Q] How is India’s marketing and sales industry changing and what challenges are you facing in that transition?
The way companies around the world buy technology has evolved drastically over the past few years due to market shifts, the pandemic, changes in buyer behaviour, a new generation of decision-makers, and more. But the B2B sales process has not evolved at the same pace, it’s outdated and inefficient. For example, last year, only 64% of sellers met their sales goals. Sellers want to spend more time with their customers and help them find solutions that solve their problems. But when they are busy tracking down insights about their customers or focused on tasks like data entry and proposal development, sellers are left with little time to actually engage with customers and close deals.
Q] How effective are modern technologies such as AI, Machine Learning, and Data Analytics in assisting ‘Digital Salespersons,’ with respect to personalization, which is a common customer engagement strategy these days?
Modern technologies like AI, machine learning, and data analytics can be incredibly effective in helping sellers today. With the help of AI and automation, recommended content puts the right offers and the answers to commonly asked questions directly in the seller’s hands when they need them. It automates manual, time-consuming steps, making it easy to find customer information, take actions, and complete activities quickly with fewer clicks and less effort. Additionally, data analytics capabilities help sales teams to easily visualize business trends, spot outliers and monitor customer sentiment and sales performance, leading to increased buyer satisfaction.
Q] Amongst all the disruptive digital technologies, how is Cloud particularly transforming the B2B sales processes and helping fast-track the closure of deals?
Looking internally at our own cloud sales processes, we recently rolled out Oracle Fusion Sales to Oracle’s salesforce of tens of thousands, and we were excited to hear such positive and encouraging feedback from our sales representatives. In fact, after only a couple months of using the new technology, 78% of our sales reps actively choose to use the new interface over our previous one because it’s helping them sell more. In addition, our sales qualification process runs about 4x faster than before and our sales reps are having to do about 25% less clicks and time spent in the system entering data and contact information. With cloud-based deployment, we’re able to make changes and updates on the fly, helping to ensure that our sales reps have the best possible experience and are equipped with all of the historical information they need for a successful customer engagement.
Q] How is Oracle instrumental in strengthening the role of sales professionals and supporting in enhancing their sales processes? Please cite a few examples here.
By applying 40 plus years of data and business process expertise, Oracle has done the heavy lifting to engineer the next generation of CRM – Oracle Fusion Sales removes the manual steps in the B2B sales process to help sellers close more deals faster and more efficiently. For Ricoh USA, CRM is an integral tool – the company sells complex and expensive equipment and software in 180 counties across the globe – but their outdated processes of stitching together sales insights from an array of applications, Excel spreadsheets and post-it notes was inefficient to say the least. With Oracle Fusion Sales, Ricoh was able to provide its sellers with a guided experience that focuses their time and improves deal success by delivering better insights to help adapt to market shifts faster. Like many B2B companies, Aon was looking to transition their marketing and sales teams to be more digitally enabled, and both teams needed more from their CRM system. Oracle solutions have not only helped Aon become digitally empowered, but they’ve also helped Aon grow its business.
