Mount Arbor Blog

Let’s face it - your sales team is statistically likely to be lagging behind in terms of their use of technology. They’re most likely to be applying more relationship driven sales methods than data-driven - especially if your hiring pool includes salespeople with more than 10 years experience in sales. The reason for this is that digital technology has been available to Sales for years, but the systems and processes to use the technology in your sales process has been difficult to apply. Altify claim there’s a 13% retention rate on sales training - that means, essentially, that even if you were to train the sales team to follow your own unique sales system or methodology the likelihood is that after training is complete, most of your salespeople will put the manuals on the shelf and do what they were doing before. The same is true of your CRM - statistically salespeople spending too much time on data entry and not enough on sales. From 'The State of Inbound', a report commissioned by Hubspot:

Engineers like to solve problems. Show me an excited engineer and I’ll show you a man with a problem. Noodling with algorithms and figuring out how to connect one thing to another excites a problem solver like nothing else. In technology companies, it’s always an advantage to have people who love the challenge of diving into complexity and emerging with simple, elegant solutions. These can then be sold to customers - provided the solution is actually something the customer wants.

New concept businesses can’t sell like others with more familiar products. Selling a pair of jeans in a department store requires a particular type of selling, emphasising the value of something already understood to be useful and desirable to the customer. Selling a platform or product that does something that's never been done before requires two extra steps...

Sometimes selling a solution or product feels like you’re sitting on a goldmine, yet no-one around you seems to understand. Often the value remains hidden, no matter how many ways you tell your story.

If you're still sending out generic offers to your customers in 2017, something's wrong. However, according to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal about personalization using data, "banks, including Chase, know they are sitting on a large deposit of gold—and they intend to mine it." The same is true across every industry, particularly larger institutions with both legacy data from historical transactions. They're trying to find ways to combine that data with real-time, behavioral data (from their website, for example) so they can use it to personalize interactions with their customers. This will improve customer experience and has been proven to increase loyalty, retention, and revenue.