The sales industry was totally disrupted in 2020, and companies responded by rethinking how they develop, prepare, and grow new strategies. And like the previous year, 2021 will carry its own range of challenges and improvements. To prepare you for this year, we have some sales and marketing projection that might be useful for you

1. CMOs will be held responsible for the sales

Given their access to critical market and buyer data, CMOs play a particularly important role. CMOs can bridge the gap between marketing and sales by gathering the most valuable information for sales and providing it to them in an easily digestible format. Bridging the gap between the two will generate more revenue in the long run.

However, in this year, businesses will be under more pressure than ever before to increase revenue. It has infiltrated the re-evaluation of all operations with the goal of determining what actually raises the revenue. This means that everyone in a company is now responsible for revenue in some way.

Those who related in this area will be a part of marketing's shift from sales support to revenue accelerator.

2. The CRM is on borrowed time as we know it

The pandemic has accelerated digital transformation, such as the use of AI, bots, and others. Because your teams and buyers are now all remote, solutions must be built to operate online and rely on technology such as artificial intelligence to allow your teams to focus on revenue-generating tasks.

The CRM that we know is being phased out in favor of dynamic conversation models that aggregate data, infer conclusions, and require less human management. Because everything uses data and AI, it may result in job displacement.

But, there’s no need to be worried, displacement does not always imply destruction. While administrative tasks like email databasing and CRM data logging will be replaced by A.I., the result will be a complete reorganization of how we view work, resulting in new opportunities that require creativity, agility, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence that only a human can provide.

3. B2B Sales Culture has Changed

The pandemic has compelled B2B buyers and sellers to go fully digital. Prior to Covid-19, most salespeople relied on high-touch tactics to close deals. Such as business lunches, live entertainment, and plenty of face-to-face interaction. Even if you weren't dining, you were probably flying from one location to another for a one-hour meeting.

According to Mckinsey & Company, all of those traditional approaches will no longer work. It is because the pandemic has changed everything, which has forced a high-touch process to become digital-first. This has accelerated the third marketing era, in which brands must meet customers on their own terms and learn to close deals in a purely digital environment. Even if we are able to reassemble in a safe manner, there is no going back to the way things were.

Increased customer expectations, massive technological advancements, and the rise of omnichannel commerce are just a few of the sales trends reshaping the industry. 

According to Mckinsey survey, these pandemic-induced trends are expected to become permanent. It is clear that companies must consider how they will transform the in-store experience by utilizing emerging technologies and big data on customers. Customers want their shopping experience to be personalized in some way, and research shows that effective personalization can boost store revenues by 20-30%. 

To serve today's highly digital, well-informed customers, stores are increasingly expected to provide a wide range of omnichannel services, i.e., services that can be accessed through multiple channels. Many consumers, for example, use a variety of channels to gather product information before making a purchase.

As omnichannel shopping becomes the new norm, consumers and retailers must be prepared to provide fast, flawless omnichannel delivery. OneTalk by TapTalk.io is one of the omnichannel services that you can use. They provide many channels, such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Twitter, Line, and Facebook Messenger. The use of this technology has provided easier communication and sales transactions

With OneTalk, you can answer all chats from your customers on various platforms in one inbox. Your customers can buy, ask questions, and get answers online without any hassle by coming to your physical store. By doing so it will provide a much easier transaction because everything can be done online. Other than that, you can also monitor how your agents attend customers.

If 2020 has taught us something, it's that you never know what's around the corner, but these movements are all about being adaptable and easy to adjust. Hopefully, these projections can help you prepare for the year.