More Success In B2B Sales: How Can A Cloud-First Go-To-Market Strategy Increase Sales Productivity?

A connected, cloud-based infrastructure can bring significant benefits to the go-to-market process. An AI-powered infrastructure that combines data from across the sales and marketing space provides B2B sales teams valuable visibility and insight into what is and isn’t working across the customer journey. This gives go-to-market teams the right insights to target buyers and closes new deals faster.

Efficient growth is the order of the day for ambitious and future-oriented companies. However, achieving sustained growth and success in a complex, volatile economic environment is no easy task.

B2B brands of all sizes and sectors face challenges caused by a multitude of factors. These range from market uncertainty brought on by rising inflation and geopolitical issues to overcrowded digital communication channels and evolving customer demands.

Difficulties in attracting and retaining the best talent and high employee turnover in companies also hamper B2B performance. Sales and marketing teams cite talent shortages as their biggest challenge. Understaffing leads to ineffective campaigns and launches (56%), the churn of highly skilled team members (40%), and failure to meet revenue goals (36%).

This puts significant pressure on the go-to-market (GTM) teams to operate as effectively as possible. The need to do more with less – both in terms of productivity and efficiency – has increased. To achieve this, executives place sales enablement (61%) and go-to-market strategy development (56%) at the top of their list of priorities — both essential for B2B brands to thrive and thrive over the long term.

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Take The Plunge

The dominance of digitization characterizes the new era of sales. Sales must also act primarily digitally and data-driven. Shopper preferences are shifting further and further away from face-to-face interaction. Gartner research shows that sales representatives only accompany B2B buyers for 17 percent of the buying process. 44 percent of Millennials, who are today’s B2B buyers, do not want any contact with sales reps.

This has resulted in B2B sales teams constantly competing for buyers’ attention on digital channels. Businesses need to find ways to empower their sales teams to cut through the content chaos and positively impact every interaction with buyers.

But how do sales and marketing know whether they are getting through to interested parties and achieving the desired effect? To do this, it is necessary to go beyond essential content management and simple analytics. To ignite and sustain growth in a digitally-dominated world, B2B brands must develop and implement an enablement strategy that equips their go-to-market teams with the right tools, content, skills, and insights. And to increase efficiency, customer-facing teams need smooth digital workflows.

In short, they must adopt a cloud-first GTM strategy. This is the only way sales, and marketing teams can work together to ensure a consistent buyer experience throughout the entire buyer journey. By building their go-to-market processes on a single, cloud-based platform, companies are realizing the total value of data and improving their operations systematically and dynamically. In doing so, they ensure optimized and personalized interactions happen where and when shoppers want them, in the proper context, and at scale.

Ultimately, the cloud is the foundation on which all sales, marketing, and other customer-facing activities can—and should—be built. That’s the secret to an end-to-end connected GTM operation that optimizes sales performance and converts digital interactions into business wins.

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The Power Of The Cloud

A connected, cloud-based infrastructure can bring significant benefits to the go-to-market process. An AI-powered infrastructure that combines data from across the sales and marketing space provides B2B sales teams valuable visibility and insight into what is and isn’t working across the customer journey. This gives go-to-market teams the right insights to target buyers and closes new deals faster.

For example, with access to a unified digital platform, sales reps can analyze the data captured from customer interactions at each stage of the sales cycle to understand the best behaviors and activities. Or they can use detailed content insights to identify and create the most effective content for specific buyer personas. With personalized content recommendations delivered automatically through the platform, sales reps can create more meaningful interactions that accelerate purchasing decisions.

These insights allow sales management to plan and improve GTM strategies more effectively. With the cloud as a one-stop shop, many of the pain points that previously prevented executives from gaining a complete picture of sales operations and identifying potential bottlenecks are eliminated.

By integrating all elements of go-to-market analysis, executive teams can plan and take corrective actions based on real-time data insights. You can deliver personalized training programs to specific sales reps, re-run top performers, and optimize team resources from a central hub.

Finally, cloud-first platforms help fill the talent gap by providing more effective training and coaching. Again, everything is based on data. These platforms get new sales reps up to speed faster through interactive playbooks and scenarios, and they also use accurate performance data to show which activity is most productive at any given moment. Through timely, personalized recommendations, sales reps discover how to replicate the results of their top performers, build their skills, and improve their results.

All of this is only possible with the cloud at its heart. A connected and centralized cloud platform will provide B2B companies with the performance data they need to target their audiences more effectively with the right content, in the proper context, and at the right time – increasing performance with every customer contact.

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