Forrester released a study titled “The 2016 Guide To Digital Predators, Transformers, and Dinosaurs” which argued that companies need to quickly transform themselves into digital businesses.  The study broke businesses into three digital categories: Predator, Transformer, and Dinosaur and evaluated the percent of business that are either digital services or sold online.

Predators are already generating over 80% of their business digitally and will grow their business to 90% by 2020.  For them, digital is a foundational element of their operations.

Likewise, transformers are quickly evolving into digital businesses while dinosaurs are plodding along.  In 2014, only one in six dollars was generated digitally at transformers, but by 2020, two of every three dollars will be digitally mediated at transformed businesses.

At the dinosaurs, only one in three dollars will be digitally generated in 2020.

Forrester found that transformers are customer-centric in their business strategy and processes.  Customer obsession is part of their corporate DNA:

While all companies profess to put customers first, it’s clear from the data that executives at digital Predators care more passionately about the customer across multiple dimensions: In every customer metric we measured, these executives rated the importance of the customer higher than peers in transformers and dinosaurs – in short, they are not just customer obsessed, they are really, really customer obsessed.

• Nigel Fenwick, Forrester VP and Principal Analyst

Overall, Forrester found that 29% of current total sales are influenced by digital, but that 47% would be digitally influenced by 2020.  Thus, any business that wishes to remain competitive must have a digital strategy which encompasses sales, marketing, credit decisioning, contracting, and all of the elements across your sales funnel.

My blog focuses on sales intelligence (with some discussion of marketing intelligence and DaaS), so I’m covering a subset of this transformation.  But sales intelligence is a key element of the digital transformation of sales and marketing.  Its goal is to make sales reps more efficient and effective at generating revenue through

• Improved understanding of customers and prospects.  Whether the company is employing ABM, ABSD, social selling, trigger selling, or other techniques, customer-centricity begins with an understanding of the customer at the contact, company, and industry level.  Sales intelligence vendors go beyond firmographics and contact data to deliver business descriptions, SWOTs, biographies, social posts, industry research, financials, analyst reports, technology platforms, etc.
• Current Awareness. Improved awareness of changes at customers and prospects helps to improve account planning, messaging, and forecasting.  Where once this intelligence was delivered as generic company news, the sales intelligence vendors have refined their tagging and now provide high precision sales triggers which are accurate at both the company and business topic level.  Some have even begun to integrate sales triggers into their prospecting engines.
• Reduced busywork + improved data quality.  Sales intelligence vendors cut the time wasted on busywork through the implementation of DaaS enrichment of accounts, contacts, and leads.  Enrichment provides more accurate firmographics, corporate linkage, and contact information which is then propagated to downstream systems.  It also reduces the keying done by prospects on web forms and sales reps in CRMs.  Furthermore, targeting, segmentation, and messaging are much more accurate when the ongoing maintenance of account intelligence is managed by a third party.

Over the past decade, sales intelligence firms have grown from standalone web information portals to integrated workflow services that deliver a broad set of account intelligence to CRMs, marketing automation platforms, sales acceleration (ABSD) services, Google Chrome, web forms, and mobile devices.  Thus, sales intelligence is now becoming available to sales, marketing, and service departments across a broad set of platforms and devices.

If you would like to read more on my thoughts concerning the digital transformation of sales and marketing, I have also discussed the topic on Sparklane and Avention’s blogs.