The source of revenue for most B2B companies worldwide is creating a smooth and effective sales funnel. Your company’s sales funnel eventually brings in the income and, as a result, determines whether a service or product succeeds or fails. To achieve this, companies have become increasingly reliant on Sales technology to increase their Social intelligence sales.
Technology revolutionized sales and marketing.
Sellers used to manage their relationships with their leads and prospects from the beginning of the selling process until they finally made a decision. However, the previous decade was marked by significant development and change in the corporate world due to the advancement of sales technology. The symbiotic link between technology and sales is a beautiful illustration of causality: when new technologies emerge, the manner they are marketed evolves as well.
In other words, when technology progressed, such as social media, cloud services, and sales interaction platforms, B2B selling methods profited from them and helped to drive more innovation.
Today, the selling process is more like an industrial assembly line. Sellers and marketers send out mass emails to potential clients and create nurturing funnels to stay relevant.
Representatives from company sales development endeavor to engage with the most appropriate prospects, sometimes using automated platforms and tools.
However, it has become clear that sales technology has limits of its own. The quantitative data on sales pipeline performance generated by these systems turned out to be extremely difficult to evaluate and comprehend. When we acquire more information from potential leads, it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly where, how, and why a business lost a deal-making opportunity.
Furthermore, a single individual rarely makes purchase decisions in the B2B industry. According to data, a typical buying group for a sophisticated B2B solution consists of six to ten decision-makers.
It has become evident that another tool is required to address the social and emotional components and the intricacies of contemporary B2B selling.
The growing relevance of social intelligence in today’s marketplace
Many sellers have realized that sales were never supposed to be aggressive or persuading in the first place. It was always about exposing people to something useful, assisting them in understanding how it may suit their needs, desires, and goals, assisting them in overcoming any tangible or intangible buying obstacles, and ensuring that the purchase was made, facilitated, and treasured.
In short, selling is more of a social than a business activity. And it all boils down to developing relationships and connections, the ethereal tie that binds people to a person or an idea.
But to build relationships to connect on an emotional level, it is essential to comprehend human emotions and how they manifest. This is the part where social intelligence plays a crucial role. Social intelligence is defined as understanding emotions and observing nonverbal behavior for enhanced interpersonal success and self-management.
It’s even more crucial in sales since some leads find conveying their feelings through words challenging. Some prefer not to do so, while others aren’t even conscious of how they’re feeling. This places even more responsibility on the shoulders of sellers. They must create emotional profiles for people in real-time. Many academics have coined the phrase emotion analytics.
Because it allows a seller to comprehend, counsel, and ethically influence an individual at the subconscious level, social intelligence can revolutionize the field of sales.
Because of our evolutionary ancestry, emotion consistently outweighs reason as a factor in decision-making.
And if sellers can see what’s going on inside a prospect’s head via those cracks, they’ll be able to communicate on a more human level.
These nonverbal messages have the power to create or ruin a lead or a transaction. And a socially aware seller may significantly impact all critical metrics, from the company’s top line to client relationship management results. That is how social intelligence may go beyond talent and become ingrained in the culture and fabric of a business. And it’s because of this client-centricity that the company succeeds.
Conclusion
Sales technology has grown in recent years from simple systems that rely just on concrete measurements to more intricate and nuanced platforms that attempt to evaluate the buyer’s preparedness. Moving past this into the world of social signals will be the next significant step for modern selling. With the sales funnel becoming more fractured, it may be necessary to consider the function of social intelligence in the sales cycle.
Social intelligence has become an increasingly important asset for the modern-day seller. While hard skills, sales technology, and experience remain crucial, you or your business can only go so far without social intelligence. Social intelligence may assist in attracting and retaining clients, which is essential to a company’s success.
Diverting the attention from sales intelligence to social intelligence might be the next horizon for sales professionals interested in understanding and affecting prospects through subtle (and sometimes invisible) social signals to create the intangible emotional relationships that drive most buying decisions.