StageYou interviews Kelli Rodriguez on how technology is making it easier to build customer relationships.

Technology isn’t just making the world a smaller place by facilitating communication, it’s also allowing us to maintain deeper relationships, able to keep track of what each of us is going through at any particular point in time, which, admittedly, doesn’t always play out in our favour – just think of that annoying relative on your social media account. But what about professional relationships?

StageYou spoke to Kelli Rodriguez, a sales and marketing business leader, for her input on Digital transformation in the sales industry and how technology has helped sales teams reach out to customers to build and maintain stronger relationships, saving their time and the company’s budget. Trimming down and streamlining processes is her forte; as Assistant Vice-President of Sales at L’Oréal, she’s helped take brands from the inception stage to multi-million dollar household names – a feat that would be impossible without an effective sales and distribution strategy.

Having been in the sales field for over 20 years, Kelli’s seen how the front lines transformed, from using payphones and notebooks to hunt down leads and keep track of targets, to today’s software-assisted customer relationship management (CRM) process. She notes that leaving behind the manual process of collecting sales information has made things far easier – there are entire databases of leads available online and numerous ways to track all sorts of information about a sale. While this has reduced the burden on sales teams, who are now able to follow up on leads a lot faster with less effort, she notes it has increased the responsibilities borne by those in the leadership roles of marketing and sales.

Since sales teams have moved towards a more data-driven process, it is up to their leaders to ensure that these efforts are well coordinated to maximise resource efficiency – and technology has helped in this aspect as well. Facilities like video conferencing, group messaging and cloud storage have brought about a new standard of collaboration, while more powerful tools exist to analyse the overarching patterns behind sales records, meaning that sales and marketing heads have all the information required to guide their teams efficiently in unison.

Kelli points out, however, that acting on this data alone is still a waste of resources, as these executive decisions require an understanding of what the situation is like in the field and cannot be made from behind a desk. For sales and marketing efforts to align, the decision-makers need to be in close contact with field teams and each other, which could lead them to interesting patterns that may not have been apparent in the numbers.

At the same time, it allows leadership to identify strategies and areas that are not providing an effective Return On Investment (ROI), while highlighting efforts that deserve to be rewarded and replicating them through corporate training and setting up realistic goals.

In the field she’s in, the pharmaceutical industry, products need to be distributed to healthcare providers as well as directly to consumers, requiring separate approaches for businesses and end-users. Today, however, vast amounts of data can be captured through their operations, such as sales volumes, territorial information and the like, and combined with CRM tools, these strategies can be devised and implemented more effectively than ever before.

Sales teams have new ways to capture details of leads, such as by scanning the QR codes of the participants they meet at trade fairs, tracking data from e-commerce purchases, and handing out registration forms for free trials, while marketers can use this data with easy-to-use software that allows them to devise engaging core visual aids even on the fly.

While Kelli agrees that the level of tracking, analysis and coordination afforded by today’s technology has made the sales hunt a much more efficient process, she remains confident that the profession will continue to rely heavily on the element of human interaction and how well a sales agent can connect to a potential lead to close the sale. At the end of the day, it will be about two decision-makers reaching common ground, and the human touch will ultimately end up playing a deciding factor, however all the tools at hand make this connection easier to establish and capitalize on. The leverage that Digital Transformation is bringing in the context of sales and streamlined marketing is here to stay.