Is Digital Selling the New Oil?

We explore digital selling and its value to businesses by understanding how this data-driven selling process leverages digital assets, use of data in decision-making, customer relationship management, and forecasting.

Is Digital Selling the New Oil?

In this very fast-moving world, every day is a new start with thousands of new things coming into our lives. It’s no surprise new ways of doing business, new platforms, new markets, and new opportunities are coming up every day. Digital selling is one of those essential things which have shown its importance in recent years. When almost all of the businesses worldwide are going online and enjoying the benefit of e-commerce, digital selling has achieved success right after being accepted as a new marketing model.

But how beneficial and essential is digital selling nowadays? Can we claim it to be a new oil? Is this data-driven selling idea worthy of being called as a new oil? We will be discussing these questions thoroughly and come to a conclusion on the future outlooks and implications of digital selling for businesses.

Before getting started, firstly, let’s answer this is fundamental question.

What is Digital Selling?
In simpler term, digital selling is the process of making sales without being physically out there facing customers or partners. This sales model has evolved in recent years and attracted thousands of corporates and businesses across the globe. Digital selling is also known as virtual selling and is popular among B2B and B2C buyers and many other sales roles. Digital selling provides ease of doing sales businesses, where salesperson doesn’t need to be wandering around the streets and convincing people to buy their products. With the help of digital assets, Collaboration tool such as Cisco Webex enables the corporates to make their sales without physically showing up to its customers. It’s why digital selling is getting popular day by day.

What are Digital assets?
Digital assets are the platform and content used by digital sellers like virtual sales account managers, virtual partners managers, virtual sales specialists, and virtual systems engineers. These sellers are social media influencers, content creators, and digital marketers. You can find a myriad of digital sellers’ digital assets, but the most commonly used assets include videos, case studies, podcasts, testimonials, and research reports.

Data is the new Oil
The importance of data is increasingly clear. Recording, representation, interpretation, and analysis of the data help the governments, organizations, businesses, and financial institutions to predict the future outlooks and trends of the markets. Those who have relevant data enjoy market leadership and success. The race of extracting data from markets worldwide has increased the importance of data in businesses. Corporates are happy to pay millions of dollars for the relevant data, making it more valuable than any other asset in the world. Similarly, data is also an important factor in digital selling. With the help of sophisticated tools and softwares, companies can target their potential customers worldwide. These software web tools use advanced algorithms to integrate data in the user’s decision-making.

How the use of data in decision making changes the world
The world accepts the significance of data in decision-making in recent years. Although data use and importance were a debate among decision-makers for decades, nobody neglected its relevance. In today’s world, data and its intensive use in the decision-making process for corporates, governments, and financial institutions have increased in several folds. These organizations are spending billions of dollars for the data they use to predict and trend line in the future outlooks of their businesses. With the help of data analysis, corporates have developed the secret strategy to interpret the results and make decisions accordingly. By making a minor chance of variation in the interpretation of the results, corporates have seen extensive growth and business increase just because they use data to make decisions. Because of this revolutionary breakthrough in decision-making, the world has seen an entirely different but efficient decision-making model which changes business.

CRM is the discipline
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a method/practice widely used by corporates around the globe.

Management and professionals have come to the conclusion that a business anchored on CRM can witness extensive growth within a very short period and with the support of relevant data analysis. Today’s managers are taught about the CRM and its usefulness to grow businesses.

In simple words, we can say that CRM is the principle that works as a pillar to digital selling. This very crucial but simple factor has helped thousands of corporates to make billions from the market and helped thousands of other businesses to achieve this milestone.

The forecast as the lens for sales and the foundation to decision-making
The sales forecast is among the most important things businesses consider. These forecasts work as a foundation to decide the outlook of the company. When we claim of forecast as the lens for sales, we meant to explain the importance of business prediction. If a company forecasts a 10% increase in sales, the business owner’s approach will be positive and they expect more from the business. On the other hand, if a company forecasts a 10% decrease in the sales, their approach will be negative, yet supportive to increase it next time. With the forecast lens, corporations can easily see its sales, and make strategic and superior approach to perform better.

Forecasting about the business and specifically for sales is the crucial factor in decision-making. With the study of data and its interpretation, corporations forecast their sales trend and other business activities. Over the years of using this approach, corporates and other data management organizations have observed an accuracy in their decision-making with a minor variation in the valuation.

Now that we have explored the importance of digital selling and its value to businesses, in my next blog article, I will unveil the 5 myths of digital selling. People often get confused with some rumors in the market about digital selling. These myths about digital selling need to be further elaborated or discussed to get the truth behind them…Stay tuned!

In the meantime, you can browse my previous post for Cisco Viewpoints relating to the wining in the virtual sales world here or check out our most recent posts by my colleagues on how organization can embrace Success in the Virtual World.