Sales and Technology

Sales represents one of the jewels in the crown of technology innovation. We are seeing new technology innovations such as mobility, big data and cloud leveraged and the deployment of these innovations in sales is far ahead of other divisions such as finance and HR. Sales and marketing are widely believed to be more reliant on technology than other departments for most businesses, technology must be adopted by sales people to remain competitive in this digital environment which is developing and changing how we see the world and interact with each other.

From a marketing perspective, traditional surveys, and focus groups to discover the way to promote products and services are being superseded by deep analysis of customers’ and potential customers’ behaviour across digital channels, which provides previously unobtainable levels of actionable intelligence to both sales and marketing.

The adoption of social media marketing is vitally important. With social media campaigns you attract users to potentially drive sales and based on user posts valuable data can be harvested and sentiment analysis regarding your service and the industry will assist greatly in refining your marketing strategy.
Social media allows customers to share their views peers which changes the dynamics of market sentiment, you are more likely to trust a close friend or relatives opinion or experience with a brand than just believe an advert or post. This digitised customer experience demands a high level of attentiveness and responsiveness from the salesperson, putting pressure on the you to react to customer needs faster than ever before. There’s no point in starting a conversation if you then walk away and are not there to respond when a customer comes back to you with a comment, an enquiry, an issue or a criticism.

There are tools available at Century 21 to enhance communication with your clients and potential clients which are currently underutilised. One major one is the Everlytic platform, which enables you to engage with your clients by email or sms on a weekly basis to ensure that you are always the person they think of when they want to buy, sell or refer to someone. The key to this is to create and maintain databases of clients and investors which you contact every week for the rest of your career.

The technology platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Everlytic are excellent tools for Sales and Marketing, if you have not been using these tools to increase your sales, now is the time! Social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing. The Century 21 Marketing department has created posts and a calendar of what to post and when to post it – available on 21Online, making it easy for you to get started with a strategy to put the Century 21 brand first in the eyes of the public in your area and to keep your listings in front of potential clients regularly.

To take advantage of technology in this every growing digital marketplace, you need to invest in Digital Literacy. Digital literacy is best defined as an individual's ability to find, evaluate, and clearly communicate information and knowledge through using diverse digital platforms. It is best evaluated by an individual's interaction skills with technology and includes: grammar, composition, typing skills and the ability to produce text, images, audio and designs using technology.

Author: Adriano De Moura – National Technology Manger at Century 21 South Africa

9 November 2022