Experts Explore How Technology Can Create a Digital-First Selling Experience at the 2023 Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference, May 16-17 in Las Vegas
“The technologies that make up this list prioritize buyers’ value of real time collaboration, provide them with the help required to influence consensus, and allow them to leverage digital tools for purchase guidance,” said Dan Gottlieb, Senior Director Analyst in the Gartner Sales Practice.
“While our research indicates buyers have a preference for a rep-free purchase experience, they also report that their interactions with sellers are the most valuable parts of the buying process,” Gottlieb said. “Their willingness to work with sellers via technology presents a compelling opportunity to experiment with new ways to engage digitally.”
Dan Gottlieb, Senior Director Analyst in the Gartner Sales Practice shared the benefits that technology brings to B2B buyer engagement.
AI-Sales Email
Gartner predicts that in the next two years, 30% of outbound messages from large organizations will be synthetically generated. Within sales, generative AI will be increasingly used to create emails that utilize CRM data and prompts engineered by sellers in order to build highly tailored messages that align with the buying priorities of multiple buyers.
“Generative AI is on course to change the way sales organizations do business,” said Gottlieb. “AI will empower B2B sales teams to easily produce highly relevant content, creating better messaging to engage a higher number of buyers in a deal — and faster.”
Visual Collaboration
Visual collaboration tools provide a shared virtual canvas to tell stories, co-create and annotate content with buyers. These tools help sellers to explore complex solutions with their buyers, demonstrating client understanding through an interactive and visual real-time experience.
Gartner predicts that by next year, visual collaboration applications will be the center of 30% of meeting experiences.
Virtual Reality (VR)
VR provides a computer-generated 3D environment that surrounds a user and responds to an individual’s actions in a natural way, usually through immersive head-mounted displays. While considered a luxury in sales settings, VR can facilitate real-time 3D virtual meeting experiences in the Metaverse, offering a digital-first selling experience for buyers to learn about products and engage with peers.
Digital Sales Rooms (DSRs)
DSRs offer a consolidated vendor microsite and project management hub for the buying team, which empowers buyers with a single space to reference vendor assets and information. DSRs streamline how a small group of targeted buyers interact with the supplier, offering better customer experience. They also support customer retention, turning into a collaborative platform where the supplier and customer continue to work together to achieve better lifetime value for the vendor.
By 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels.
Workstream Collaboration
Workstream collaboration products, such as Microsoft Teams or Slack, deliver a conversational workspace based on a persistent group chat. Sales leaders can utilize this technology to set up channels dedicated to the buying process, answer questions in real-time and facilitate dialogue with buyers.
Conversation Intelligence
Conversation intelligence analyzes conversations between buyers and sellers, using AI to deliver relevant insights to improve interaction quality (e.g., suggesting next best action). Gartner predicts that by 2025, 75% of B2B sales organizations will augment traditional sales playbooks with AI-guided selling solutions.
“Active listening is one of the most fundamental skills in facilitating the buying process. Conversation intelligence helps sellers pick up on trends in buyer rhetoric, giving them additional guidance to use during real-time sales conversations,” said Gottlieb.
Visual Configuration
Over half of buyers say they use supplier-provided digital technologies during the buying process. Visual configuration enables buyers to interact with a visual representation of a physical product. Sellers can walk buying teams through customizations in real-time, making this technology useful for solution exploration and requirement building.
Already a table stakes capability in industries such as medical devices and specialty vehicles, organizations that are among the first to adopt it in their industry can gain substantial competitive advantage.
Interactive Demonstrations
Interactive demonstrations allow buyers to interact directly with synthetic data in digital products. Sales teams can customize a real-time walkthrough experience for a product tour for a personalized experience via their website or a digital sales room.
“By putting buyers in the driver’s seat for solution exploration, requirements building and supplier selection, the likelihood of their engagement and, by extension, purchase power soars,” said Gottlieb.
Narrative Automation
Narrative automation technologies use AI to conduct relevant research about a company (such as financial metrics) and convert that research into value messaging sales content assets, improving seller confidence in their sales engagements. Sellers can distribute a highly strategic narrative to more executive buyers, improving account coverage.
Gottlieb left attendees with a key caveat when evaluating technologies to implement in their organization: “There is no single technology to rule them all. Adopt the best-fit technologies suited to meet your customers’ needs and capitalize on your sales organization’s strengths.”
