Digital Transformation of Sales & Marketing

At my previous employer, Indutrade Benelux, my goal was to help the Indutrade companies advance their digital transformation. Over the past four years, I focused primarily on digitizing the sales process. It was a challenging task, and I helped several companies take their operations to the next level. Indutrade is a Swedish holding company comprising more than 200 technology-based small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

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Purpose of Digitizing Sales & Marketing

When digitizing an organization’s sales operations, I want to gain insight into the sales funnel. By visualizing the sales funnel, you immediately get a sense of where the pain points are and where you can offer solutions that will help the company and team move forward.
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For example, maybe you don’t have many leads, but you do have a lot of website visitors? By gaining insight into this, you can get started right away with digitization. In my opinion, there are two things you can do:

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1. Improve your website (UX/UI) by enhancing its content and also offering features that make it easier for visitors to contact you. Consider adding a chat feature or making greater use of downloads and forms where visitors can provide their contact information.
2. Another option is to use Leadinfo. This is a tool that allows you to identify website visitors and turn them into recognized companies. If you're interested in Leadinfo, click here.

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Lots of leads but no inquiries?

You see this a lot at B2B companies in the SME sector. Marketing generates leads, but Sales fails to convert them. This is a waste and causes a lot of frustration in both departments, which doesn’t help collaboration and ultimately has a negative impact on your business.
This can be prevented. Sometimes leads need more time and information before they’re ready to be followed up on by Sales. A visitor to your website might not be ready to receive a call from your sales representative just yet. Based on their behavior on your website, you can reach out to them via LinkedIn or email to gradually build their interest in your service or product. It’s a matter of building trust, and you can’t skip any steps in that process. With the help of a marketing automation tool like HubSpot, you can automate this process and also get an overview of where each lead is in the process.

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Challenges in Digital Transformation

Most companies are able to devise the right strategy, combined with the right tools and tactics, to digitize their operations.
Digitizing the sales process entails a change in the way work is done.  Sales management is asking the sales team to take a proactive approach to following up on leads and to work closely with marketing. This can be a major shift from current work practices and requires time and effective guidance.
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The challenge lies in embedding the new processes into daily work. For example, how will we follow up on leads, where will we record this information, and how? If these processes aren’t properly embedded, projects will fail, and digitization will lead to higher costs instead of increased revenue and greater customer satisfaction.
By monitoring and managing work processes, you can prevent the change from falling through. One of the advantages of digitization is that everything is transparent and measurable, which makes monitoring fairly straightforward.

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Need help with digitization?

Need help getting started with your digital transformation? Contact us using the form or send an email to casper.lucassen@tmcmedia.nl

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