omnichannel experiences. Companies must deliver exceptional service across all channels or risk losing customers. Patrick Dougherty, Product Marketing Manager at Vendavo, explores Vendavo’s insights from a recent complimentary Gartner® report, offers strategies to transform tech from a burden into a true ally, and explains how to empower your sales team, focus on closing deals, and drive growth.
For several years now, B2B buyers have pursued personalized, omnichannel experiences. This is true across all industries, geographies, customer sizes, and relationship stages. To meet growth goals, companies must deliver more exceptional experiences across more channels because when buyers don’t find what they are looking for, they go elsewhere.
To support sellers in meeting these rising customer expectations, organizations lean heavily on technology. However, as per our understanding of the new Gartner® report, Make Technology a Teammate to Humanize the B2B Seller Role, additional technology often only adds to sellers’ task lists rather than boosts sales. Asking salespeople to learn more tools inevitably results in less focus time for hitting quotas. To deploy salespeople where they are needed most and ultimately win more deals, treat technology as a teammate rather than a tool.
When adopting sales-enabling technology – or RevTech – the goal should be to reach stages 3 and 4 of the four stages of RevTech Maturity. The two later stages, Automated Selling and Autonomous Selling, are when technology acts as a member of the sales team, making decisions and executing independently of a salesperson’s direct involvement. When sales technology takes on more responsibility, individual salespeople can devote more time to interacting with clients.
Give your Sales Technology More Responsibility
How can technology take on more responsibility and improve a salesperson’s effectiveness? Here are 3 ways:
- Manage and optimize prices
When it comes to bottom-line growth, price improvement beats cost-cutting every time. Price Optimization is the process of deciding the most effective pricing for a product or service. It is how organizations find the optimal price their customer is willing to pay for a product: not so high that they risk losing that customer’s business, not so low that they sacrifice margin. It’s exactly the right price, for the right product, for the right customer, at the right time.
Price management software helps the sales team know their customers, organize and analyze their data, and measure value. Powered with AI, it handles all the data required to optimize prices, automate pricing analytics, and easily execute pricing changes across the organization. As costs fluctuate and customer behaviors change, automated, AI-optimized pricing enables the sales team to make more efficient, profitable decisions in real-time. - Deliver fast, accurate quotes
Configure, price, and quote technology can shorten the sales cycle by delivering fast, accurate, approved quotes, no matter the configuration’s complexity. When the quoting technology is also fueled with optimized pricing information, the sales team has a powerful teammate who helps them quickly win more deals with greater margin. It will reduce quote iterations and empower even the most junior salespeople. - Modernize rebate programs
When buyers agree to purchase a specific volume of product at a specific price, rebates can be used to reward them by giving them back a portion of the original purchase cost. This helps promote customer loyalty, influence customer behavior, optimize purchasing and stocking activities, and maximize margin.
Managing rebate programs manually is time-consuming and complex. When not well-executed, they can interrupt otherwise healthy customer relationships and cause unintended margin leakage. Rebate management technology will reduce administrative overhead and improve accuracy. It will also provide visibility of incentive impact in a sales quote, rank customer compliance, issue timely payments, and report on program effectiveness.
Don’t ask your sales team to simply perform more tasks with technology. Instead, ensure that technology shoulders more sales responsibility and empowers the sales team with timely, accurate insights that exceed customer expectations and win more deals profitably.
Gartner, Make Technology a Teammate to Humanize the B2B Seller Role, Betsy Gregory-Hosler, Jared Davis, 1 February 2024.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
