In our last blog we discussed four important trends that are likely to influence sales enablement for Consumer Packaged Goods companies. Growing digitization in the CPG industry is likely to amplify the need for a more seamless customer experience in the next 12-24 months.
Consumers are achieving more and more tasks or types of purchases on their smartphones today. An Accenture study reports 51% of consumers are expected to continue digital purchasing . As e-commerce transactions continue to boom across categories, CPG companies will focus more on enhancing customer experiences online. Currently most consumer goods companies have limited digital, data or technological capabilities to achieve this desired state. 2021 has presented an opportunity for CPG companies to re-invent themselves and provide a seamless & frictionless customer experience. Here are three ways consumer packaged companies can rethink and enhance consumer experience in 2021:
Utilizing Big Data to Predict Consumer Preferences
A unified data driven view of consumers across channels ranging from social media to in-store experience needs to be captured and built in 2021. Several CPG companies are investing heavily in building systems, processes that can capture & unify data on consumer buying behavior, shopping patterns, purchase history as well as direct consumer feedback. As discussed in our last blog, with greater adoption of IOT devices underway, sensors can analyze and process big data to enable CPG companies to develop more personalized products and services.
Experimenting to Innovate
With a surge in Direct To Consumer (DTC) companies where consumers have the flexibility to personalize and design their own products, CPG companies have their work cut out. According to Forbes, 89% of businesses now differentiate primarily on customer experience. Building customer loyalty with personalized product portfolios and service delivery can enable CPG companies to leapfrog their success in the next 18 to 24 months.
Upskilling Sales Teams for The New Normal
CPG leaders need to identify current capabilities of their sales teams and prepare a roadmap to upskill and reskill them to meet the challenges and demands of 2021. According to Accenture, only 35% of CMO’s believe their employees have the required skills for enhancing go-to market. While CPG salesforce have largely required traditional skills to succeed such as merchandising, warehousing et al, with growing digitization and automation traditional skills will need to be augmented by digital skill sets that can enable the salesforce to draw insights from consumer preferences data. Furthermore, future jobs would require distributors, business development officers and operation center executives to develop behavioral skills to provide trademark levels of service and identify and capitalize on “Moments of Truth” in the consumer journey.
Case In Point: A large sales & distribution company fast-tracked sales enablement of its distributor staff and service managers to provide a frictionless and seamless customer experience. Direct to Home services rely heavily on their existing customers to drive their sales and revenue generation. An important cog in the wheel include technicians who visit households for installation related queries or concerns and contact center operators who schedule these visits and interact with customers. These interactions provide several opportunities or Moments of Truth that can be capitalized to identify latent requirements and cross sell.
To drive upsell and cross-sell, providing a better consumer experience enabled the distributor sales teams to build better rapport and uncover latent needs of the consumer.
Using the Master-O platform the project team re-packaged following important traditional skills into game-based & bite sized microlearning modules:
Through deeper analytics based on a more habitual and sustainable learning experience, the service provider derived several data points that better linked learning analytics with business outcomes.
- There was a 32%increase in average conversions by the ISPs for digital channel packs
2. A game-based learning approach to developing skills of selling value, developing a service mindset and objection handling increased up-selling by 33% in just 2 months
Outlook for 2021
CPG companies today need to re-imagine their go-to market strategies and customer experience. Selling to consumers directly will be a top priority in the coming few years. This will not only help in boosting sales and online presence but will also enable companies with highly valuable consumer data for shaping product offerings. Upskilling salesforce to drive higher revenue generation with seamless customer experience can becomes a sustainable competitive advantage for CPG leaders in the future.
Watch out for our next blog where we discuss how sales enablement can help CPG companies achieve their sales KPI’s quickly and efficiently.