How Connected Enterprises Are Redefining Traditional Business Models

Modern consumers have more sway over brands than they used to before the advent of social media. In such an environment, the success of any customer-facing organization depends on the customer experience they offer. 

The goal is to provide consumers with meaningful sales journeys personalized to their tastes. However, to achieve such a buying journey, businesses need a single view of the customer that encompasses everything that nurtures the consumer-business relationship. 

This paradigm change is affecting the relationship between enterprise sales teams and their clients too. 

Connected Enterprises: Winning Over Prospects With Data 

Customer centricity applies strongly to the relationship between enterprises and services providers too. 

Today’s enterprise decision–makers expect service providers to meet not only new requirements but also provide accurate forecasting on the company’s future needs.  

But before we dive into how service providers can meet the needs of a connected enterprise, let us examine what the term itself means.  

Connected enterprises provide their customers with a truly holistic experience that puts people, not processes, at the forefront of decision-making. This is now possible thanks to the emergence of new technologies such as cloud-native applications and AI & ML-powered solutions that drive the always-on services ecosystem. 

Beyond this, connected enterprises also share the below attributes: 

1. Omnichannel view of customers: While their customers could interact with them through any of the ‘n’ number of channels at their disposal, enterprises should ideally be conducting their end of the operation through a single window.  

This ‘dashboard’ of customer interaction has the potential to increase customer satisfaction multifold since each analyst has a complete overview of the customer’s experience thus far. 

1. Connecting Insights to the UX: While enterprises have long been leveraging data-backed insights to plan promotions, it is now time to use these to actively make the user experience more intuitive and tailored to personal tastes. This means orchestrating a customer journey in the front office based on insights gathered from customer preference data in the backend. 
2. Intelligent supply–chain: An intelligent supply-chain pipeline is the hallmark of a truly connected enterprise. With supply and demand being controlled by automated processes that are also plugged into other environment variables, connected enterprises have truly mastered the art of modern inventory management.  
3. Unified cloud model: A unified suite of cloud solutions can help businesses manage customer experiences based on one trusted customer data model. This model also integrates with other cloud-based applications. It provides the ability to deliver customer-centric processes and better outcomes, which will in turn build customer trust and loyalty. 
4. Intelligent analytics using ML/ Big Data: With the massive amounts of data generated on the cloud, enterprises can now leverage Big Data tools or ML models to extract meaningful, actionable insights about their customers. This is now a mainstay of modern enterprises and is considered to be a basic functionality to get the coveted ‘connected enterprise’ tag. 

Now that we’ve seen what connected enterprises are, it’s time to explore how sales teams can pitch services that speak to their wavelength. 

Pitching your service to connected enterprises 

As we have established firmly, within a connected enterprise, the focus is on delivering seamless connectivity across value chains and fully integrated functioning among them. While the traditional business models strived to do this, it was not entirely possible due to technological limitations. 

But with the rise of cloud, IoT, & Big Data, it has now become possible for enterprises to connect their services in a whole new way. This means that the challenges for service providers approaching enterprises for pitching their services have also changed. 

If you’re a service provider pitching a digital solution to a connected enterprise, then it is very important that you add or retain the connectivity quotient in your solution as well. 

Your solution must provide enterprise decision-makers with an omnichannel view of the pain point your trying to solve. In other words, you need to be aware of your prospects’ pain points from multiple angles before approaching them for a deal.  

This includes, but is not limited to: 

1. Understanding your clients digital and business intentions 
2. Identifying their competitors and researching their digital/ business intentions 
3. Performing thorough research on the niche your prospect operates in and updating your team on the latest trends and innovations in this field 
4. Crafting a targeted pitch that is in line with the psychographic profile of the decision–maker in the company. 

These activities require meticulous research and legwork. However, with the rise of AI-powered sales intelligence tools, sales leaders can now do all of the above and much more.  

Modern sales intelligence tools like Draup use proven machine-learning models to extract actionable insights from streaming data. These insights can then be converted into action points that allow sales leaders to target connected enterprises with pain point-specific solutions while also arming them with comprehensive data on the prospect’s ecosystem.