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- As more businesses go digital, many sales teams could benefit from working with IT to improve processes.
- Leaders from Salesforce, Worldwide Express, and First Command shared customer-centric strategies.
- Watch the event, “IT & Sales: Drive Business Growth Through A Customer-First Digital Transformation,” here.
Throughout the span of nearly 12 months, the world has seen a remarkable shift toward digital technology. A recent study from McKinsey & Co. surveyed a number of executives, confirming the dramatic rate at which the COVID-19 crisis pushed consumers toward online channels.
In fact, survey statistics show that the pandemic has accelerated the digitization of customer interactions by several years. Customers adopted digital tools at a 58% rate by the middle of 2020. Compare this to December 2019, when average digital use stood at 36%, and the earliest survey results, recording only 20% in 2017.
“It’s IT that’s in the hot seat for driving a lot of this change – for making this evolution happen,” said Ash Gorringe, Sales Cloud 360 product marketing manager at Salesforce. Now, businesses must enhance their sales technology to keep up with the competition. That means IT teams and sales teams need to collaborate in new ways.
Gorringe moderated the recent digital event “IT & Sales: Drive Business Growth Through A Customer-First Digital Transformation,” which explored the ways businesses can unite various departments, like IT and sales, around their customer’s needs to increase revenue and expand growth opportunities.
Dolly Wagner-Wilkins, chief technology officer of Worldwide Express, and Amy Doherty, executive vice president and chief operating officer of First Command Financial Services also joined the conversation.
Doherty and Wagner-Wilkins said their organizations have implemented initiatives that have successfully streamlined business processes and delivered higher customer satisfaction. Some examples include CRM implementation, digital signatures, and Agile methodologies – but most importantly, using data to understand and better serve customers.
“Data is the lifeblood of your organization, and it’s a cornerstone of a trusted relationship with the client,” Doherty said. “Ideally, you want to create interactions and experiences for your clients so that you can derive data from those experiences.”
A partnership between IT and sales allows organizations to create data insights that tell each customer’s story and enables reps to deliver superior customer experiences. Implementing this strategy can have a profound bottom-line impact on any business.
“Ultimately, what you want at the end of the day is a great customer experience,” Wagner-Wilkins said, “You want to anticipate issues and make their day-to-day business as smooth as possible.”
Click here to watch the full event.
This post was created by Insider Studios with Salesforce.
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