Two years ago, the management team at REA Group, Australia’s number one property platform, decided it was time to take a journey of powerful and purposeful digital transformation. The business was fast expanding into new markets, organically and by acquisition. Its legacy systems were not designed to cope with the increasing expectations of a market demanding seamless, real-time individualisation and meaningful, relevant connection.

To grow at pace but still be nimble enough to defend its position at the top, REA Group required the forward vision, insight and trend-spotting capabilities offered by data analytics.

REA Group brought on board a Salesforce suite to make its data-driven vision a reality. Vitally, this united data front allowed for the formation of a single point of truth for every customer, one that was available across the organisation, rather than being held in siloed departments and acquired businesses.

The REA Group journey to its digitally dominant position today as an organisation that changes the way the world experiences property – a company that refers to itself as “a leading global digital business specialising in property” – is a perfect case study for numerous data points that came out of the fourth edition of the State of Sales report.

Sales ops fuels organisational growth

For example, 89% of sales professionals said sales ops plays a critical role in growing the business. Clearly, sales ops played a lead role in REA Group’s development of a single point of truth for each customer.

“There’s a lot of work that the sales ops team has done in collaboration to create that single point of truth,” says Rodney House, REA Group’s Sales Adoption Lead: Customer Excellence. “That data is used to drive the business of the account managers within our business.”

“The biggest thing our Chief Sales Officer wants is for our sales team to see our customers more often but, when they do, for them to have a better-quality conversation. So actually, it’s about quality and quantity at once – he wants more shots on goal and more of those shots to go in.”

That’s not possible without a single point of data truth, Rodney says.

The sales professionals who go out and speak to the market, he explains, are the engine of the organisation. The Salesforce system, and the data and insights it provides, makes that engine run far more efficiently and much faster.

“We can see now in real time whether we are having more conversations quarter-on-quarter, as well as whether those conversations are driving value,” Rodney says. “Those are statistics that would never have been known around the organisation before.”

Sales ops is cross-functional and strategic

Similarly, 85% of sales people say sales ops is becoming increasingly strategic. In fact, within REA Group there is now a Chief Sales Officer, a role that simply didn’t exist two years ago.

“Two years ago, we were structured by market – residential, commercial, etc.,” says Smrithi Kamtikar, Senior Manager Product at REA Group. “Then we took the opportunity to move to a more functional structure, and that was when our Sales teams came together into one function.”

“Since then, from a platform perspective, we’ve been on a journey of dramatic simplification, with the end goal of putting in place the right experiences for our customers and ensuring our platform supports teams like Sales and Customer support who in turn support our customers..”

Another fact to come out of the State of Sales report was that high-performing sales teams were 2.3 times more likely than underperforming teams to increase the cross-functional nature of their work. In fact, 48% of sales ops teams surveyed have increased their involvement in cross-functional workstream management.

Within REA Group, most of our discussions tend to be cross-functional ones, Smrithi says. At quarterly planning sessions, she says, a multi-disciplinary team that includes sales discusses shared goals and common challenges, combining their wisdom, experience and knowledge to develop actions and solutions.

Those discussions, and so many more within the business, are made far easier where we have relevant and insightful data into our market and customer needs.

Data reveals the future

“From a macro point of view, we’re constantly reinvesting in our data to support good business decisions,” Smrithi says.

“We’re also doing it to make sure we can take the next big step forward, which is about becoming more predictive and proactive across all our customer channels – regardless of whether they are digital or face to face channels.”

“We don’t want to look backwards, we want to look forwards and have the ability to predict what our customers might want, and to identify gaps in the market, and to know which product or which approach best solves specific customer pain points.”

From a micro point of view, Rodney discusses the way a performance discussion might go between an account manager and their sales manager, with the insight provided by data.

“We’ve definitely moved to more data-led coaching,” he says. “We describe it as ‘less feels and more facts’. So rather than sitting down and saying, ‘I think I’m doing well’, they can now say, ‘I have made this amount of calls and off the back of that I can see that I have issues with this particular product, because I close the other product more often’.”

“Central to everything we’re doing right now is the driving of a coaching culture. Some people considered coaching as being a bit of a soft art. But actually, when you marry those two things together – the empathy of coaching and the hard facts of data – that’s when the real magic happens.”

Find out the latest sales trends and insights guiding sales professionals to recover and grow in the fourth edition of the State of Sales report.

More articles from Salesforce

How Fisher & Paykel Redefined Its Approach To Sales

Six Traits Of Great Sales Reps

It’s time for sales leaders to rethink how they lead

50 Pro Sales Tips eBook

The post How REA Group Built Its New Sales Strategy Around Data appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Working through this pandemic has brought many different challenges for all types of businesses, and COVID-19 presented us with a big decision: do we let things play out and see what happens? Or do we double down and invest in technology?

As a global business who sells products in more than 50 countries, we operate in a B2B, B2C and B2B2C world, so we needed to ensure our sales channels were still able to work as best as they could.

We asked the question internally: “In 12 or 18 months, are we going to regret investing in technology now?”. No one could say “no”.

There were some things that we already knew we needed to do. Straight away, we brought forward the technological investment that was already on our roadmap. Since then it feels like we’ve done at least two years of work in the past six months, but it’s been worth it.

Under our new CEO and the executive team, we’ve been focusing very heavily on internal communication and transparency to make sure our shared purpose, vision and strategy have cascaded through the company and permeate everything we do at every level.

This culture enabled us to quickly take action and helped power the changes we made to the way we connected with all of our partners and customers.

Reimagining the sales process

As you’d expect during this global pandemic, we’ve had to rethink our approach to sales. And as a global business, that looked different in each region.

Parts of North America have essentially been in lockdown since March; in New Zealand we had very swift lockdowns, but were back in action relatively quickly. So we’ve had to tailor our approach based on what’s happening in the region.

Across the world, though, retailers’ ability to sell to the customer was taken away overnight. This meant we had to change how we supported them – and change that quickly.

The most significant change, of course, was for those who usually operate from a storefront. If you don’t have a store, how do you keep on selling?

The immediate things we focused on were perhaps the obvious. Were our products on their website? Did they have the right content to support those products? And this, all of a sudden, leads into how can we keep training your staff?

It was important they understood the principles of B2C commerce, so when they’re engaging a customer whose only access to the store is now via a website, they can have the right conversations.

The key thing to note, however, is that we didn’t turn to a direct sales approach – we weren’t cold calling or putting the hard sell on. We said to everyone selling: “we want you to keep engaging with customers in exactly the same way. The only thing that’s changed is the medium – you’re online, not face-to-face”.

The fundamentals are very similar.

Out with the hard sell, in with the gentle touch

From the outset of the pandemic, we decided to change the way we marketed and to take the focus away from the product.

We didn’t think it was right to deliberately promote our brand, so we decided to engage with customers on a much more human level. There was so much information about coronavirus and the economy, and it was all doom and gloom. We just wanted to add something positive – a distraction to lighten the mood and help people.

We started to communicate with customers about things that could improve their lives a little – especially given they were going to be spending more time at home.

We ran a series of ‘life hacks’ on timely topics, like ’how can I make my food last longer in my refrigerator?’ or ‘how do I use my dishwasher better?’, and ‘how do I make a cake for someone who’s allergic to flour?’. We just wanted to stay connected with our customers and continue to find new ways to add something of value.

Fast-tracking tech implementation

To keep the business and our channels to market working as well as they could given the new circumstances, we quickly moved all of our websites – across all of our brands and countries – onto Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

The first step was to home in on the user experience. The second step was to support our trade customers by continuing to build out our trade portal, which is built on Community Cloud, and getting that into the hands of more customers.

The third step, which was critical, was putting in place the internal tools of enablement – making sure employees had the right tools at their fingertips.

We did a lot of work in Service Cloud; we enabled Facebook Messenger as a channel and WhatsApp as a service channel, put the Channel Menu on our website and made sure we had the right touchpoints for everyone to do their jobs as well as they could.

The importance of empowerment and ownership

Of course, we couldn’t do any of this globally without our teams being able to act quickly. This comes down to empowerment and ownership and having the right groups of people focusing on outcomes for customers – again, something that stems from our culture.

Our Australian sales team was focusing on what they needed to do for their B2B and B2C customers; our UK team was focusing on what they needed to do on a direct-to-consumer basis.

Importantly, the teams had to have some autonomy to make decisions and move quickly, which our culture and leadership supported.

The changes we’ve had to make to the way we operate haven’t just been done to deal with the pandemic. They’ve been done for the long term, too.

The vast majority of our activity was on the roadmap for the future. Twelve months ago, I could never have imagined we’d have gotten there so quickly.

Find out how other sales leaders are driving business resilience and growth by downloading the fourth edition of the State of Sales report.

Hear more about how Fisher & Paykel redefined its global sales approach in our on-demand webinar Unpacking the State of Sales: What are the next steps for sales leaders? Hear from the best in the business, including sales expert Tony Hughes and Salesforce ANZ Chief Commercial Officer Ian McAdam.

Read more from Salesforce:

Six Traits Of Great Sales Reps

It’s time for sales leaders to rethink how they lead

Introducing the 50 Pro Sales Tips for 2020 eBook

The post How Fisher & Paykel Redefined Its Approach To Sales appeared first on Head Of Sales.