The transformation-of-selling-altimeter 2017

THE TRANSFORMATION
OF SELLING:
HOW DIGITAL ENABLES
SEAMLESS SELLING
By Charlene Li, Principal Analyst
Altimeter, a Prophet Company
February 21, 2017

www.altimetergroup.com | The Transformation of Selling: How Digital Enables Seamless Selling | info@altimetergroup.com
2
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
While “social selling” is a key idea that has emerged over the past few years,
it is clear that something larger is afoot. Keeping up with fast-moving and
well-informed customers requires sales departments to focus less on the hard
sell and more on adding value to the experience and relationship via digital
channels. Moreover, selling must become seamless, bridging traditional
department silos like Marketing, Sales, and Service to meet customers
wherever they may engage an organization.
This report examines the transformation of selling in complex transactions,
such as those typically done in business-to-business (B2B) sales or high-
consideration consumer sales. Three types of transitions drive the digital
transformation process: Platform Integration, Organization, and Culture.
Notably, while digital technologies may drive the transformation, the strategic
focus for sales teams must include changing organization and culture such that
customers become the core of the selling process.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Executive Summary 2
Selling Must Transform Because the Way Customers Buy Has Changed 3
Transformation Puts the Focus on Customers with Three Types of Transitions 5
Integration of Data, Insights, and Content Platforms Lays the Foundation 6
Organizational Structure, Process, and Metrics Must Transform As Well 10
Culture Change Focuses on Developing Critical Skills 13
Next Steps: Assess Your Selling Transformation Maturity 26
A Look at the Future 29
Next Steps 16
Endnotes 18
Methodology 18
Brands, Researchers, Agencies and Industry Experts 18
About Us 19
How to Work With Us 19

3
SELLING MUST TRANSFORM BECAUSE
THE WAY CUSTOMERS BUY HAS CHANGED
Digital has fundamentally changed the buying process for customers, which has implications
for how companies sell to these fast-moving buyers. In particular, digital has changed
complex buying and selling transactions in the following ways:
• Buyers have access to information earlier in the buying process. In the past, the seller
was in control of information. But now, the proliferation of influencer content, peer
reviews, and comparison sites all make today’s customers less reliant on company-
provided information and sales experts. More than half of the decision-making process
is completed before customers even reach out to a salesperson,1
while 70% of B2B
buyers use social media to help them decide.2
“The consumer has never had this much
information at their disposal,” says Trey Tubbs, Director of Global Sales Management
and Client Care at CBRE.“I do think [digital] is raising the bar in the sense that customers
now [expect sales] to provide new information that they didn’t already know.” Readily
available information means that businesses must fulfill customers’ need for control and
self-service throughout their journey. Consumerization of the B2B buying process means
more targeted content being created and made available to potential customers —
targeted based on behavior, not solely on the product being purchased.
• Digital interactions supplant calls and meetings. SiriusDecisions found that 67% of
buying journeys now involve digital interactions versus traditional channels.3
Customers
want to connect on the platform of their choice, be it LinkedIn or even WhatsApp, but
salespeople uncomfortable with digital cling to traditional channels. Even for salespeople
eager to embrace these new channels, corporate IT departments frequently ban them,
so salespeople resort to using their personal devices, social media, and messaging
accounts that can’t be tracked or monitored. This means the traditional role of the “hero
salesperson” — to connect one-on-one with a prospect and close the sale through a
series of meetings, calls, and emails — is being supplanted by inside Sales, Marketing,
or even Customer Service, all of whom are often better equipped to operate in digital
channels.
• Social selling has seen mixed results, despite its obvious potential. Altimeter found that
43% of companies surveyed had social selling programs that were either being optimized
or mature, with another 39% planning, piloting, and in the first year of implementation.4
The results are being felt in tangible ways; data from LinkedIn shows there have been
significant advances in social selling activities across both geographies and industries
(see Figure 1). But uptake by Sales has often been limited, a common complaint being
that social selling does not generate enough leads to justify the time it takes away from
traditional sales activities.

4
FIGURE 1
LINKEDIN’S SOCIAL SELLING INDEX SHOWED SIGNIFICANT GAINS OVER THE PAST YEAR
We found that many social selling initiatives lacked depth, focusing on simply training Sales on
how to use LinkedIn and Twitter, giving reps access to LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or pushing out
content via an employee advocacy platform. The problem is that these initiatives don’t go far
enough to address the fundamental changes taking place around buying and selling. Stan de
Boisset, the Commercial and Inside Sales Lead at Juniper Networks, explains, “It’s not because
social selling doesn’t work. It’s because transforming an organization takes time, education,
practice, and discipline. It’s like giving someone a Formula 1 car — just because they have a
driver’s license doesn’t mean they can win a race.” We found that organizations that were most
successful at rolling out social selling considered it to be just one piece of a successful digital
selling organization, which is made up of an aligned Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service/
Success team.
44%
21%
37%
27%
19%
35%
27%
26%
24%
23%
23%
21%
21%
19%
LATAM
Asia
AN
Z
N
A
EM
EA
Retail &
Consum
er Products
Aero/Auto/Engineering
M
anufacturing/Industrial
Tech, Telecom
&
M
edia
Healthcare
&
Pharm
aceutical
G
overnm
ent/Education/N
on-Profit
Financial Service
&
Insurance
O
il &
Energy
Professional Services
Global average score growth
GrowthinAverageSSIscore
LinkedIn SSI Score Growth- January 2015 to August 2016
The LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) measures the strength of a user’s professional brand,
level of engagement, employment of prospect and connection research tools, and overall
level of connectedness on the LinkedIn platform.

5
TRANSFORMATION PUTS THE FOCUS ON
CUSTOMERS WITH THREE TYPES OF TRANSITIONS
Selling to customers in the Digital Era is difficult because, historically, almost every company
divides the complex selling process among departments with specialized skills. Sales focuses
on building one-to-one relationships; Marketing analyzes data and presents ideas in a simple
and concise way; and Customer Service or Customer Success deals with any post-transaction
implementation or issues. This specialization has resulted in siloed departments that make it
difficult to create a seamless buying experience for customers (see Figure 2).
Breaking down silos is an age-old problem that has stymied many organizations. The
difference today is that digital tools and practices are helping edge us toward a unified
reality, not so much by tearing down the silos as by building windows between them.
Increased visibility helps everyone in the organization operate more transparently, which
makes it easier to create the seamless experiences that customers want.
To create this digital transformation, organizations must undergo transitions in three areas:
platform integration, organization, and culture (see Figure 3). Our research found that
while these transitions happen concurrently and often depend on each other, organizations
focused on one area to start. Here are more details and examples of each transition.
FIGURE 2
CUSTOMERS MUST NAVIGATE SILOED DEPARTMENTS IN THE SELLING PROCESS
MARKETING SALES SERVICE
Activities:
Create content,
events, ads
Develop
relationships
React to calls,
emails
Metric of
success:
Number of leads
generated
Sales closed
Problems solved
efficiently
Technology:
Marketing
Automation
CRM Call Center

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INTEGRATION OF DATA, INSIGHTS, AND
CONTENT PLATFORMS LAYS THE FOUNDATION
On the surface, integration appears to revolve around technology platforms. But Jerome
Thiebaud, Director of Global Digital Workplace Marketing at Avanade, pointed out a subtle
difference, saying, “It’s not because you have technology that you are going to be successful
in the marketplace. It’s because you have technology that allows you to focus more on the
customer, and on the human interaction.” Most companies have an overabundance of
technology but lack the integration between those platforms to keep customers at the center.
Maureen Blandford, CMO of Software Improvement Group, affirms, “Integration is the
new black. We’re trying to build as small a technology stack as possible, with optimal
integration.” Here are some of the top integration efforts organizations should prioritize to
transform selling.
• Put the power of digital data and content in the hands of employees to engage clients.
At the most basic level, digitizing Sales means more than getting them equipment and
loading them up with software and content — it’s about making sure that these enabling
technologies are tuned to drive better engagement with customers. At CBRE, one of
the world’s largest commercial real estate firms, a key goal was to enable salespeople
to demonstrate their deep understanding of their clients’ businesses by using digital
to establish and scale thought leadership and thus trust. CBRE took all of the paper
materials its salespeople used to hand out to clients and put them on iPads, enabling
salespeople to add engaging content like video on the fly into their presentations
without having to go back to IT for help. At the same time, CBRE recognized that social
media was becoming a more important force.
FIGURE 3 THREE TRANSITIONS DRIVE THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF SELLING
Platform Integration
Transition
Organization
Transition
Culture
Transition
• Unify and distribute
customer data across
departments, platforms,
and channels.
• Customize content based
on customer data.
• Tap artificial intelligence
to improve engagement.
• Create a single
Operations team across
Marketing & Sales.
• Align objectives across
departments with
common metrics.
• Create roles to place
focus on customers and
their experiences.
• Focus training on general
enablement and skill
development.
• Spread stories of quick
wins to establish new
habits.
• Ensure leadership is
engaged, especially in
Sales.
Digital Transformation of Sales Requires Three Transitions

7
“If you’re looking for [real estate] space, you’re not going to be looking on Twitter,”
acknowledges CBRE’s Trey Tubbs. “But our clients, prospective clients, and people in our
industry follow us on social media. An article will go out and be well-received by people
we never expected to be interested.” To support social media outreach, CBRE placed an
app on the iPad called Engage, which enables corporate, 400 local offices, and 75,000
employees to post content on LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Leverage existing tools rather than seeking out new ones. Rather than try to select,
install, and adopt a new technology, sometimes it’s faster and easier to tap an established
one and modify existing processes instead. At Intel, the Marketing group leveraged the
existing Brand IQ platform, rather than create a new tool, to create a content aggregator,
which became a one-stop shop for anyone to post and share content. Different Sales
roles would share different types of content that they found helpful.
Danielle Miller, Global Social Business Strategist and Manager at Intel, recalls, “We
were finding that everybody likes the bright shiny tool. ‘Let’s just get a tool!’ But there
needs to be recognition that we look at the internal processes so that it serves as a
solid foundation for the future, because we knew there was a limit to how many tools a
salesperson can manage.”
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8
• Distribute customer data and listening throughout the organization. Data is a great
way to open windows between the silos. The avowed goal of many digital transformation
efforts is to have a perfect, 360-degree view of everything a customer does, on and
off your site. The reality is that this will take years, and you can’t afford to wait. Several
organizations we spoke with described how they took a first basic step of integrating
operational and social media data about customers into their CRM profiles.
At thyssenkrupp Elevator Asia Pacific, digital was the way to open windows between the
silos, enabling the organization to look at its customers through the same customer data
lens. The company has diverse customers ranging from sophisticated building managers
in Singapore to first time developers in China, altogether using 250,000 elevators,
escalators, and moving walkways throughout Asia Pacific. The first step was to put all
sales brochures and materials on tablets so that relevant assets were easy for teams to
access and for Marketing to update. In addition, the tablets gave thyssenkrupp’s teams
direct access to data on equipment breakdowns and on how quickly service issues were
addressed. They could then create customer-specific presentations to demonstrate the
value of their products and services.
Similarly, thyssenkrupp sources data from social listening that identifies problems at
customer sites before they become major problems. That data flows into various CRM
systems and can proactively trigger a visit by thyssenkrupp to the customer.
“We’re generating leads from what we can observe in the public social space,” explained
Kelly Truax, VP of Service Support at thyssenkrupp Elevator Asia Pacific. “We have full-
time people in place who monitor social channels, looking for our competitors’ unhappy
customers, but also watching out for any of our own customers who may need assistance
before they approach us.”

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• Tap into analytics and artificial intelligence to improve content curation and
engagement. Given the rising digital sophistication of buyers, Marketing can’t get away
with creating “one-size-fits-all” collateral anymore. The problem with most content
isn’t that there isn’t enough, but rather that there’s too much of the wrong kind. A study
by Docurated found that a third of a sales rep’s time is spent searching for or creating
content — time that could have been spent engaging in sales conversations.5
To address
this, organizations are using marketing technology to support the content needs of
salespeople. For example, Dun & Bradstreet uses digital intelligence to perform lookalike
modeling that identifies the next best action and then programmatically creates and
delivers relevant content — either to the salesperson or directly to the customer. On
larger accounts, Marketing works closely with Sales to deploy the right set of tactics —
such as architecting workshops, creating custom content, or designing events.
Machine learning can also provide context, discerning and anticipating what customers
are looking for. IBM uses artificial intelligence to answer basic questions or offer free trials
based on interactions with customers. When the conversation gets to the point where the
customer is using buying language or asking deep technical questions, the program will
engage the appropriate sales or technical rep.
“A tool like this can nurture thousands of prospects all at once who are all driving towards
the same goal,” explains Jeannette Browning, worldwide manager of IBM Watson’s
Digital Client Cognitive Evangelism team. “It’s an interesting combination of tech support
and learning, while providing key digital assets.” Machines will become smart enough
to be able to interact with humans — and also realize when it’s necessary for a human to
take over and enact the “escalate to human” sub-routine.
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10
ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE, PROCESS,
AND METRICS MUST TRANSFORM AS WELL
While the structure of most selling organizations does not change, the roles and
responsibilities, and especially the interactions between departments, can change
significantly when moving from their traditional roles to one where they are more focused on
creating a seamless buying experience for customers (see Figure 4).
Department Traditional
Role
Customer-Focused
Role
Key
Challenges
Operations
Manages the back office
workflow, as well as training
and enablement. Each
department typically has
their own Operations team.
Integration of customer
data, insights, and
workflow to ensure a
seamless experience.
Empower Operations to
make strategic decisions
and investments that
will impact other
departments.
Marketing
Creates content and
experiences that
generate leads that are
fed to Sales.
Enables self-service
content and experiences
that engage Customers
throughout the
relationship.
Drawing other departments
into the Customer Team by
giving up primary control
of customer experience
design.
Sales and Account
Management
The Hero Salesperson
who meets one-on-one
with the client and wins
the business. Mindset is
“Won and Done.”
Champions the needs
of Customers across the
organization, to best
serve them.
Elevating the voice of
Sales as the voice of the
Customer.
Service
Reacts to problems
across multiple channels
with the goal of
addressing each one
quickly and well.
Proactively develops a
relationship with content
and outreach, to ensure
the success of the
Customer.
Shifting from supporting
product groups to
Customer groups.
Product
Development
Designs products/
services that Sales then
has to sell.
Aligns closely with Sales
to understand how
products are/are not
meeting the needs of
Customers.
Increasing contact with
Customers.
Legal/
Finance
Final checkpoint in the
selling process, comes in
after business terms are
set.
Involved from the start
in understanding needs
and restrictions to inform
proposal development.
Invest the time upfront
to be proactive in new
relationships, rather than
at the end.
FIGURE 4
HOW ORGANIZATIONAL ROLES CHANGE WITH THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF SELLING

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Several interviewees emphasized the importance of making this transition from department
to customer focus but also recognized the unique challenges of such a mindset shift.
To prepare for this transition, companies should take the following steps to support the
organization:
• Focus the organization around customer personas and profiles. One of the biggest
problems with department silos is that they create a limited orientation to serving
the customer. Several organizations we spoke with shared how they created cross-
organizational models of customer personas to focus and align attention on the needs of
key customer segments. At Dun & Bradstreet, the decision to focus on specific customer
personas was tied to a broader effort to re-center the company’s purpose, mission,
and values. The customer personas became a guidepost for the entire organization —
Marketing, Sales, Finance, Compliance, etc. — to orient around customers.
Rishi Dave, CMO of Dun & Bradstreet recalls, “This wasn’t just about marketing and
sales. We were transforming holistically, from product development all the way through
to the post-sale customer experience.” This ranged from putting together specific go-to-
market messaging for customer personas and ROI calculators to having Marketing team
members go into key accounts and teach Sales how to use tailored content in an effective
way, account-by-account.
• Create a single Operations team across Marketing and Sales. Several companies we
interviewed observed that the people in operations were not only among the most
strategic people in the organization, but also sometimes the most tactical. One shares,
“Our enablement teams often struggle for credibility because they aren’t given adequate
budgets or respect in the organization. They are seen as a nuisance, trying to interrupt
the sales process with their insistence on methodology.”
In digital transformation, Operations play a crucial role in making sure that the flow of
customer data, insights, and content move seamlessly throughout a department. As
these selling elements start to integrate, the Operations function becomes the glue
between departments, translating and infusing existing practices and processes into
digital ones. Jamie Shanks, CEO of Sales for Life and author of Social Selling Mastery,
shares, “The intent of sales ops in companies is that they are going to be the change
agents of the Sales and Marketing departments.”

12
• Align objectives across departments with common metrics. Digital makes everything
so much more measurable, but simply because you can measure something doesn’t
necessarily mean that the measurement is valuable. “Vanity metrics” — such as the
number of visitors to a site or the number of contacts made — distract from the core
objective, which is most typically revenue. But shifting from a department or revenue
focus to one that is customer-centered can be tough, because many organizations don’t
use metrics like customer lifetime value or Net Promoter Score that measure the health of
customer relationships.
This was the case for Hitachi Data Systems’ team, which was trying to shift the
organization from a “lead-generation” mindset to a “relationship-generation” one. While
they trained salespeople on how to use social selling techniques, they supplemented that
training with customer listening, content curation, and content management systems that
made it easier for salespeople to provide specific insight to individual customers. Sharon
Crost, Senior Social Business Lead at Hitachi recalls, “We had traditional funnel thinking
in our Marketing department and had to turn it upside down. Marketing now delivers
vetted, commercially-oriented content to the field, in real time.”
Crost also shared that measurement of the impact was difficult to capture. “We don’t have
a mature attribution model. Instead, we have to resort to using anecdotes and storytelling
to connect relationship building to an increase in sales. But we also use proxy measures like
LinkedIn’s SSI (social selling index) scores. It’s not the best, but it’s a baseline against which
we can measure progress. Just having the number has been important.”
Metrics should change for Sales as well. At CA Technologies, the focus was on Sales to
be more engaged with and focused on customers, particularly engaging with them on
social channels. To measure this, CA tracked LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index (SSI) score
for each salesperson. “Social being digital, it gives you datasets that are more reliable
than the information that is manually entered into our CRM,” explains Andrew Plunkett,
VP of Global Education for Sales and Marketing at CA Technologies. “We were able to
correlate SSI scores to pipeline size and found that people who were above a certain
threshold score had greater quote attainment.” Being able to track and show how new
practices in both Marketing and Sales resulted in topline growth is a key part of the
selling transformation process.

13
CULTURE CHANGE FOCUSES ON
DEVELOPING CRITICAL SKILLS
Instead of thinking about culture as a “soft skill,” organizations need to think of it as a critical
component of the digital transformation of selling. There were several commonalities among
the organizations we spoke with when it came to transitioning culture, but they all agreed
on two things — culture and leadership is crucial and often overlooked, and that this is not
something that is done overnight. Jill Rowley, social selling evangelist, put it well, saying,
“There needs to be a mindset shift, where I recognize that my job isn’t to sell, it’s to help.
That customer at the core mantra needs to be deep in the DNA of the culture.” To get
started, here are some things to focus on as you go through your cultural transition:
• Shift the mindset from selling to relationship building. Unless a change in mindset
accompanies integration of data, content, and organization, the selling team will
continue to work as it did in the past. Juniper’s Stan de Boisset, who realized that culture
lay at the center of the transformation, explains, “Customers actively use social networks
to learn and keep up-to-date with trends and solutions. They aren’t receptive to shills or
spamming. With social, salespeople have an opportunity to engage customers in new
conversations, provide real value, and eventually prove themselves as trusted advisors.”
To bring about a mindset shift, de Boisset enlisted the help of every inside sales manager
within the organization. Together, they developed a new daily sales routine, created
a new set of sales KPIs, and created training materials and other content. “For social
to become fully integrated in our sales process, everything had to change: from hiring
practices where ‘social skills’ is a qualification to striving to record every social interaction
with customers in our CRM. We knew it would be hard, but it’s something we have to do,”
de Boisset said.
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• Focus training on specific skill development. At Dell, the long-standing Social Media
and Community University (SMaC U) has embedded social media into the DNA of Dell,
with over 15,000 employees certified to engage in social on the company’s behalf.
Salespeople go through the basic SMaC U training, like all employees, to understand the
fundamentals of social engagement. Amy Heiss, Director of Social Media Activation at
Dell, explains, “If you don’t have an understanding of the culture of social, you miss the
picture of social.” After training takes place, Dell also has each salesperson spend time
with a dedicated marketing specialist to talk about challenges they may face, how to
connect with customers via digital channels, and identify where digital activities would be
critical to their individual pipelines.
In addition, Dell incorporated social listening into daily routines for salespeople.
The recommendation was for salespeople to spend 10 minutes a day listening and
responding to people they were following. They could then not only identify if there was
a selling signal, but also personal interests. One salesperson discovered that a prospect
enjoyed playing golf and arranged a meeting at a golf course, which resulted in a multi-
million-dollar sale. Heiss recalls, “We highlighted that he was able to do this just through
listening. It sounds simple to be focused on customer needs, but listening is a big
process change for people.”
Sprint took a similar approach, treating the initial pilot with 100 salespeople as sales
enablement rather than training. “The reason our salespeople loved it is that digital
selling is a true skillset that they can apply at Sprint and also take with them,” explains
Sprint’s Chris Hutson, Business Social Selling Strategist. “This is in contrast to training
about a specific product that is useless if they leave the company.” Sprint established
a 10-week program that included gamification elements and transparency, with weekly
reporting of SSI scores. Leadership also provided executive sponsorship with twice-a-
week follow-ups. At the end of the 10-week training period, 95% of the salespeople had
finished the certification and SSI scores were up by 40%. Hutson credited the success
of the program to the accountability of the weekly SSI score, saying, “We wouldn’t let
people fall behind, but we also didn’t need to beat people up to do this because they
could see the benefit to themselves.”
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• Spread stories of quick wins to establish new habits. The tangible outcomes of selling
transformation aren’t always measurable in numbers, hence the importance of gathering
anecdotes of success early in the process. The power of stories is that they tap into a
memorable arc and emotions that highlight how new behaviors and mindsets resulted
in success. Stories also have the benefit of being highly shareable, especially if spread via
digital channels. “As we saw our culture becoming more customer-centric, we wanted to
celebrate it,” recalled Rishi Dave from Dun & Bradstreet. “I cannot underscore enough the
importance of communicating. To create culture change, it’s even more important internally
than it is externally to communicate this.” To accomplish this, Dun & Bradstreet codified
the sharing of customer stories by establishing “Project Benjamin,” where marketing and
sales would find and share 100 new customer success stories in 100 days. To move this even
faster throughout the organization, Dun & Bradstreet published the stories on their internal
social network and also used it to crowdsource stories from employees.
• Ensure leadership engagement, especially in Sales. Across the board, our research
found that the strategic involvement of leadership was crucial, but not always present.
Many efforts began organically in Marketing, which has been hit earlier and more directly
by digital changes. But the reality is that many sales leaders remain uncomfortable with
the use of digital and social tools, especially in the Sales organization. One interviewee
shares, “Senior sales leaders don’t think they need to be involved in social, but they do
think that their team needs to be on social.” At one company, the initial social selling pilots
were done at the frontlines with individual salespeople and, unfortunately, the frontline
managers were not involved in the process. As a result, the managers didn’t know how to
monitor or manage the new digital and social activities. To guard against this, when Sprint
rolled out its social selling pilot to 100 salespeople, they ensured that leadership was
involved with direct follow up from them twice a week. Chris Hutson at Sprint recalls, “In
the first one to two weeks, everyone could sense that this program was different.
15

16
NEXT STEPS: ASSESS YOUR SELLING
TRANSFORMATION MATURITY
To continue your digital transformation journey, take a moment to assess which stage of
maturity you’re in, as illustrated in Figure 5. You may find that you are ahead in some areas
and behind in others, but you center around one of the five stages. Knowing where you are
in the maturity curve provides you with information on the next steps you need to take to
pull together a cohesive transformation strategy for selling.
Status Quo Developing Integrated Strategic Holistic
Customer Data
Integration
Little customer
data is shared
between
departments.
Customer data
is integrated
between
Marketing and
Sales, but not
prospect data.
Customer data
is integrated
between
Marketing and
Sales.
Customer and
prospect data is
readily available to
Marketing, Sales
& Service.
Full customer and
prospect data
is available to
anyone.
Analytics
and Insights
Basic analytics
provide information
on a few customer
segments and
insights remain
department
focused.
Customer
personas focus
the analytics while
social listening
provides basic
customer insight.
Scaled social
listening puts the
power of analytics
in the hands of
salespeople.
Programmatic
recommendations
provide near
real-time
recommendations
for content and
engagement.
Artificial
intelligence
guides next action
that enables hyper
personalization.
Content
Content is
centrally produced
by Marketing, and
is difficult to find/
use by Sales.
Marketing creates
atomized content
for various
platforms that Sales
republishes on
social platforms.
Sales begins
to curate and
create content,
contributing to
central repository
of content.
Marketing
automation scales
Sales content
marketing efforts.
Atomized content
programmatical-
ly delivered for
hyper-
personalization
Metrics
Revenue targets
for Sales, lead
generation for
Marketing.
Revenues become
one of Marketing’s
metrics.
Revenue targets
extend across
Sales, Marketing
and Service.
Revenue targets
plus some
customer metrics.
Customer metrics
sit alongside
revenue targets.
Operations
Integration
Each department
has their own
operations team.
Marketing and
Sales Ops start
to integrate
processes.
Marketing
and Sales Ops
combine into one
Ops department.
Adds in Service
operations,
in addition to
Marketing and
Sales.
Operations is fully
integrated and it
plays a strategic
role in setting sales
direction.
Sales Training
and Recruitment
Training &
enablement
focuses on
traditional sales
tactics.
Training
incorporates social
engagement and
content marketing
skills.
Social skills
becomes an
integrated part
of the hiring
and onboarding
process.
Promotions based
on ability to scale
sales revenues
with digital selling.
All salespeople are
fully trained and
engaged in using
digital and social
tools and platforms
to drive revenues.
Leadership
Leaders focus
on meeting the
department’s
monthly revenue
or lead gen
targets.
Sales and
Marketing
leadership meet
regularly to align,
and show general
support for digital
transformation.
Sales & Marketing
leadership meet
frequently, and
show support with
own engagement
in digital and social
channels.
Leadership
regularly focuses
on customers first
and connects how
customer focus
results in higher
revenues.
Is focused on
customers first,
above even
monthly revenue
quotas.
FIGURE 5 MATURITY STAGES OF THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF SELLING

17
No matter where you are on the maturity curve, there are some takeaways that our research
found for specific roles, as follows:
• Sales Leaders: Leverage Marketing’s digital expertise — and technology budgets.
Marketing is well on its way into digital transformation, so tap their knowledge and
best practices for streamlining and scaling personalized content for customers. Where
possible, leverage their technology investments in digital platforms, like social listening,
marketing automation, and employee advocacy, so that you can focus your more limited
tech budget on customizations needed for salespeople. Using common platforms also
makes it much easier to integrate operations.
• Marketing Leaders: Lean into Sales’ deep and real-time knowledge of customers.
Turn the one-off customer insights that Sales owns into discoverable data by aggregating
and streamlining customer insights and case studies from the field in real time. This
could be as simple as meeting regularly with sales counterparts or extending to training
and encouraging salespeople to post regularly on internal collaboration platforms or
enterprise social networks.
• CEOs: Become the chief instigator of transformation on behalf of customers.
The digital transformation of selling requires leadership from the very top of the organization
to continually drive the three transitions and, in particular, guide the silo bridging that needs
to happen. When departmental conflicts develop, the CEO must re-center deliberations on
how to best serve customers and away from departmental self-interest.
• COOs and CFOs: Establish metrics and processes that elevate customers.
As long as the selling organization is focused on internal revenue metrics at the expense of
customer success metrics, they will always make decisions that put customers second. To
counter this, conduct the analysis needed to find correlations between customer success
and company success. Test these correlations to gain confidence that the customer metrics
do indeed correlate with better business performance. Even putting in place the process of
looking for correlations will develop a greater focus on customer success.
17

18
ENDNOTES
1
CEB Global. The Digital Evolution in B2B Marketing. 2012 (https://www.cebglobal.com/content/dam/
cebglobal/us/EN/best-practices-decision-support/marketing-communications/pdfs/CEB-Mktg-B2B-
Digital-Evolution.pdf).
2
Dell and Social Business Engine. “Digital Transformation: Social Selling Research, Insights, and Best
Practices.” Social Business Journal. 2015 (http://www.socialbusinessengine.com/socialselling/dell.pdf).
3
Heuer, Megan. “Three Myths of the “67 Percent” Statistic.” SiriusDecisions. July 3, 2013
(www.siriusdecisions.com/Blog/2013/Jul/Three-Myths-of-the-67-Percent-Statistic).
4
Terpening, Ed. The 2016 State of Social Business: Social’s Shift from Innovator to Integrator. Altimeter,
a Prophet Company. November 15, 2016 (http://www2.prophet.com/2016-state-of-social-business).
5
Docurated study. The State of Sales Productivity. 2015 (http://go.docurated.com/state-of-sales-
productivity-report.html).
METHODOLOGY
This document was developed based upon online and in-person conversations with 17 market
influencers, technology vendors, brands, and others on the digital transformation of selling, as well
as secondary research, including relevant and timely books, articles, and news stories. Our deepest
gratitude to the following:
BRANDS, RESEARCHERS, AGENCIES AND INDUSTRY EXPERTS
7Summits, Dion Hinchcliffe, Chief Strategy Officer
Avanade, Jerome Thiebaud, Director of Global Digital Workplace Marketing; Dave Nelson, then SVP –
Global CRM Lead
CA Technologies, Andrew Plunkett, VP of Global Education – Sales and Marketing
CBRE, Trey Tubbs, Global Director – Digital and Technology
Dell, Amy Heiss, Director of Social Media Training and Activation (SMaC U); Havilah Tower-Perkins,
Social Engagement Manager and Executive Communications, Marketing
Dun & Bradstreet, Rishi Dave, CMO
GM, David Mingle, General Director, Global Customer Experience Execution and Planning
Hitachi Data Systems, Sharon Crost, Senior Social Business Lead – Social Selling, Social Analytics,
Social Media Strategy
IBM, Jeannette Browning, Watson Cognitive Evangelism, IBM Watson Group, Manager WW
Intel, Danielle Miller, Global Social Business Strategist & Manager
Jill Rowley, Digital Sales Transformation Evangelist & Startup Advisor
Juniper, Stan de Boisset, Global Head, Commercial and Inside Sales
LinkedIn, Justin Shriber, Head of Marketing for LinkedIn Sales Solutions; Diana Kucer, then Director of
Global Product Marketing
Sales for Life, Jamie Shanks, CEO
SAP, Vivek Bapat, Senior Vice President, Global Head of Marketing Strategy
Software Improvement Group (SIG), Maureen Blandford, CMO
Sprint, Chris Hutson, Business Social Selling Strategist
thyssenkrupp Elevator Asia Pacific, Kelly Truax, Vice President, Service Support

19
HOW TO WORK WITH US
Altimeter can support your digital transformation of selling efforts in the following ways:
• Move social selling beyond LinkedIn profiles and Twitter accounts. While your salespeople
have created polished LinkedIn profiles and set up a Twitter accounts, they remain largely unused.
Altimeter can help by conducting an assessment of your current social selling activities, identifying
opportunities around data, content, and engagement that can drive better business results.
• Make the case for a digital transformation strategy for selling. There may be a groundswell of
support for the use of digital in selling but it lacks coherence. Altimeter can help make the case for
executive support of and engagement in a robust digital strategy that spans across departments.
An assessment of your digital selling capabilities lays the foundation for an executive workshop that
aligns the organization around specific goals and objectives.
• Educate and align sales and marketing organizations for digital transformation. Altimeter
conducts workshops and speaks at internal events to bring awareness and alignment around digital
transformation. Several prep interviews conducted in advance ensures that the session is customized
to the needs of your organization, with relevant examples.
• Create and activate a robust strategy for the digital transformation of selling. Working closely
with our consulting colleagues at Prophet Brand Strategy, Altimeter creates a multi-year strategy that
takes into account all three types of transitions: platform integration, organizational, and cultural. The
strategy typically includes inputs from sales and marketing leadership, but can also include service,
product, and finance/legal.
To learn more about Altimeter’s offerings, contact sales@altimetergroup.com.
About Charlene Li,
Principal Analyst
Charlene (@CharleneLi) is a
Principal Analyst at Altimeter, a
Prophet company, where she helps
leaders thrive with disruption. She was the
Founder and CEO of Altimeter Group prior to
its joining Prophet, and she is the author of the
New York Times bestseller, Open Leadership.
She is also the coauthor of the critically
acclaimed, bestselling book Groundswell.
Her most recent book, The Engaged Leader,
is a call to business leaders to adapt to the
digital landscape, and revolutionize their
relationships by connecting directly with their
followers. Her current research focuses on
customer experience strategy and employee
engagement and she’s working on a new
book on disruption strategies. You can reach
Charlene at charlene@altimetergroup.com.
About Altimeter, a Prophet Company
Altimeter, a Prophet company, is a research and
strategy consulting firm that helps companies
understand and take advantage of digital
disruption. In 2015, Prophet acquired Altimeter
Group to bring forward-thinking digital
research and strategy consulting together
under one umbrella, and to help clients
unlock the power of digital transformation.
Altimeter, founded in 2008 by best-selling
author Charlene Li, focuses on research in
digital transformation, social business and
governance, customer experience, big data,
and content strategy.
Altimeter, a Prophet Company
One Bush Street, 7th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94104
info@altimetergroup.com
www.altimetergroup.com
@altimetergroup
415-363-0004

20
OPEN RESEARCH
This independent research report was 100% funded by Altimeter, A Prophet Company. This report is
published under the principle of Open Research and is intended to advance the industry at no cost. This
report is intended for you to read, utilize, and share with others; if you do so, please provide attribution to
Altimeter, A Prophet Company.
PERMISSIONS
The Creative Commons License is Attribution-NoncommercialShareAlike 3.0 United States, which can be
found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/.
DISCLAIMER
ALTHOUGH THE INFORMATION AND DATA USED IN THIS REPORT HAVE BEEN PRODUCED AND
PROCESSED FROM SOURCES BELIEVED TO BE RELIABLE, NO WARRANTY EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED IS
MADE REGARDING THE COMPLETENESS, ACCURACY, ADEQUACY, OR USE OF THE INFORMATION.
THE AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS OF THE INFORMATION AND DATA SHALL HAVE NO
LIABILITY FOR ERRORS OR OMISSIONS CONTAINED HEREIN OR FOR INTERPRETATIONS THEREOF.
REFERENCE HEREIN TO ANY SPECIFIC PRODUCT OR VENDOR BY TRADE NAME, TRADEMARK, OR
OTHERWISE DOES NOT CONSTITUTE OR IMPLY ITS ENDORSEMENT, RECOMMENDATION, OR
FAVORING BY THE AUTHORS OR CONTRIBUTORS AND SHALL NOT BE USED FOR ADVERTISING
OR PRODUCT ENDORSEMENT PURPOSES. THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED HEREIN ARE SUBJECT TO
CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE.

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