How Digital Enables Seamless Selling, by Charlene Li

1. THE TRANSFORMATION
OF SELLING:
HOW DIGITAL ENABLES
SEAMLESS SELLING
By Charlene Li, Principal Analyst
Altimeter, a Prophet Company
February 21, 2017
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
While “social selling” is a key idea that has emerged over the past few years,
it is clear that something larger is afoot. Keeping up with fast-moving and
well-informed customers requires sales departments to focus less on the hard
sell and more on adding value to the experience and relationship via digital
channels. Moreover, selling must become seamless, bridging traditional
department silos like Marketing, Sales, and Service to meet customers
wherever they may engage an organization.
This report examines the transformation of selling in complex transactions,
such as those typically done in business-to-business (B2B) sales or high-
consideration consumer sales. Three types of transitions drive the digital
transformation process: Platform Integration, Organization, and Culture.
Notably, while digital technologies may drive the transformation, the strategic
focus for sales teams must include changing organization and culture such that
customers become the core of the selling process.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Executive Summary 2
Selling Must Transform Becasue the Way Customers Buy Has Changed 3
Transformation Puts the Focus on Customers with Three Types of Transitions 5
Integration of Data, Insights, and Content Platforms Lays the Foundation 6
Organizational Structure, Process, and Metrics Must Transform As Well 10
Culture Change Focuses on Developing Critical Skills 13
Next Steps: Assess Your Selling Transformation Maturity 26
A Look at the Future 29
Next Steps 16
Endnotes 18
Methodology 18
Brands, Researchers, Agencies and Industry Experts 18
About Us 19
How to Work With Us 19
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SELLING MUST TRANSFORM BECAUSE
THE WAY CUSTOMERS BUY HAS CHANGED
Digital has fundamentally changed the buying process for customers, which has implications
for how companies sell to these fast-moving buyers. In particular, digital has changed
complex buying and selling transactions in the following ways:
• Buyers have access to information earlier in the buying process. In the past, the seller
was in control of information. But now, the proliferation of influencer content, peer
reviews, and comparison sites all make today’s customers less reliant on company-
provided information and sales experts. More than half of the decision-making process
is completed before customers even reach out to a salesperson,1
while 70% of B2B
buyers use social media to help them decide.2
“The consumer has never had this much
information at their disposal,” says Trey Tubbs, Director of Global Sales Management
and Client Care at CBRE.“I do think [digital] is raising the bar in the sense that customers
now [expect sales] to provide new information that they didn’t already know.” Readily
available information means that businesses must fulfill customers’ need for control and
self-service throughout their journey. Consumerization of the B2B buying process means
more targeted content being created and made available to potential customers —
targeted based on behavior, not solely on the product being purchased.
• Digital interactions supplant calls and meetings. SiriusDecisions found that 67% of
buying journeys now involve digital interactions versus traditional channels.3
Customers
want to connect on the platform of their choice, be it LinkedIn or even WhatsApp, but
salespeople uncomfortable with digital cling to traditional channels. Even for salespeople
eager to embrace these new channels, corporate IT departments frequently ban them,
so salespeople resort to using their personal devices, social media, and messaging
accounts that can’t be tracked or monitored. This means the traditional role of the “hero
salesperson” — to connect one-on-one with a prospect and close the sale through a
series of meetings, calls, and emails — is being supplanted by inside Sales, Marketing,
or even Customer Service, all of whom are often better equipped to operate in digital
channels.
• Social selling has seen mixed results, despite its obvious potential. Altimeter found that
43% of companies surveyed had social selling programs that were either being optimized
or mature, with another 39% planning, piloting, and in the first year of implementation.4
The results are being felt in tangible ways; data from LinkedIn shows there have been
significant advances in social selling activities across both geographies and industries
(see Figure 1). But uptake by Sales has often been limited, a common complaint being
that social selling does not generate enough leads to justify the time it takes away from
traditional sales activities.
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FIGURE 1
LINKEDIN’S SOCIAL SELLING INDEX SHOWED SIGNIFICANT GAINS OVER THE PAST YEAR
We found that many social selling initiatives lacked depth, focusing on simply training Sales on
how to use LinkedIn and Twitter, giving reps access to LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or pushing out
content via an employee advocacy platform. The problem is that these initiatives don’t go far
enough to address the fundamental changes taking place around buying and selling. Stan de
Boisset, the Commercial and Inside Sales Lead at Juniper Networks, explains, “It’s not because
social selling doesn’t work. It’s because transforming an organization takes time, education,
practice, and discipline. It’s like giving someone a Formula 1 car — just because they have a
driver’s license doesn’t mean they can win a race.” We found that organizations that were most
successful at rolling out social selling considered it to be just one piece of a successful digital
selling organization, which is made up of an aligned Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service/
Success team.
44%
21%
37%
27%
19%
35%
27%
26%
24%
23%
23%
21%
21%
19%
LATAM
Asia
AN
Z
N
A
EM
EA
Retail &
Consum
er Products
Aero/Auto/Engineering
M
anufacturing/Industrial
Tech, Telecom
&
M
edia
Healthcare
&
Pharm
aceutical
G
overnm
ent/Education/N
on-Profit
Financial Service
&
Insurance
O
il &
Energy
Professional Services
Global average score growth
GrowthinAverageSSIscore
LinkedIn SSI Score Growth- January 2015 to August 2016
The LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) measures the strength of a user’s professional brand,
level of engagement, employment of prospect and connection research tools, and overall
level of connectedness on the LinkedIn platform.
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TRANSFORMATION PUTS THE FOCUS ON
CUSTOMERS WITH THREE TYPES OF TRANSITIONS
Selling to customers in the Digital Era is difficult because, historically, almost every company
divides the complex selling process among departments with specialized skills. Sales focuses
on building one-to-one relationships; Marketing analyzes data and presents ideas in a simple
and concise way; and Customer Service or Customer Success deals with any post-transaction
implementation or issues. This specialization has resulted in siloed departments that make it
difficult to create a seamless buying experience for customers (see Figure 2).
Breaking down silos is an age-old problem that has stymied many organizations. The
difference today is that digital tools and practices are helping edge us toward a unified
reality, not so much by tearing down the silos as by building windows between them.
Increased visibility helps everyone in the organization operate more transparently, which
makes it easier to create the seamless experiences that customers want.
To create this digital transformation, organizations must undergo transitions in three areas:
platform integration, organization, and culture (see Figure 3). Our research found that
while these transitions happen concurrently and often depend on each other, organizations
focused on one area to start. Here are more details and examples of each transition.
FIGURE 2
CUSTOMERS MUST NAVIGATE SILOED DEPARTMENTS IN THE SELLING PROCESS
MARKETING SALES SERVICE
Activities:
Create content,
events, ads
Develop
relationships
React to calls,
emails
Metric of
success:
Number of leads
generated
Sales closed
Problems solved
efficiently
Technology:
Marketing
Automation
CRM Call Center
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INTEGRATION OF DATA, INSIGHTS, AND
CONTENT PLATFORMS LAYS THE FOUNDATION
On the surface, integration appears to revolve around technology platforms. But Jerome
Thiebaud, Director of Global Digital Workplace Marketing at Avanade, pointed out a subtle
difference, saying, “It’s not because you have technology that you are going to be successful
in the marketplace. It’s because you have technology that allows you to focus more on the
customer, and on the human interaction.” Most companies have an overabundance of
technology but lack the integration between those platforms to keep customers at the center.
Maureen Blandford, CMO of Software Improvement Group, affirms, “Integration is the
new black. We’re trying to build as small a technology stack as possible, with optimal
integration.” Here are some of the top integration efforts organizations should prioritize to
transform selling.
• Put the power of digital data and content in the hands of employees to engage clients.
At the most basic level, digitizing Sales means more than getting them equipment and
loading them up with software and content — it’s about making sure that these enabling
technologies are tuned to drive better engagement with customers. At CBRE, one of
the world’s largest commercial real estate firms, a key goal was to enable salespeople
to demonstrate their deep understanding of their clients’ businesses by using digital
to establish and scale thought leadership and thus trust. CBRE took all of the paper
materials its salespeople used to hand out to clients and put them on an iPads, enabling
salespeople to add engaging content like video on the fly into their presentations
without having to go back to IT for help. At the same time, CBRE recognized that social
media was becoming a more important force.
FIGURE 3 THREE TRANSITIONS DRIVE THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF SELLING
Platform Integration
Transition
Organization
Transition
Culture
Transition
• Unify and distribute
customer data across
departments, platforms,
and channels.
• Customize content based
on customer data.
• Tap artificial intelligence
to improve engagement.
• Create a single
Operations team across
Marketing & Sales.
• Align objectives across
departments with
common metrics.
• Create roles to place
focus on customers and
their experiences.
• Focus training on general
enablement and skill
development.
• Spread stories of quick
wins to establish new
habits.
• Ensure leadership is
engaged, especially in
Sales.
Digital Transformation of Sales Requires Three Transitions
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“If you’re looking for [real estate] space, you’re not going to be looking on Twitter,”
acknowledges CBRE’s Trey Tubbs. “But our clients, prospective clients, and people in our
industry follow us on social media. An article will go out and be well-received by people
we never expected to be interested.” To support social media outreach, CBRE placed an
app on the iPad called Engage, which enables corporate, 400 local offices, and 75,000
employees to post content on LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Leverage existing tools rather than seeking out new ones. Rather than try to select,
install, and adopt a new technology, sometimes it’s faster and easier to tap an established
one and modify existing processes instead. At Intel, the Marketing group leveraged the
existing Brand IQ platform, rather than create a new tool, to create a content aggregator,
which became a one-stop shop for anyone to post and share content. Different Sales
roles would share different types of content that they found helpful.
Danielle Miller, Global Social Business Strategist and Manager at Intel, recalls, “We
were finding that everybody likes the bright shiny tool. ‘Let’s just get a tool!’ But there
needs to be recognition that we look at the internal processes so that it serves as a
solid foundation for the future, because we knew there was a limit to how many tools a
salesperson can manage.”
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HOW TO WORK WITH US
Altimeter can support your digital transformation of selling efforts in the following ways:
• Move social selling beyond LinkedIn profiles and Twitter accounts. While your salespeople
have created polished LinkedIn profiles and set up a Twitter accounts, they remain largely unused.
Altimeter can help by conducting an assessment of your current social selling activities, identifying
opportunities around data, content, and engagement that can drive better business results.
• Make the case for a digital transformation strategy for selling. There may be a groundswell of
support for the use of digital in selling but it lacks coherence. Altimeter can help make the case for
executive support of and engagement in a robust digital strategy that spans across departments.
An assessment of your digital selling capabilities lays the foundation for an executive workshop that
aligns the organization around specific goals and objectives.
• Educate and align sales and marketing organizations for digital transformation. Altimeter
conducts workshops and speaks at internal events to bring awareness and alignment around digital
transformation. Several prep interviews conducted in advance ensures that the session is customized
to the needs of your organization, with relevant examples.
• Create and activate a robust strategy for the digital transformation of selling. Working closely
with our consulting colleagues at Prophet Brand Strategy, Altimeter creates a multi-year strategy that
takes into account all three types of transitions: platform integration, organizational, and cultural. The
strategy typically includes inputs from sales and marketing leadership, but can also include service,
product, and finance/legal.
To learn more about Altimeter’s offerings, contact sales@altimetergroup.com.
About Charlene Li,
Principal Analyst
Charlene (@CharleneLi) is a
Principal Analyst at Altimeter, a
Prophet company, where she helps
leaders thrive with disruption. She was the
Founder and CEO of Altimeter Group prior to
its joining Prophet, and she is the author of the
New York Times bestseller, Open Leadership.
She is also the coauthor of the critically
acclaimed, bestselling book Groundswell.
Her most recent book, The Engaged Leader,
is a call to business leaders to adapt to the
digital landscape, and revolutionize their
relationships by connecting directly with their
followers. Her current research focuses on
customer experience strategy and employee
engagement and she’s working on a new
book on disruption strategies. You can reach
Charlene at charlene@altimetergroup.com.
About Altimeter, a Prophet Company
Altimeter, a Prophet company, is a research and
strategy consulting firm that helps companies
understand and take advantage of digital
disruption. In 2015, Prophet acquired Altimeter
Group to bring forward-thinking digital
research and strategy consulting together
under one umbrella, and to help clients
unlock the power of digital transformation.
Altimeter, founded in 2008 by best-selling
author Charlene Li, focuses on research in
digital transformation, social business and
governance, customer experience, big data,
and content strategy.
Altimeter, a Prophet Company
One Bush Street, 7th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94104
info@altimetergroup.com
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OPEN RESEARCH
This independent research report was 100% funded by Altimeter, A Prophet Company. This report is
published under the principle of Open Research and is intended to advance the industry at no cost. This
report is intended for you to read, utilize, and share with others; if you do so, please provide attribution to
Altimeter, A Prophet Company.
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