the transformation-of-selling-altimeter 2017

THE TRANSFORMATION OF SELLING: HOW DIGITAL ENABLES SEAMLESS SELLING

By Charlene Li, Principal AnalystAltimeter, a Prophet Company

February 21, 2017

www.altimetergroup.com | The Transformation of Selling: How Digital Enables Seamless Selling | [email protected] 2

EXECUTIVE SUMMARYWhile “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 2Selling Must Transform Because the Way Customers Buy Has Changed 3Transformation Puts the Focus on Customers with Three Types of Transitions 5Integration of Data, Insights, and Content Platforms Lays the Foundation 6Organizational Structure, Process, and Metrics Must Transform As Well 10Culture Change Focuses on Developing Critical Skills 13Next Steps: Assess Your Selling Transformation Maturity 26A Look at the Future 29Next Steps 16Endnotes 18Methodology 18 Brands, Researchers, Agencies and Industry Experts 18

About Us 19How to Work With Us 19

http://www.altimetergroup.com

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SELLING MUST TRANSFORM BECAUSE THE WAY CUSTOMERS BUY HAS CHANGEDDigital 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.




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.

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LinkedIn SSI Score Growth- January 2015 to August 2016The 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.




TRANSFORMATION PUTS THE FOCUS ON CUSTOMERS WITH THREE TYPES OF TRANSITIONSSelling 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




INTEGRATION OF DATA, INSIGHTS, AND CONTENT PLATFORMS LAYS THE FOUNDATIONOn 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 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




“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.”

7www.altimetergroup.com | The Transformation of Selling: How Digital Enables Seamless Selling | [email protected]






• Distribute customer data and listening throughout the organization. Data is a great way to open windows between the silos. The avowed goal of many digital transformation efforts is to have a perfect, 360-degree view of everything a customer does, on and off your site. The reality is that this will take years, and you can’t afford to wait. Several organizations we spoke with described how they took a first basic step of integrating operational and social media data about customers into their CRM profiles. At thyssenkrupp Elevator Asia Pacific, digital was the way to open windows between the silos, enabling the organization to look at its customers through the same customer data lens. The company has diverse customers ranging from sophisticated building managers in Singapore to first time developers in China, altogether using 250,000 elevators, escalators, and moving walkways throughout Asia Pacific. The first step was to put all sales brochures and materials on tablets so that relevant assets were easy for teams to access and for Marketing to update. In addition, the tablets gave thyssenkrupp’s teams direct access to data on equipment breakdowns and on how quickly service issues were addressed. They could then create customer-specific presentations to demonstrate the value of their products and services. Similarly, thyssenkrupp sources data from social listening that identifies problems at customer sites before they become major problems. That data flows into various CRM systems and can proactively trigger a visit by thyssenkrupp to the customer. “We’re generating leads from what we can observe in the public social space,” explained Kelly Truax, VP of Service Support at thyssenkrupp Elevator Asia Pacific. “We have full-time people in place who monitor social channels, looking for our competitors’ unhappy customers, but also watching out for any of our own customers who may need assistance before they approach us.”




• Tap into analytics and artificial intelligence to improve content curation and engagement. Given the rising digital sophistication of buyers, Marketing can’t get away with creating “one-size-fits-all” collateral anymore. The problem with most content isn’t that there isn’t enough, but rather that there’s too much of the wrong kind. A study by Docurated found that a third of a sales rep’s time is spent searching for or creating content — time that could have been spent engaging in sales conversations.5 To address this, organizations are using marketing technology to support the content needs of salespeople. For example, Dun & Bradstreet uses digital intelligence to perform lookalike modeling that identifies the next best action and then programmatically creates and delivers relevant content — either to the salesperson or directly to the customer. On larger accounts, Marketing works closely with Sales to deploy the right set of tactics — such as architecting workshops, creating custom content, or designing events. Machine learning can also provide context, discerning and anticipating what customers are looking for. IBM uses artificial intelligence to answer basic questions or offer free trials based on interactions with customers. When the conversation gets to the point where the customer is using buying language or asking deep technical questions, the program will engage the appropriate sales or technical rep. “A tool like this can nurture thousands of prospects all at once who are all driving towards the same goal,” explains Jeannette Browning, worldwide manager of IBM Watson’s Digital Client Cognitive Evangelism team. “It’s an interesting combination of tech support and learning, while providing key digital assets.” Machines will become smart enough to be able to interact with humans — and also realize when it’s necessary for a human to take over and enact the “escalate to human” sub-routine.







ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE, PROCESS, AND METRICS MUST TRANSFORM AS WELLWhile the structure of most selling organizations does not change, the roles and responsibilities, and especially the interactions between departments, can change significantly when moving from their traditional roles to one where they are more focused on creating a seamless buying experience for customers (see Figure 4).

Department Traditional Role

Customer-Focused Role

Key Challenges

Operations

Manages the back office workflow, as well as training and enablement. Each department typically has their own Operations team.

Integration of customer data, insights, and workflow to ensure a seamless experience.

Empower Operations to make strategic decisions and investments that will impact other departments.

Marketing

Creates content and experiences that generate leads that are fed to Sales.

Enables self-service content and experiences that engage Customers throughout the relationship.

Drawing other departments into the Customer Team by giving up primary control of customer experience design.

Sales and Account Management

The Hero Salesperson who meets one-on-one with the client and wins the business. Mindset is “Won and Done.”

Champions the needs of Customers across the organization, to best serve them.

Elevating the voice of Sales as the voice of the Customer.

Service

Reacts to problems across multiple channels with the goal of addressing each one quickly and well.

Proactively develops a relationship with content and outreach, to ensure the success of the Customer.

Shifting from supporting product groups to Customer groups.

Product Development

Designs products/services that Sales then has to sell.

Aligns closely with Sales to understand how products are/are not meeting the needs of Customers.

Increasing contact with Customers.

Legal/Finance

Final checkpoint in the selling process, comes in after business terms are set.

Involved from the start in understanding needs and restrictions to inform proposal development.

Invest the time upfront to be proactive in new relationships, rather than at the end.

FIGURE 4 HOW ORGANIZATIONAL ROLES CHANGE WITH THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF SELLING




Several interviewees emphasized the importance of making this transition from department to customer focus but also recognized the unique challenges of such a mindset shift. To prepare for this transition, companies should take the following steps to support the organization:

• Focus the organization around customer personas and profiles. One of the biggest problems with department silos is that they create a limited orientation to serving the customer. Several organizations we spoke with shared how they created cross-organizational models of customer personas to focus and align attention on the needs of key customer segments. At Dun & Bradstreet, the decision to focus on specific customer personas was tied to a broader effort to re-center the company’s purpose, mission, and values. The customer personas became a guidepost for the entire organization — Marketing, Sales, Finance, Compliance, etc. — to orient around customers. Rishi Dave, CMO of Dun & Bradstreet recalls, “This wasn’t just about marketing and sales. We were transforming holistically, from product development all the way through to the post-sale customer experience.” This ranged from putting together specific go-to-market messaging for customer personas and ROI calculators to having Marketing team members go into key accounts and teach Sales how to use tailored content in an effective way, account-by-account.

• Create a single Operations team across Marketing and Sales. Several companies we interviewed observed that the people in operations were not only among the most strategic people in the organization, but also sometimes the most tactical. One shares, “Our enablement teams often struggle for credibility because they aren’t given adequate budgets or respect in the organization. They are seen as a nuisance, trying to interrupt the sales process with their insistence on methodology.” In digital transformation, Operations play a crucial role in making sure that the flow of customer data, insights, and content move seamlessly throughout a department. As these selling elements start to integrate, the Operations function becomes the glue between departments, translating and infusing existing practices and processes into digital ones. Jamie Shanks, CEO of Sales for Life and author of Social Selling Mastery, shares, “The intent of sales ops in companies is that they are going to be the change agents of the Sales and Marketing departments.”




• Align objectives across departments with common metrics. Digital makes everything so much more measurable, but simply because you can measure something doesn’t necessarily mean that the measurement is valuable. “Vanity metrics” — such as the number of visitors to a site or the number of contacts made — distract from the core objective, which is most typically revenue. But shifting from a department or revenue focus to one that is customer-centered can be tough, because many organizations don’t use metrics like customer lifetime value or Net Promoter Score that measure the health of customer relationships. This was the case for Hitachi Data Systems’ team, which was trying to shift the organization from a “lead-generation” mindset to a “relationship-generation” one. While they trained salespeople on how to use social selling techniques, they supplemented that training with customer listening, content curation, and content management systems that made it easier for salespeople to provide specific insight to individual customers. Sharon Crost, Senior Social Business Lead at Hitachi recalls, “We had traditional funnel thinking in our Marketing department and had to turn it upside down. Marketing now delivers vetted, commercially-oriented content to the field, in real time.” Crost also shared that measurement of the impact was difficult to capture. “We don’t have a mature attribution model. Instead, we have to resort to using anecdotes and storytelling to connect relationship building to an increase in sales. But we also use proxy measures like LinkedIn’s SSI (social selling index) scores. It’s not the best, but it’s a baseline against which we can measure progress. Just having the number has been important.” Metrics should change for Sales as well. At CA Technologies, the focus was on Sales to be more engaged with and focused on customers, particularly engaging with them on social channels. To measure this, CA tracked LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index (SSI) score for each salesperson. “Social being digital, it gives you datasets that are more reliable than the information that is manually entered into our CRM,” explains Andrew Plunkett, VP of Global Education for Sales and Marketing at CA Technologies. “We were able to correlate SSI scores to pipeline size and found that people who were above a certain threshold score had greater quote attainment.” Being able to track and show how new practices in both Marketing and Sales resulted in topline growth is a key part of the selling transformation process.




CULTURE CHANGE FOCUSES ON DEVELOPING CRITICAL SKILLSInstead of thinking about culture as a “soft skill,” organizations need to think of it as a critical component of the digital transformation of selling. There were several commonalities among the organizations we spoke with when it came to transitioning culture, but they all agreed on two things — culture and leadership is crucial and often overlooked, and that this is not something that is done overnight. Jill Rowley, social selling evangelist, put it well, saying, “There needs to be a mindset shift, where I recognize that my job isn’t to sell, it’s to help. That customer at the core mantra needs to be deep in the DNA of the culture.” To get started, here are some things to focus on as you go through your cultural transition:

• Shift the mindset from selling to relationship building. Unless a change in mindset accompanies integration of data, content, and organization, the selling team will continue to work as it did in the past. Juniper’s Stan de Boisset, who realized that culture lay at the center of the transformation, explains, “Customers actively use social networks to learn and keep up-to-date with trends and solutions. They aren’t receptive to shills or spamming. With social, salespeople have an opportunity to engage customers in new conversations, provide real value, and eventually prove themselves as trusted advisors.” To bring about a mindset shift, de Boisset enlisted the help of every inside sales manager within the organization. Together, they developed a new daily sales routine, created a new set of sales KPIs, and created training materials and other content. “For social to become fully integrated in our sales process, everything had to change: from hiring practices where ‘social skills’ is a qualification to striving to record every social interaction with customers in our CRM. We knew it would be hard, but it’s something we have to do,” de Boisset said.







• Focus training on specific skill development. At Dell, the long-standing Social Media and Community University (SMaC U) has embedded social media into the DNA of Dell, with over 15,000 employees certified to engage in social on the company’s behalf. Salespeople go through the basic SMaC U training, like all employees, to understand the fundamentals of social engagement. Amy Heiss, Director of Social Media Activation at Dell, explains, “If you don’t have an understanding of the culture of social, you miss the picture of social.” After training takes place, Dell also has each salesperson spend time with a dedicated marketing specialist to talk about challenges they may face, how to connect with customers via digital channels, and identify where digital activities would be critical to their individual pipelines. In addition, Dell incorporated social listening into daily routines for salespeople. The recommendation was for salespeople to spend 10 minutes a day listening and responding to people they were following. They could then not only identify if there was a selling signal, but also personal interests. One salesperson discovered that a prospect enjoyed playing golf and arranged a meeting at a golf course, which resulted in a multi-million-dollar sale. Heiss recalls, “We highlighted that he was able to do this just through listening. It sounds simple to be focused on customer needs, but listening is a big process change for people.” Sprint took a similar approach, treating the initial pilot with 100 salespeople as sales enablement rather than training. “The reason our salespeople loved it is that digital selling is a true skillset that they can apply at Sprint and also take with them,” explains Sprint’s Chris Hutson, Business Social Selling Strategist. “This is in contrast to training about a specific product that is useless if they leave the company.” Sprint established a 10-week program that included gamification elements and transparency, with weekly reporting of SSI scores. Leadership also provided executive sponsorship with twice-a-week follow-ups. At the end of the 10-week training period, 95% of the salespeople had finished the certification and SSI scores were up by 40%. Hutson credited the success of the program to the accountability of the weekly SSI score, saying, “We wouldn’t let people fall behind, but we also didn’t need to beat people up to do this because they could see the benefit to themselves.”







• Spread stories of quick wins to establish new habits. The tangible outcomes of selling transformation aren’t always measurable in numbers, hence the importance of gathering anecdotes of success early in the process. The power of stories is that they tap into a memorable arc and emotions that highlight how new behaviors and mindsets resulted in success. Stories also have the benefit of being highly shareable, especially if spread via digital channels. “As we saw our culture becoming more customer-centric, we wanted to celebrate it,” recalled Rishi Dave from Dun & Bradstreet. “I cannot underscore enough the importance of communicating. To create culture change, it’s even more important internally than it is externally to communicate this.” To accomplish this, Dun & Bradstreet codified the sharing of customer stories by establishing “Project Benjamin,” where marketing and sales would find and share 100 new customer success stories in 100 days. To move this even faster throughout the organization, Dun & Bradstreet published the stories on their internal social network and also used it to crowdsource stories from employees.

• Ensure leadership engagement, especially in Sales. Across the board, our research found that the strategic involvement of leadership was crucial, but not always present. Many efforts began organically in Marketing, which has been hit earlier and more directly by digital changes. But the reality is that many sales leaders remain uncomfortable with the use of digital and social tools, especially in the Sales organization. One interviewee shares, “Senior sales leaders don’t think they need to be involved in social, but they do think that their team needs to be on social.” At one company, the initial social selling pilots were done at the frontlines with individual salespeople and, unfortunately, the frontline managers were not involved in the process. As a result, the managers didn’t know how to monitor or manage the new digital and social activities. To guard against this, when Sprint rolled out its social selling pilot to 100 salespeople, they ensured that leadership was involved with direct follow up from them twice a week. Chris Hutson at Sprint recalls, “In the first one to two weeks, everyone could sense that this program was different.







NEXT STEPS: ASSESS YOUR SELLING TRANSFORMATION MATURITYTo continue your digital transformation journey, take a moment to assess which stage of maturity you’re in, as illustrated in Figure 5. You may find that you are ahead in some areas and behind in others, but you center around one of the five stages. Knowing where you are in the maturity curve provides you with information on the next steps you need to take to pull together a cohesive transformation strategy for selling.

Status Quo Developing Integrated Strategic Holistic

Customer Data Integration

Little customer data is shared between departments.

Customer data is integrated between Marketing and Sales, but not prospect data.

Customer data is integrated between Marketing and Sales.

Customer and prospect data is readily available to Marketing, Sales & Service.

Full customer and prospect data is available to anyone.

Analytics and Insights

Basic analytics provide information on a few customer segments and insights remain department focused.

Customer personas focus the analytics while social listening provides basic customer insight.

Scaled social listening puts the power of analytics in the hands of salespeople.

Programmatic recommendations provide near real-time recommendations for content and engagement.

Artificial intelligence guides next action that enables hyper personalization.

Content

Content is centrally produced by Marketing, and is difficult to find/use by Sales.

Marketing creates atomized content for various platforms that Sales republishes on social platforms.

Sales begins to curate and create content, contributing to central repository of content.

Marketing automation scales Sales content marketing efforts.

Atomized content programmatical-ly delivered for hyper- personalization

Metrics

Revenue targets for Sales, lead generation for Marketing.

Revenues become one of Marketing’s metrics.

Revenue targets extend across Sales, Marketing and Service.

Revenue targets plus some customer metrics.

Customer metrics sit alongside revenue targets.

Operations Integration

Each department has their own operations team.

Marketing and Sales Ops start to integrate processes.

Marketing and Sales Ops combine into one Ops department.

Adds in Service operations, in addition to Marketing and Sales.

Operations is fully integrated and it plays a strategic role in setting sales direction.

Sales Training and Recruitment

Training & enablement focuses on traditional sales tactics.

Training incorporates social engagement and content marketing skills.

Social skills becomes an integrated part of the hiring and onboarding process.

Promotions based on ability to scale sales revenues with digital selling.

All salespeople are fully trained and engaged in using digital and social tools and platforms to drive revenues.

Leadership

Leaders focus on meeting the department’s monthly revenue or lead gen targets.

Sales and Marketing leadership meet regularly to align, and show general support for digital transformation.

Sales & Marketing leadership meet frequently, and show support with own engagement in digital and social channels.

Leadership regularly focuses on customers first and connects how customer focus results in higher revenues.

Is focused on customers first, above even monthly revenue quotas.

FIGURE 5 MATURITY STAGES OF THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF SELLING




No matter where you are on the maturity curve, there are some takeaways that our research found for specific roles, as follows:

• Sales Leaders: Leverage Marketing’s digital expertise — and technology budgets. Marketing is well on its way into digital transformation, so tap their knowledge and best practices for streamlining and scaling personalized content for customers. Where possible, leverage their technology investments in digital platforms, like social listening, marketing automation, and employee advocacy, so that you can focus your more limited tech budget on customizations needed for salespeople. Using common platforms also makes it much easier to integrate operations.

• Marketing Leaders: Lean into Sales’ deep and real-time knowledge of customers. Turn the one-off customer insights that Sales owns into discoverable data by aggregating and streamlining customer insights and case studies from the field in real time. This could be as simple as meeting regularly with sales counterparts or extending to training and encouraging salespeople to post regularly on internal collaboration platforms or enterprise social networks.

• CEOs: Become the chief instigator of transformation on behalf of customers. The digital transformation of selling requires leadership from the very top of the organization to continually drive the three transitions and, in particular, guide the silo bridging that needs to happen. When departmental conflicts develop, the CEO must re-center deliberations on how to best serve customers and away from departmental self-interest.

• COOs and CFOs: Establish metrics and processes that elevate customers. As long as the selling organization is focused on internal revenue metrics at the expense of customer success metrics, they will always make decisions that put customers second. To counter this, conduct the analysis needed to find correlations between customer success and company success. Test these correlations to gain confidence that the customer metrics do indeed correlate with better business performance. Even putting in place the process of looking for correlations will develop a greater focus on customer success.







ENDNOTES

1 CEB Global. The Digital Evolution in B2B Marketing. 2012 (https://www.cebglobal.com/content/dam/cebglobal/us/EN/best-practices-decision-support/marketing-communications/pdfs/CEB-Mktg-B2B-Digital-Evolution.pdf).

2 Dell and Social Business Engine. “Digital Transformation: Social Selling Research, Insights, and Best Practices.” Social Business Journal. 2015 (http://www.socialbusinessengine.com/socialselling/dell.pdf).

3 Heuer, Megan. “Three Myths of the “67 Percent” Statistic.” SiriusDecisions. July 3, 2013 (www.siriusdecisions.com/Blog/2013/Jul/Three-Myths-of-the-67-Percent-Statistic).

4 Terpening, Ed. The 2016 State of Social Business: Social’s Shift from Innovator to Integrator. Altimeter, a Prophet Company. November 15, 2016 (http://www2.prophet.com/2016-state-of-social-business).

5 Docurated study. The State of Sales Productivity. 2015 (http://go.docurated.com/state-of-sales-productivity-report.html).

METHODOLOGY This document was developed based upon online and in-person conversations with 17 market influencers, technology vendors, brands, and others on the digital transformation of selling, as well as secondary research, including relevant and timely books, articles, and news stories. Our deepest gratitude to the following:

BRANDS, RESEARCHERS, AGENCIES AND INDUSTRY EXPERTS 7Summits, Dion Hinchcliffe, Chief Strategy Officer Avanade, Jerome Thiebaud, Director of Global Digital Workplace Marketing; Dave Nelson, then SVP – Global CRM Lead CA Technologies, Andrew Plunkett, VP of Global Education – Sales and MarketingCBRE, Trey Tubbs, Global Director – Digital and TechnologyDell, Amy Heiss, Director of Social Media Training and Activation (SMaC U); Havilah Tower-Perkins, Social Engagement Manager and Executive Communications, MarketingDun & Bradstreet, Rishi Dave, CMOGM, David Mingle, General Director, Global Customer Experience Execution and PlanningHitachi Data Systems, Sharon Crost, Senior Social Business Lead – Social Selling, Social Analytics, Social Media StrategyIBM, Jeannette Browning, Watson Cognitive Evangelism, IBM Watson Group, Manager WWIntel, Danielle Miller, Global Social Business Strategist & ManagerJill Rowley, Digital Sales Transformation Evangelist & Startup AdvisorJuniper, Stan de Boisset, Global Head, Commercial and Inside SalesLinkedIn, Justin Shriber, Head of Marketing for LinkedIn Sales Solutions; Diana Kucer, then Director of Global Product MarketingSales for Life, Jamie Shanks, CEOSAP, Vivek Bapat, Senior Vice President, Global Head of Marketing StrategySoftware Improvement Group (SIG), Maureen Blandford, CMOSprint, Chris Hutson, Business Social Selling Strategist thyssenkrupp Elevator Asia Pacific, Kelly Truax, Vice President, Service Support



https://www.cebglobal.com/content/dam/cebglobal/us/EN/best-practices-decision-support/marketing-communications/pdfs/CEB-Mktg-B2B-Digital-Evolution.pdf



http://www.socialbusinessengine.com/socialselling/dell.pdf

http://www.siriusdecisions.com/Blog/2013/Jul/Three

http://www2.prophet.com/2016

http://go.docurated.com/state-of-sales-productivity-report.html

http://go.docurated.com/state-of-sales-productivity-report.html


HOW TO WORK WITH USAltimeter 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 [email protected].

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 [email protected].

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 [email protected] www.altimetergroup.com @altimetergroup 415-363-0004



mailto:[email protected]

https://twitter.com/charleneli

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http://charleneli.com/books/open-leadership/

http://charleneli.com/books/groundswell/

https://www.amazon.com/The-Engaged-Leader-Strategy-Transformation-ebook/dp/B00TKQYFD8

mailto:charlene%40altimetergroup.com?subject=

mailto:[email protected]

www.altimetergroup.com


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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DISCLAIMER ALTHOUGH THE INFORMATION AND DATA USED IN THIS REPORT HAVE BEEN PRODUCED AND PROCESSED FROM SOURCES BELIEVED TO BE RELIABLE, NO WARRANTY EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED IS MADE REGARDING THE COMPLETENESS, ACCURACY, ADEQUACY, OR USE OF THE INFORMATION. THE AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS OF THE INFORMATION AND DATA SHALL HAVE NO LIABILITY FOR ERRORS OR OMISSIONS CONTAINED HEREIN OR FOR INTERPRETATIONS THEREOF. REFERENCE HEREIN TO ANY SPECIFIC PRODUCT OR VENDOR BY TRADE NAME, TRADEMARK, OR OTHERWISE DOES NOT CONSTITUTE OR IMPLY ITS ENDORSEMENT, RECOMMENDATION, OR FAVORING BY THE AUTHORS OR CONTRIBUTORS AND SHALL NOT BE USED FOR ADVERTISING OR PRODUCT ENDORSEMENT PURPOSES. THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED HEREIN ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE.



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