Gartner recommends to meet customers’ buying preferences and adopt a more digital-first approach, chief sales officers (CSOs) and other sales leaders must consider the following:

Diversify Digital Selling Tools & Channels: Sellers need digital tools that build engagement with customers, particularly with their customers’ decision makers, in a way that replicates the traditional forms of selling. These digital engagement tools are necessary to overcome the challenges of aligning larger groups of internal stakeholders virtually and asynchronously. Sellers must be able to use multiple, different, simultaneous digital sales channels.

Rethink Sales Enablement: To learn how to align selling activity to customers’ preferred engagement channels and purchasing journey, sellers will need entirely new methods of sales enablement. Gartner’s 2019 survey of B2B sales organizations indicated that sales enablement was the most critical priority last year. The pandemic accelerated this priority, as CSOs seek new techniques to reduce the risk of lost sales. 

Prioritize the Seller Experience & Coaching: To keep sellers engaged and executing sales, CSOs must find the right balance between the technology deployed and the volume of content that sellers interact with to do their jobs. CSOs and sales enablement leaders must train sellers both synchronously and asynchronously in order to better optimize virtual sales enablement practices.