6 must-haves of a data-driven sales model for Large Service Providers

What is the ideal Large Service Provider sales model? We believe it’s the one that allows to analyze data from where everything starts, the entry point, and move beyond having data to being data-driven. In fact, a data-driven sales model allows you to acquire better data (what you already have, what you can bring or capture from the outside and what can be shared in your environment and is still not on your systems), apply data effectively (make it available at the right time and context), and manage data better (understand behaviours with apps, analytics, and algorithms that will enable your company to increase revenues, productivity and profit).

 

Here are the 6 characteristics that differentiate an efficient and data-driven sales model from a traditional and inefficient sales model:

Making complex selling simple and making complex connections simple – Centralizing all the customers’ information within a mobile app is the basis to solving the problems associated with a traditional sales model. An automated approach will capture, integrate, store and monitor all the information, even the unstructured data, extracting the correct risk assessment and matching that to the contracts given to the customer. When he leaves the store, all the complex products and services purchased will already be activated. If you look at what multi-brand retailers are facing, it is even more delicate. All the information must be correctly handled and secured, especially in highly regulated and competitive environments.

Engage customer onboarding within a single point: automated data capture, due diligence, and contract case management – It is possible to simplify the sale of a complex bundle of products and services by connecting them seamlessly. By using a single point of customer data entry, due diligence and case management can be fully automated. After the sale is closed, the system will make sure the seller has all the information needed for a specific contract. There will be no missing steps or checklists that they need to go through.

Detailed customer journey analytics – Detailed customer journey analytics is usually missing from a traditional sales model. By implementing this layer, the company can learn exactly how long the customer spent choosing a product or another, and how long he spent evaluating specific terms and conditions of a service. Using this insight and many others, the salesperson can receive better training and figure out which options will make it easier for the customer to select the services they want to bundle. Better training is key and helps to solve critical issues companies face when they don’t have the most skilled salespeople around, for instance during seasonal peak times like Christmas and summer. Stores will recruit temporary workers, often younger and less experienced, and it is important that it goes smoothly and the experience of other employees is leveraged. Companies can make the process easier to use and select automation steps in the sales process to help temporary salespeople.

Live management and colleague dashboard – A data-driven approach also includes live management and colleague dashboard so that the manager can understand exactly what is happening in the store. Through the dashboard, it’s possible to evaluate all the sales previously submitted as well as monitor how commissions are processed.

Gamification to drive engagement and productivity – One of the most interesting and differentiating concepts of a data-driven sales model is its gamification layer. The goal is to drive engagement and increase productivity. Constructive feedback will motivate salespeople. If they’re repeating the same kind of error, the system will be automatically helping them and provide instant training so that they can approach the next situation with better insights. The system will also warn if there is a specific alert for due diligence on client risk, for instance.

Not only a tech approach – It may not seem obvious, but this is not only about technology:

  • Embed the digital journeys into the operational model – This ensures the company no longer has a broken process. Starting right at the entry point means there’s no back-office management nor difficulties related to diverse types of channels, like emails, web, and offline. It’s all about organizing the same operational model and work this digital journey into all the channels available.
  • Early colleague engagement – Building employee engagement should be a priority. Once executives have defined a data-driven strategy, they should be proactive and effective in engaging colleagues and employees. One good step is to identify the employees more willing to manage and value data and position them to share their knowledge with colleagues. This way the data-driven strategy will be more easily implemented in the company, engaging even the more data resilient colleagues.
  • Align incentives and rewards with technology – It’s important to have an alignment of incentives and rewards with technology. This way, sales teams will be drivers of the change. They need to understand exactly what is their position, where they are in the process and what they need to do to make it better. This is about the journey, the multiple operational processes. It’s about having the right engagement with different stakeholders and aligning incentives and rewards that are typically not found in these approaches, making it clearer to the salesperson what they need to do to sell more, receive more and be more efficient.

 


To Dos:
– Look across the range of your sales activities to see where content analytics could provide business insight to understand customer needs, improve competitive advantage, increase sales, leverage sales people performance, help to solve cases and investigations or prevent non-compliance and fraud!
– Inbound content handling can rapidly overload your staff and reduce the speed of response to customers. Use automated data recognition, routing, and data extraction.
– Unless your staff is diligent and consistent at declaring, classifying and tagging records, consider providing auto-classification assistance or full auto-classification. Be aware that your information governance policies need to be updated and consistent as they will provide the rules for automation.
– Clearly define your offering bundles, goals, team, and targets.
– Train and create an effective sales network.
– Implement a data-driven client onboarding solution that gives you the insights you need to grow and comply with existing regulations.
– See how Papersoft approach to Large Service Providers can help improve your business and bring you more revenues.
– Subscribe to our blog to receive valuable insights about mobile and paper-free processes.
Ask for a demo that will enable you to materialize a data-driven sales model!
– Download our ebook “How to become a data-driven company? Start from the entry point” and know more about how to move beyond having data to being data-driven.

ebook How to become a data-driven company? Start from the entry point.