It’s no secret that fully embracing digital sales experiences is increasingly necessary to stay in the sales game. By 2025, this shift will be business as usual. What does this mean for sales organizations? Gartner analysts breaks it down in a recent trend insight report, “The Future of Sales in 2025: Why B2B Sales Needs a Digital-First Approach.”
- 80 percent of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels. Sales teams will need to merge their sales processes, apps, data, and analytics into a single operational practice that will scale and won’t require weeks of training.
- 60 percent of B2B sales organizations will transition from conventional wisdom and intuition-based selling to data-driven selling, according to the “Future of Sales 2025: Data-Driven B2B Selling to Drive Digital Commerce.”
- As buyers become savvier and want less frequent but more informed interaction with sales reps, sellers must figure out how to show up at the right time to help buyers make sense of the research they’ve done.
The right time to reach out
As buyers try to go at it alone, they are often overwhelmed by the volume of trustworthy information available, and over half of buyers have found supplier information can contradict trustworthy sources. Buyers dealing with this kind of complexity often become uncertain in their decision, making them less likely to make a purchasing decision at all. Now is the time for sellers to add guidance and help customers make sense of the research and what’s best for their company. However, most organizations lack the automation, AI augmentation, and digital scalability to deliver the experience buyers seek. By successfully undergoing a digital transformation, organizations should empower human sellers to deliver the right information, at the right time.
Introducing sales accelerator for tailored experiences
For many sales teams, implementing the technology and human skills to keep up with the evolving demands of digitally savvy customers may seem like a stretch, even for 2025. That’s why we’re introducing sales accelerator, a digital selling capability of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. Sales accelerator helps sellers work faster and smarter with a prioritized work list of the next best lead or opportunity, allowing them to engage through their customers’ preferred channel with integrated email, phone dialer, and a Microsoft Teams channel (coming soon). Sellers are equipped with timely, AI-driven insights and recommendations based on customer events and needs, so sales teams know when to offer customer guidance.
“Sales accelerator has provided our agents with a single location to prioritize and conduct their important work every day. Along with sequences we’ve been able to keep the agents more organized and focused on communicating with people interested in staying at our hotels.”
“We receive a tremendous amount of leads daily and the sales accelerator provides a platform for our agents to prioritize and focus on selling without scrolling through a long list of leads to find out what’s next. This along with the addition of sequences has allowed us to create a simple sales cadence that our agents can follow to increase conversion. Once a lead is assigned all of the work is published to the sales accelerator for the agent to follow. They simply log in and start selling,”—Brian Miller, Director of Sales for Brittain Resorts and Hotels.
Prioritizing your day and scaling up
As fewer sellers are dealing with a greater number of customers, it can be difficult to determine whom to engage with, or the next best task. With sales accelerator, all actions and activities that need to happen that day are prioritized and organized in a work queue. The seller has flexibility to sort and filter based on key attributes such as scoring, urgency and source. Each record presents the next best action based on organizational sales sequences set up by the seller or their sales manager.
As sellers run through an extensive list of leads, they often struggle to gain a holistic view, including communications history, customer needs, and specific circumstances. This view is necessary for crafting the most relevant pitch to the customer, achieving a positive outcome.
A powerful feature of sales accelerator is the data-driven context it gives sellers for each potential customer’s journey. Without navigating away from their screen, sellers benefit from a comprehensive view that captures and surfaces customer data, past and present activities, and insights into one place to help craft the right message at the right time. Trigger events like a customer doing research on a seller’s site, requesting a white paper, or responding positively to a call or email can prompt suggested actions the seller might take to best nurture the sale.
“The new sales accelerator capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales has been a game changer. Using My Work List and Up Next widget in conjunction with Sequences in the new sales accelerator help our reps stay focused and prioritized so they always know the next most important task to complete.”—Lowell Vande Kamp, CIO and Chief of Staff at Synergis Education
Sales accelerator can make digital scalability a reality. Learn more about sales accelerator and Microsoft Dynamics Sales.
Watch a demo or take a guided tour to see how Dynamics 365 Sales can empower your sellers with actionable insights.
For more technical details, check out our blog, “Enable digital selling with the sales accelerator in Dynamics 365 Sales.”
