Why does sales digital transformation fail? The key points that work in times of change!

This blog entry is an excerpt from the article "The key to success in the digital transformation sales and marketing in an era of change! (Written by Tomonori Chiba, Customer Experience Transformation Partner, EY Strategy & Consulting K.K.) What should be input into SFA? (Taking stock of Success Method) A typical failure of SFA (Sales Force Automation) is that it becomes a system that is not used or a double book of accounts with Excel. The original purpose of SFA is to visualize the status of a business meeting so that the manager can correctly advise the client to accelerate the meeting or increase the win rate. So, what kind of information does a manager need to manage correctly? Many Japanese-affiliated firms are likely to deal with existing clients, so in many cases, they already have an understanding of things like BANTC and sponsor information (penetration map). For example, in the case of a solution proposal, you will probably be able to make a proposal by ensuring that the customer's issues are heard and the four "non-issues" (unnecessary, non-urgent, distrustful, and unsuitable) are eliminated. When proposing a solution to an existing customer, even if the unnecessary, distrustful, and inappropriate issues are resolved, the non-urgent (not now!) issues may not be resolved, resulting in a longer negotiation period. ) are not cleared, the negotiation period is prolonged, the focus is blurred, and in many cases, the opportunity to make a proposal is lost. For companies that are facing such challenges, it is important to understand whether they have a firm grasp of the customer's business events, whether they are able to schedule the dates from the business event to the proposal using a "reverse schedule," and whether the schedule is "agreed upon" with the customer and visualized as an on-schedule. Is the schedule "agreed" with the client and visualized as an on-schedule? The key point is whether the schedule is "agreed" with the client and whether it is an on-schedule or not. If the on-schedule status is indicated on the activity sheet as "◆" if it has been completed and "◇" if it has not been completed, and the list is automatically displayed along with the period of time the meeting has been held up, the manager will not miss anything and can easily provide advice and forecasting. Individual detailed notes can be left as a memo if necessary by the person in charge.

Analyzing High Performers

Traditionally, analyzing high performers in sales and designing a standard model has required an enormous amount of time and effort, with the cooperation of the human resources department and others, to analyze the attributes/performance data of the person in charge and to caravan the interviews, placing a considerable burden on the field as well.
However, by combining Work Logs, we are now able to identify the characteristics of high performers and what "events" are needed to make them grow.
The events (feature points) here are intended to be factors common to high performers, such as number of qualifications, qualification level, and amount of communication with customers.

**Basic Concepts of High Performer Analysis**

This ability to identify characteristic points and conduct quantitative experience analysis will enable us to design sales enablement measures and monitor onboarding with reproducibility.

**Basic Steps in High Performer Development**

Weaponize the Zion Effect (simple contact effect)

During the explanation of the execution effect of the case study, we mentioned that the Work Agent function is used to recommend the timing of visits to customers, etc. It is very important to strategically design the frequency of contact with customers in order to build engagement with them.
The psychological effect of creating a favorable impression on a person is called the Zion effect (simple contact effect). As you can see from the graph, the likelihood of favorable impression increases sharply where the number of contacts is between 2 and 10, while the rate of increase drops sharply after 10 contacts.

In the marketing industry, the Seven Hits Theory has already been proposed and commercials, digital marketing campaigns, and other activities have been constructed based on an understanding of these psychological effects.
In the BtoB industry, which has traditionally focused on customer visits, it is important to understand how to incorporate the zion effect into sales activities, especially in the new normal era when it has become difficult to meet face-to-face with customers. In order to successfully implement this strategy, how to integrate customer information held by marketing, contact centers, customer success, etc., with the sales organization, and how to use the information in a cross-functional manner will become the most important issue in the future.
We now have all the weapons we need to increase the frequency of contact with our customers. For example, even for a single piece of marketing information, it is now possible to easily obtain various types of information, such as business card information, analysis of the open rate of e-mail newsletters, landing on a company's website, or analysis of customer traffic (footprints). If work agents are able to understand the interests of customers in advance based on such marketing information and effectively control the frequency of contact based on work logs, the efficiency of business negotiations will be further enhanced.