It’s time for CFOs to budget for sales organisations’ transition from intuition-based to data-driven decision making.
By 2026, 65% of B2B sales organisations will transition from intuition-based to data-driven decision making, using technology that unites workflow, data and analytics, said Gartner recently when releasing results of a survey of 168 sales leaders across North America, Europe and Asia/Pacific from November through December 2021 .
As the market is growing rapidly with the rush to virtual selling due to the pandemic, sales leaders who want to modernise their virtual selling strategy should build a technology stack based on three critical attributes: improving buyer engagement, data-driven seller actions and simplified seller workflows.
The average virtual selling technology stack includes 13 technologies, said Dan Gottlieb, senior director analyst in the Gartner for Sales Leaders Practice.
Critical attributes of a technology stack
According to Gartner, the three critical attributes of a technology stack are as follows.
Improving buyer engagement. Virtual selling technologies help sellers improve customer engagement with innovative methods for facilitating meetings such as videoconferencing, visual collaboration, and asynchronous interactions with customers in a virtual selling environment which include video messaging and digital sales rooms.
Simplified workflows. Virtual selling technologies simplify day-to-day seller workflows by automating time-consuming tasks such as e-sign and sales engagement applications. In addition, virtual selling technologies can help streamline the seller’s user experience of technology.
Lack of seller digital dexterity easily undermines the successful adoption of technology. Innovative technology vendors understand that making sellers fall in love with their products requires embedding technologies into sellers’ highly detailed daily workflows.
Adapt data-driven seller actions. Virtual selling technologies equip sellers with stakeholder and company data that generates situationally aware insights to influence messaging, workflows and tactics such as conversation intelligence and account-based platform.
Since sellers tend to have the lowest data proficiency in the enterprise, innovative technologies must help sellers understand and activate data points.
What emerging tech organisations need to evaluate
Gartner recommends organisations to evaluate emerging technologies that support two kinds of B2B transactions.
Volume and velocity: Typically executed over shorter sales cycles of less than three months), for small deal sizes of less than $25,000, with a small buying committee of less than six stakeholders, often for products with lower complexity.
Enterprise: Typically executed over longer sales cycles of six months or more, for larger deal sizes of greater than $125,000) with a large buying committee of eight to 11 stakeholders, often for complex products.
