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B2B sales processes need to be evolved faster: Oracle

Oracle is at the helm of this transformation and is now announcing a complete portfolio of Sales automation.

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Aanchal Ghatak
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Oracle

Utilizing AI-powered technology to enhance the sales process from beginning to end is known as AI in sales. This is accomplished by automating a number of sales-related processes, freeing up your sales team's time to concentrate on completing business.

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This could entail sorting incoming leads automatically based on how promising they are, looking back at successful sales messages to spot trends, assessing cross-selling prospects, and much more.

In an interview Katrina Gosek, VP, Product Strategy, Sales Portfolio, Oracle Advertising and CX, Oracle Corporation, discussed the challenges of sales professions, the latest launch and its benefits for the ‘Digital Salesperson’. 

Excerpts: 

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Katrina Oracle

DQ: What are some of the challenges that the consumer sale preferences and market dynamics have created for sales professionals in recent months? In addition, what are some of the opportunities created by changing customer preferences?

Katrina: The way companies around the world buy technology has evolved drastically over the past few years due to market shifts, the pandemic, changes in buyer behavior, a new generation of decision-makers, and more. But the B2B sales process has not evolved at the same pace: it’s outdated and inefficient. For example, last year, only 64% of sellers met their sales goals. Sellers want to spend more time with their customers and help them find solutions that solve their problems. But when they are busy tracking down insights about their customers or focused on tasks like data entry and proposal development, sellers are left with little time to actually engage with customers and close deals.

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DQ: How is technology assisting the ‘Digital Salesperson’ in understanding the evolving needs of the customers and create wider sales opportunities? 

Katrina: Nearly one third of sellers struggle to close deals and meet quotas because far too many companies are equipping their sales teams with outdated, obsolete CRM systems. In a moment when customer demand has never been higher and a business’ margin for error has never been smaller, sellers need AI-powered, predictive intelligence that gives them the insight and bandwidth they need to close more leads.  When that happens, they’ll be able to exceed their sales targets and sit down with their next customer with confidence knowing their competitors are in the rear-view mirror.

DQ: How are disruptive technologies such as AI, ML, and Data Analytics assisting salespersons, particularly in terms of personalization, which is a common customer engagement strategy these days?

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Katrina: Modern technologies like AI, machine learning and data analytics can be incredibly effective in helping sellers today. With the help of AI and automation, recommended content puts the right offers and the answers to commonly asked questions directly in the seller’s hands when they need them. It automates manual, time-consuming steps, making it easy to find customer information, take actions, and complete activities quickly with fewer clicks and less effort. Additionally, data analytics capabilities help sales teams to easily visualize business trends, spot outliers and monitor customer sentiment and sales performance, leading to increased buyer satisfaction.

DQ: How is Cloud transforming the Sales processes and helping close deals faster and more efficiently and how sales professionals are strengthening their selling strategy? 

Katrina: This next generation Oracle Fusion Sales takes conversation-ready opportunities and guides sellers through the sales process to maximize the likelihood of closing a deal faster. Over two-thirds of sellers tell us they are keen for automation using AI to do more. By automating mundane tasks and applying AI to guide the entire sales and marketing journey from beginning to end, Oracle Fusion Sales gives sales teams a CRM that's built to help them sell. With the right tools, seller productivity goes up, deal success improves, and customers are happier with the engagement resulting in greater lifetime value and stronger ongoing customer relationships.

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DQ: Marketing and sales are completely customer-oriented operations that involve various stages of customer interaction and are thus highly subjective based on the needs of each customer. Keeping this in mind, how is Cloud assisting marketers and salespeople in developing larger-scale business strategies to improve their overall operations?

Katrina: With Oracle Fusion CX Analytics, revenue leaders now have a complete intelligence across all customer engagement data – from sales, marketing, service, finance, HR and more – all without support from IT. This single view enables sellers to monitor critical sales and marketing performance and customer sentiment at any time – not just at the close of the quarter.

DQ: How is Oracle enhancing the role of sales professions and assisting the in enhancing their sales processes? Elaborate on your recent launch and its role in this regard.

Katrina: Looking internally at our own cloud sales processes, we recently rolled out Oracle Fusion Sales to Oracle’s salesforce of tens of thousands, and we were excited to hear such positive and encouraging feedback from our sales reps. In fact, after only a couple months of using the new technology, 78% of our sales reps actively choose to use the new interface over our previous one because it’s helping them sell more. In addition, our sales qualification process runs about 4x faster than before and our sales reps are having to do about 25% less clicks and time spent in the system entering data and contact information. With cloud-based deployment, we’re able to make changes and updates on the fly, helping ensure our sales reps have the best possible experience and are equipped with all of the historical information they need for a successful customer engagement.

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