A seasoned sales professional knows how to manage a change, which can harm client relations if inefficiently coordinated. Unfavorable situations are most likely to bring the teams closer as they must go the extra mile to achieve the results. It can ignite energy, resilience, and diligence as leaders unite individuals to address a shared challenge and discuss the probable solutions.

The driving factor of any sales force is its customers. All sales leaders need to understand the demands of their consumers before commencing their business.

The digital movement era has made it difficult for the salespersons to control the process of sales as they face issues such as:

• Sales executives losing their power and authority in the processes due to the boom of digital and virtual selling platforms
• Disrupted customer relations due to the emergence of the digital era
•  Inaccurate predictions made by an inefficient and out-of-date system

To overcome such challenges, sales teams have now begun to depend on the data to capture the consumer behavior rightly. A substantial shift has been observed towards data strategies and data analytics to study the market patterns. The deals of digital products have been in a drawn-out blast, with an expanding extent of such sales being membership-based (for example, SaaS) or consumption-based (for example, cloud services).

A few years ago, sellers would focus on “showing the pathway to achieve maximum value” rather than “win the customer” approach. This would enable them to build good customer relationships and have quality engagements with their clients. As the ecosystem’s options increase, there has been a shift of focus from exclusivity to guiding the customers rightly.

In almost every domain of sales, data-driven decisions are replacing instinctual decision-making and gut-feeling choices. Sales leaders are now focusing on developing their strategies on the basis of data rather than the customer-approach. They are more focused on tapping into the right data before venturing into any new project than earlier, where it was a more customer-centric approach. Sales organizations use data and analytics to improve sales strategy, resource deployment, talent management, sales team motivation, and customer engagement.

Standing as a classic example of this newfound practice, a financial services company used analytics to help its outbound sales team sell credit and lending products to small businesses. By examining millions of phone records and analyzing phone calls, the company discovered insights for improving sales effectiveness in the following ways:

• By focusing on just seven of 14 target industries, salespeople could increase profits by 16%.
• By shifting calls to the right time of day, salespeople could triple the probability of sales and increase profits by 20%.
• By using specific consultative sales techniques employed by top performers, salespeople could further enhance their performance.
  Thus, sales organizations that proactively address these challenges are more likely to navigate the tumultuous digital landscape successfully, thereby driving success for their customers and company.

At Draup, we assist our sales enablement platform’s clientele with tremendous amounts of relevant data regarding peer competitors, executives, the ecosystem around them and in-depth syndicated reports which help them do 360-degree analysis before venturing into any business. We also assist our clients with signals from various broad categories, which helps them stay up to date with their market. This has proven to help the customers with varied knowledge and intelligence regarding market pattern analysis, emerging trends and competitor intelligence ensuring increased effectiveness and an upsurge in the number of successful deals.