Companies turning to Agile sales & marketing models to accelerate revenues

According to recent data, the Indian excess inventory market is estimated at USD 30 billion across various sectors, primarily, FMCG, Consumer Tech, and light industrial goods. Recent reports also reveal that over 12.76 lakh houses are lying unsold in top 30 Indian cities. The piled-up auto inventory currently stands at 5 lakh passenger vehicles valued at USD 5 billion and 3million two-wheelers valued at USD 2.5 billion.

Today, the average frequency of disruption is just 3.1years across industries, making it harder for companies to stay ahead of the curve and routinely inject innovation into their business and commercial operations. Hence, companies are prone to frequent disruptions and not necessarily by their competition (eg, housing by co-living, cable TV by internet TV, etc.). Amidst slower sales, the truth remains that products are still selling. The question is, why can’t they be yours.

The instinctive reaction to boosting sales has been through providing cash backs, heavy discounting, and impractical financing schemes, which may create some initial surge, but impacts cash flows and increases financial burden in the long-term. Real estate, e-commerce, automobiles, FMCG, and manufacturing are some of the affected sectors, that are due for a commercial operations turnaround.Many disruptions haven’t become main stream yet (E.g., the calling costs have reduced to almost Zero over the last 20 years, forcing telecom providers to drive revenue from other services). Hence, there is a definitive window to maximize revenue through innovation to be future ready or, alternatively burn thecash reserves to survive.The long-term play may be to move some parts of the business slowly towards that, but it demands time, resources, know-how, strong will power, and resilience to change.

The pressing priority for companies is to partner with sales & marketing experts who can provide knowledge with a rapidly executable framework to make decisions around priorities, investment, commercial operations turnaround with respect to - marketing tech modernization, customer engagement, offer strategy, channel partner ecosystems, new and complimentary revenue streams, and content & channel mix strategy; and, execute on priorities without impacting companies’ internal bandwidth and risking their existing revenue streams.

Unified Customer Data Layer: One of the core problems enterprises face is limited understanding of their target customers, accurate ways to identify them, insights frompreviously acquired customers, trends formed, and then amplify their outreach based on the learnings. The gap in this process remains a unified customer data layer. This isn’t limited toestablishinga CRM system but having customer interaction data integrated within your CRM. It is similar to having a patient’s medical recordbut with the interaction data that helps understand each customer’s story, and further identify more like them with less marketing spend.

Multichannel Content Layer: Today, one of the most expensive mistakes enterprises make is building channel strategy in isolation of each other. The idea is to create a harmonized sales funnel, where customers can seamlessly enter through different channels, continue from where they left off and complete their transactions on any device. This requires content alignment with channels and different stages in the sales funnel. Building strong templates, adaptation processes, and content localization practices allow enterprises to rapidly create powerful content that delivers results. Additionally, theinteraction data generated gives content teams invaluable insights on what content, messaging, and channels are delivering the highest ROIs.

Multichannel Strategy: Truly modern sales and marketing teams, deliver a multichannel experience at a customer-level. For example, everyone’s Amazon store is personalized to them, and no two stores are the same. Besides common elements around brand campaigns, remaining experience is personalized at a tremendous scale. It’s prudent to not only build a multichannel strategy that addresses the need for multiple channels, but also enables intelligent channel selection and deployment based on customer segments and preferences. For instance, hyper loyal customers may be highly receptive to mobile notifications and SMS, while top of the funnel leads may be receptive to a combination of Facebook lead-gen ads and remarketing. These decisions vary by industry, product lifecycle stage, campaign objective, competition, budget limitations, and acceptable time frame within which ROI needs to be generated.

Harmonized Customer Experience Layer: Communicating with customers and prospects is like anorchestra. There are multiple instruments, each one knows their roles, and who plays what is finely timed to perfection. This is exactly the way modern sales and marketing operations also need to run. Each channel, whether it’s social media, paid advertising, endorsements, public relations, direct sales, etc. needs orchestration – a predefined journey that dictates how, what, and when a channel interacts with a customer or prospect.In traditional enterprises, each channel is executed separately. In modern enterprises,most is automated with business rules and tuned to deliver a seamless, intuitive experience.

Throughout this journey, each lever has its own maturity with modern enterprises and requires its own initiatives. Some companies start small, by first creating a dashboard in their journey to a unified customer layer, while others may just want to measure specific lead and lag measures in an excel sheet. However, the rightway is to use a maturity framework, identify where each brand is, build a road map and investment plan (in people, experts, marketing technology stack, etc.),and nurture internal buy-in from leadership to align with the plan thansolely depending on short term returns and poor profitability. By proactively addressing the changes needed, companies can access new markets, launch new products, extend the lifecycle of mature brands, and cater to a whole new generation of customers in India and overseas, with greater certainty and agility.

By Kiran John and Abhishek Jain, Joint Managing Directors at Terapact