CLOUD ESSENTIALS FOR SALES TEAMS

Results from a recent study by Harvard psychologists suggest that PowerPoint undermines information transfer to audiences and fails to improve what people think of your brand.

What do viewers want that PowerPoint can’t deliver? Novelty. Powerpoint is so ubiquitous that its utility as a medium has fallen with enough force to pull PPT viewers’ expectations down with it. As far as viewers are concerned, PPT is PFFFT! At the same time, millennials’ expectations for engaging, versatile, current content and formats have driven demand for new viewing experiences. The Boston Consulting Group puts it this way:

“The future of B2B sales is digital. Already half of B2B buyers are millennials, whose preference for digital interactions is quickly reshaping the customer journey and how buyers communicate with suppliers. In fact, companies with the most sophisticated digital B2B sales organizations are already enjoying significantly higher profits than companies with less developed digital capabilities. And they plan to invest twice as much as others over the next five years—which puts them in a position to widen their advantage.”

That’s why the more engaging information sellers can share with customers during the buying journey, the more informed the customer will become and the better the sales results will be.

The Harvard Business Review includes cloud-based technologies among its top five needs for “fast deployment and at-will scaling of systems to keep up with ever-changing business, customer, and sales force needs”. Close readers will note that the HBR findings were published in 2015, which means that organizations already using cloud-based systems have a competitive advantage over ones that don’t