5 Tech Skills Your Sales Team Needs NOW

With the peak season of OND right around the corner, now is a great time to assess your sales team’s tech skills before the final push of the selling year.

Of course, if your sales strategy isn’t already in place by Labor Day, your OND will likely fall short of your goals. But it’s not too late to take an assessment!

The need to do more with less has never been more essential, and the waning days of summer provide an opportunity to assess your sales team’s skills.

Most adult beverage companies devote significant time and effort to ensuring the sales team’s product knowledge is as sharp as possible. But many stop there. They devote little, if any, of their training budgets to “technology for sales.”

With this in mind, we would like to provide you with a list of the five tech skills every sales professional should have.

1) Sales pipeline management

In the modern selling era, there are two primary pathways salespeople take.

The first is the “transactional” approach. An intense focus on the product itself characterizes this path. It’s a features-and-benefits approach that relies heavily on presentation tech skills, overcoming objections, and closing techniques. This way of selling was very popular in the 1950s.

The second, more effective approach might be called the “strategic” approach. This path is characterized by an intense focus on the customer, their business needs, and their challenges. In this scenario, the sale is merely a byproduct of a more significant business relationship built upon service, dependability, and trust.

For the first approach, no CRM sales pipeline is needed because there are only two “stages” of the pipeline: the presentation and closed won or closed lost as the final stage.

The second selling approach recognizes that each sale is a “journey” that the customer takes. To have a high closing ratio, knowing where each account stands in this journey (a.k.a. “The pipeline) is critical.

This pipeline view is typically visualized using a Kanban board view. The pipeline serves several functions vital to success in sales:

1. Provides a clear line of sight to how much business is in each pipeline stage.
2. It significantly reduces (and can even eliminate) the need for emails, phone calls, and meetings to discuss sales progress because everything anyone in the organization might need to know is available to everyone.
3. It enables highly organized salespeople and improves customer service and closing ratios.
4. Reports can be run to shine a spotlight on things like how much revenue is in each stage of the pipeline and which accounts are “stuck” in the pipeline.

We realize what we’ve just described might be completely foreign to some readers. Let this be the wake-up call you may need: your competitors are already doing this, and because of it, they are well positioned to pick up market share from companies still selling in the old-school, transactional way.

2) Social selling

It is critical that salespeople have a professional social media presence. At a minimum, this presence should be on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Not only do buyers regularly check out sellers online, but there are great opportunities for the sellers to leverage social media in a B2B sales context, including:

• Follow all your customers’ business accounts to gain insights into their business initiatives, priorities, and promotional activities.
• Follow the primary buyers from their target accounts to learn more about them.
• Occasionally like or comment on posts (in a non-creepy, non-stalking way).
• Reach out and interact with them using DM (direct messaging). This is becoming increasingly common in a business context, but it needs to be done strategically and professionally.

Social media isn’t just about selfies and cat videos. It’s a powerful networking tool for buyers and sellers alike.

There is no shortage of articles and videos to help conscientious sales professionals bring their social media profiles up to snuff.

For those who like to keep their personal life separate from their professional lives, consider having two profiles: one personal that is private and one professional one that is public.

3) Artificial intelligence

Like it or not, AI is here to stay. A recent McKinsey report shows that modern sales technology, including AI, can automate about 30% of sales tasks.

Some of the key ways salespeople are using AI include:

• Content creation, such as detailed proposals and presentations
• Order management and order confirmation emails
• Mundane repetitive tasks include language translations, updating documents, scheduling appointments, and extracting key information/data from large documents.
• Note-taking, summarizing meeting notes, and transcribing speech to text (and vice versa).

AI should, in theory, be a salesperson’s best friend because if there is one thing in short supply among all salespeople, it’s time. The proper use of AI can be a total game changer in the time-savings department!

Savvy salespeople need to lean into AI tech skills and commit to continually learning about it as the technology is advancing rapidly.

4) Data-driven key account targeting

We live in a marvelous time! Data exists (in various forms) to tell salespeople how to “fish where the fish are.”

Not all accounts are of equal value. The 80/20 Rule is not only real but fully leveragable.

Here are just a few examples of how data can inform better decisions about which accounts are worth targeting:

• Restaurants with private dining spaces can handle significantly more volume than an average restaurant. Simple search tools like Yelp now have a wealth of data and search criteria that allow salespeople to quickly identify high-volume restaurants.
• Between Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and others, there is no shortage of “reviews” on off and on-premise accounts. While ratings, recommendations, and stars are subjective, one thing that is completely objective is the number of reviews an account has amassed. A package store that has 500 reviews receives far more foot traffic than a package store that has only 50 reviews.
• Your own depletion reporting system has a wealth of data that goes way beyond just depletions, accounts sold, and PODs. One useful metric for zeroing in on high-volume accounts is “velocity” (sales per POD). Take a look at your top 25 accounts in each market and study their velocity. You will then be able to create a “key account profile” to seek out similar high-volume accounts to target.

There are many sources and types of data that can be leveraged to better understand the best opportunities. The point is to move away from an intuitive, “just do it” approach to a highly empirical and data-driven approach.

5) Digital inbound lead generation

This is another “new” strategy in our industry. When selling wine and spirits, the popular method is to pull samples and sit down to taste with buyers.

While this will always be a highly effective way to sell, it’s simply not scalable. In fact, anything that requires the physical presence of a human being cannot be scaled.

Enter digital, inbound lead generation! Imagine having a steady stream of inbound leads coming into your inbox daily.

There are several ways to practice inbound lead management, but by far, the most effective is a lead magnet.

A lead magnet is a digital download that you give away for free in exchange for a trade buyer’s contact information. It must be irresistibly desirable for the trade buyers.

They could be checklists, guides, videos, or mini-online courses. These digital downloads can then be promoted both organically and via highly-targeted “lead ads” on the Meta platforms (FB and IG).

Another highly effective inbound lead generation strategy is hosting live webinars for trade buyers. For this strategy to be effective, the content being shared in the webinar should be highly specialized and sought after by the trade buyers. For example, you might host a webinar featuring your winemaker sharing some highly technical information in tech skills about their use of oak or their blending strategies. Most buyers have something in common: they want to learn and advance in their careers.

Wineries, distilleries, breweries, cideries, meaderies, and RTDs all have something to offer the trade buyer community.

It is critical that you have a system in place to patiently “nurture” these leads over time to build trust and rapport. The key to converting leads into paying customers is continually adding value to the business relationship rather than always trying to sell them something.

Let Andavi Solutions be your “digital dojo!”

We are about to experience a great separation among sales teams in our industry.

On one side are those who stick with old-school operating methods. On the other are those who learn to leverage technology in their sales process to maximum effect.

We are a place to come for tech skills enhancement, knowledge, and powerful collaborative software solutions.

We invite you to contact us for a free consultation with a tech-for-sales expert! Contact us today!