Far too many executives think their organization has an effective sales strategy in place, yet, the one they rely on has primarily remained the same despite the digital evolution around it.
Before any company can fully leverage a digital sales strategy, there needs to be a commitment from leadership. This top-down approach ensures alignment with business objectives. Just as important, though, it guarantees sufficient time for implementation.
This is why building a digital culture has become a matter of survival. It’s no longer if digital disruption may someday affect your company. It’s a matter of when.
This article explores seven effective ways to build and embed a digital culture in your organization from the top down.
Assess the Current Culture & Identify Areas to Improve
The first step is to evaluate your company’s culture in its current form. This will enable you to understand the level of adoption and knowledge in-house that can facilitate a digital culture. Once you do that, you can find where it needs to improve as part of its digital transformation.
Strategies to achieve that include:
Talk to the sales team to get an overview of digital capabilities, awareness, and perceived support from the top down.
Send out surveys to sellers at all levels, both in the office and field sales, to assess their opinion of digital and how its implementation can be improved or even introduced.
Conduct an audit on the digital tools and platforms used within the company and assess what is being utilized and what is redundant.
Interview senior executives to understand current capabilities and perceptions of the digital culture.
Create a vision of culture for the sales department that is shared widely with feedback mechanisms in place.
Carrying out these various strategies will help feed into the creation or refinement of a digital culture that boosts productivity, empowers sellers, and drives sales.
Create Digital Champions and Ambassadors
According to Capgemini, while 4 in 10 senior-level executives believe their firms have a digital culture, only 27% of employees surveyed agreed. This difference between perception and reality shows the need for buy-in at the senior level for a digital transformation to be successful. Only complete support is going to help its progress.
Ideally, you want one or more ‘digital champions’ at a senior level who will help lead the charge. It should be someone who is not only passionate about the impact of digital but also an individual that uses it.
This could be as simple as having a professional and well-developed LinkedIn profile that provides valuable content to customers, investors, and staff or a key decision-maker that plays a crucial role in sponsoring a social selling program in-house.
This commitment to digital at a senior level will inspire sales teams to learn how to use digital tools to engage and influence customers at all stages of the customer journey.
Benchmark Skills
The digital age has changed and keeps changing sales. To keep pace, your sales team needs to change along with it. This will entail acquiring specific skills and improving others.
Skills required will be those that enable social selling as it has proven its worth in customer engagement and driving revenue. Along with 61% of organizations that engage in social selling reporting a positive impact on revenue, 65% of buyers felt the vendor’s content affects their final purchase decision.
From a leadership perspective, digital selling is an often overlooked vital element that will feed into a digital culture. It involves a range of strategies that work together to achieve one goal, such as sales enablement, social content, design and integration, and CRM.
Harnessing digital technologies to sell requires a unique set of skills, and as platforms keep changing, the skills of sellers and sales leaders need to too. So, benchmark the talents of all staff involved in the sales process from the top down to ascertain a starting point from which to work.
Provide Tailored Workshops
Once the skills of relevant staff have been benchmarked, the next stage is to provide tailored workshops that can address the specific needs of all employees. A one-size-fits-all approach to learning may work to provide fundamental knowledge of digital, but when practical and niche experience is required, a specialized process is necessary.
For example, Sales Directors and Leaders are more likely to need knowledge of strategy and planning, sales enablement, and integration than a seller dealing with customers. From a customer perspective, sales professionals must understand digital research, how to use relevant online platforms, CRM management, and when and how to use the content.
These discrete skills require workshops at different levels that provide the necessary know-how to ensure the digital strategy is executed successfully. All roles play a role in embedding a digital culture.
Provide Flexible Training
Workshops are excellent opportunities for your staff but are only one of the ways to help your people hone their skills. Equally important is offering digital sales training through a portal that’s open 24/7.
Most companies have some form of mandatory training, but the problem is that these lessons are only offered once. If an employee wants to brush up or review some of the material, they’re generally left to ask their co-workers for help which could be better.
Instead, offering e-learning materials that your employees can access whenever and wherever makes a lot more sense. This level of accessibility is one of the reasons 98% of companies intend to use e-learning over the next two years.
As much as possible, utilize digital sales training to support your company’s transformation.