If only the desire to sell more was sufficient to succeed, every business would be much more profitable and efficient. The real state of affairs is that we live in a highly competitive world where the sales process is complex and depends on various factors, including buying behaviors and sales technologies we use.
As consumer behavior has changed dramatically over the last few years, traditional sales approaches are no more resultative. Fortunately, while technologies ceaselessly influence the way we buy, they also reinvent the way we sell.
In this blog post, we’ll highlight current trends in technologies that help streamline the management of sales and marketing operations. But first, let’s talk about the importance of setting priorities instead of embracing any of the trends impulsively.
Choosing the Right Focus
With a great variety of sales tools available for companies today, it is easy to fall for the vast possibilities they offer and deviate from the core business needs. Primarily, leaders should determine the key areas to focus on and what solutions would help them achieve their goals.
I actually think we’ll see less tech, not more. Many companies over the past two to three years have confused technology with strategy, and that’s (understandably) not working out too well. I expect we’ll see companies reduce their overall tech stack and increase both usage and ROI from the tools that remain.
— Matt Heinz, President, Heinz Marketing
More does not mean better. Instead of encompassing as many features as possible, focus on relevant functions that fit the company software development budget and simplify the work of sales teams. This will deliver the best results without overcomplicating processes.
Sales intelligence supports businesses with tools to accelerate sales productivity. The right sales tech stack at hand empowers companies to effectively collect and analyze data, make informed decisions, and automate tasks. As a result, sales and marketing teams have more resources to stay up-to-date with customers and drive more deals.
According to MarketsandMarkets, the global sales intelligence market is expected to reach $3.4 billion by 2024, rising at a market growth of 11.4% CAGR during the forecast period.
Source: MarketsandMarkets
The role of technology in sales and marketing can’t be overrated. It provides companies with new platforms and systems to achieve greater results than they were able to a couple of years ago. Now, for example, with brand monitoring tools, you can even spot and analyze online mentions of your brand and access insights on your customers, market, and competitors.
No wonder, businesses that seize opportunities created by emerging digital trends are staying at the forefront of the competition.
Benefits of Using Tech Tools in Sales
So what do the companies that adopt technology trends for their marketing and sales operations get? Well, of course, each tech solution provides its unique advantages and is designed to address specific needs. Later on, we’ll talk in detail about the benefits of each trend and how businesses can leverage them.
Now, let’s go over the general advantages that most sales technology tools deliver to those who don’t hesitate to embrace them.
- Omnichannel communications
- Improved productivity
- Higher conversion rates
- Enhanced customer experience
- Top-performing agents
- Data-driven decisions
- Better customer understanding
- Boosted sales and marketing operations
As you can see, the list is quite compelling and can give you an idea of why companies that implement technologies have more opportunities to step up their game. Below, we have selected top sales technology trends impacting business today that your company can embrace and benefit from.
Top 8 Sales Technology Trends
1. Robust CRM Platforms
Connecting with customers nowadays requires being almost a superman. It involves ongoing communications through emails, phone calls, social media, web forms, and live chats. Furthermore, the amount of customer information and profile details hinders decision-making and data analysis even for top employees. Here CRM platforms come to the rescue.
They have become a large part of doing business today. Even small companies successfully implement CRM solutions that help their sales, marketing, and service professionals streamline operations.
Learn more: Best Practices of CRM Implementation
Intelligent platforms, like process-driven CRM Creatio, provide opportunities for multichannel communications, full control of the customer journey, and routine task automation.
Among the numerous advantages that CRM solutions offer to companies, some of them particularly contribute to sales growth:
- 360 customer view
- Lead and sales pipeline management
- Activity management
- Data centralization
- Sales analytics and forecasting
- Numerous reporting opportunities
- Campaign management
On top of that, various communication options available in the CRM, for example, integration of your CRM with a phone system, allow you to manage activities, augment customer data, and access reports in one place. This helps avoid data losses, improves operational efficiency, and reduces costs.
2. Intelligent Communication Tools
It has been a while since AI made its way to the marketing field, and it keeps gathering momentum. Today, artificial intelligence enhances the efforts of marketing teams, helping them qualify more leads and optimize various tasks.
It also provides the ground for innovative sales tools and offers valuable support in improving and personalizing customer experience with tailored digital marketing — ads, targeted content, and CTAs.
Chatbots
AI tools turn to customer data and communication history to help your team drive conversations. It is possible even without your reps’ engagement. For instance, AI-powered chatbots support customers 24/7. They enable replying to basic queries or resolving issues, reducing the need for customer service interactions.
Currently, we see the growth of the global chatbot market that is projected to reach a size of $1.34 billion by 2024. At the same time, there is another similar sales technology being on the rise.
Voicebots with NLP algorithms assist customers in various ways and generate revenue growth with the use of cross-selling and up-selling techniques.
Find out more about The Ways to Increase Contact Center Performance
Contact Center Solutions
Another way to improve your customer interactions and agent efficiency is the application of AI-Powered Contact Center solutions. There are numerous use cases for these tools, but all of them are aimed to elevate your sales, boost performance, and improve the transparency of your operations.
Contact center software seamlessly integrated with your CRM allows sales agents to reach customers via calls, emails, and other channels and store all customer and interaction data in one place. That saves time, improves productivity, and eliminates the risk of data loss.
With the help of AI tools, you can analyze unstructured data such as calls and extract meaningful insights from each conversation. Thus, you will get the benefits of speech recognition and call analytics, which we will talk about further.
Read more about Conversation Intelligence Tools
You can also take advantage of smart scripts that will help your reps get to the right point of sale much faster. They are very productive for telemarketing campaigns, especially coupled with power dialer functionality. On top of that, AI helps reps close more deals by accessing the knowledge base and prompts right during the call.
AI-Based Contact Center Right in Your CRM
Full-featured Inbound & Outbound call center with AI-based agent scoring and call analytics.
3. Speech Recognition and Call Analytics
Speech recognition and AI-powered call analytics are fast-growing and world-changing technologies that help process, interpret, and understand conversations. While these solutions simplify our everyday lives with voice-powered apps, they also substantially enhance sales team productivity.
See how Call Analytics Boosted Sales of an Insurance Company
Many companies actively adopt speech analytics technology in their business applications. It allows them to understand better the expectations, preferences, and needs of their clients and prospects.
One of the use cases is transcribing calls with your clients and capturing valuable data from these conversations. With AI and ML solutions, you can analyze this data to make informed decisions and apply the results in many practical ways.
- Better understand customer needs
- Identify top skills that lead to conversions
- Monitor script adherence
- Score your reps
- Leverage your knowledge base
- Train your agents
- Measure the results of activities
Learn more about the Top Benefits of Speech Recognition
To summarize, Speech Recognition and Call Analytics help boost the performance of your agents, improve customer engagement and close deals faster, and significantly increase conversions towards the most optimal outcomes.
4. Data Management Solutions
Besides calls, there’s plenty of other data that sales and marketing teams work with. And all this data can be leveraged. From the number of leads and information on deals to purchase behaviors, favorite products, and tons of other customer personal details — companies need a helping hand to collect and process this data.
However, it’s not enough to just automate data management. It’s also essential to use data analytics like predictive and prescriptive to, for example, personalize marketing efforts and customize offers. The right data management and analytics tools support the automation of manual activities, drive decision-making, and multiply opportunities to serve customers better.
Read about 6 Types of Data Analysis for Businesses
5. Mobile Applications
According to Insider Intelligence, m-commerce sales are expected to hit $534.18 billion, or 40.4% of e-commerce sales, in 2024. That means that a bit less than half of consumers shop on mobile devices. And for many of them, poor UX is the main barrier to mobile shopping. So there are ample opportunities to seize and plenty of room for improvement.
Whether the mobile version of a website is developed with adaptive, responsive, or standalone design, it does not always entail the best user experience. In many cases, mobile apps have a user-friendly interface and enable a greater user experience compared to mobile websites.
Mobile devices have become an essential part of digital lives for nearly all generations. Thus, a mobile app developed precisely for your business needs is a powerful tool to support your sales. It provides companies with such valuable benefits as:
- Building a strong brand
- Improving customer engagement and loyalty
- Accelerating sales
- Boosting the revenue
Find out How Much it Costs to Build a Mobile App
6. Cloud-Based Software
Most of the software solutions used nowadays heavily rely on cloud computing. And sales tech tools are no exception. In fact, cloud-based solutions remain one of the most popular trends that you should consider if you want to facilitate sales and marketing operations.
Cloud technology provides multiple advantages for both field-based and office-based sales teams, allowing them to easily access customer data from anywhere, build efficient processes, and ensure that information is secured.
On top of that, the latest trends in automation technologies show that there’s great demand for SaaS platforms available in the sales tech market today. In most cases, businesses that decide to implement these solutions can benefit from seamless integration with other enterprise software, quick updates, easy customizations, and, finally — reduced costs.
7. The Internet of Things
The Internet of Things is obviously something more than just a trend that has been attracting our attention for years. It is a seed of changes poised to impact the landscape of every field. Sales and marketing are among the ones who feel the influence and benefits of this technology.
Instead of intuition and thorough market analysis, companies can now use the power of IoT devices and applications to collect and scrutinize customer data in real time. As a result, this streamlines the discovery of customer needs and forecasting further opportunities.
The right IoT solution allows companies to monitor customer behavior, respond to their preferences more flexibly, and guide their journey.
Learn How to Launch a Successful IoT Project
IoT will remain one of the powerful technology trends in sales and marketing, playing a great role in supporting customer experience and sales productivity. Ultimately, the Internet of Things helps advance:
- Data and analytics
- Customer engagement
- Process automation
- Consumer targeting
8. Extended Reality
Extended Reality continues to make leaps in providing customers with direct personal experience. It encompasses Augmented and Virtual Realities, AR and VR, and brings significant benefits to companies that depend on the visual impact to propel sales growth.
Considering shifting consumer preferences and the online presence of most companies, AR solutions quickly gain traction with the augmented reality market to generate up to $461 billion in revenue by 2030.
For the time being, we keep witnessing the changes our world undergoes. Consumers prefer online shopping, providing retailers with more opportunities and challenges to satisfy their current needs.
AR and VR serve as powerful instruments that help e-commerce offer interactive shopping and virtual product experience for customers. As a result, this improves the bottom line.
Stepping into a New Age of Sales
Upcoming years will continue offering new benefits of the latest technologies. At the same time, consumer demands will evolve even faster. Thus, for companies, whose top priority is to meet customer expectations, embracing of sales technology trends will bear fruits.
Even if AI, IoT, cloud computing, mobile and XR don’t sound like new technological waves in general, they still remain popular trends in marketing and sales sectors. They empower businesses by automating processes and improving the efficiency of operations. As a result, companies provide their customers with an enhanced experience, improve their engagement, and gain a competitive advantage over their rivals.
If your company wants to accelerate the sales process and increase productivity, it is time to make a move. Velvetech experts will be happy to assist you with any idea and come up with the most optimal software solution tailored to your needs.
Contact us for a consultation and start adopting new sales technologies to drive more deals.
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