Modern businesses cannot survive for long when relying on a single sales channel. In today’s hyper-competitive environment, organizations must coordinate their efforts across in-person, e-commerce and social media platforms to stay afloat. However, doing so effectively can be challenging.

The promises of omnichannel sales are impressive — companies see 9.5% higher annual revenue on average after implementing such a strategy. At the same time, many cross-channel efforts fail, as management ends up disjointed and slow. Businesses can avoid these pitfalls through a few tech-centric best practices.

Track Inventory and Sales in Real Time

One of the biggest challenges with managing cross-channel sales is keeping track of inventory as items sell through different platforms. The key is to bring the same real-time visibility of e-commerce to in-person sales and stock levels.

Internet of Things (IoT) tracking is essential. Solutions like radio frequency identification (RFID) tags provide real-time data on inventory levels, locations and more. Gaining this visibility has helped some organizations reduce late or unnecessary deliveries by 50%, as it’s easier to restock appropriately with an in-depth, cohesive picture of what’s available.

Importantly, businesses must use the same tracking solution across all inventory locations to keep things consistent between channels. A single customer relationship management (CRM) platform or warehouse management system (WMS) can consolidate real-time data into one point of access for greater clarity.

Consolidate Data Across Channels

Once all channels have real-time tracking solutions in place, sales teams must keep it all in one place. Switching between systems will make it difficult to compare channel performance or trace interactions between channels. Switching to a cloud-based management platform is the solution.

A cloud-based CRM will let teams from any channel access the same data at any time. The cloud can also scale up immediately as necessary when businesses integrate new sales channels or data. Many also feature automated reporting functionality, which is important when manually pooling information across platforms would be time-consuming and error-prone.

However, embracing the cloud alone is not enough. The average company uses a staggering 112 software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools, and many could serve a similar purpose. Silos are all too common, even in cloud-based SaaS. Organizations must reorganize their IT to use a single, consolidated solution across teams to maximize visibility. 

Analyze Cross-Channel Data With AI

Some cross-channel sales management strategies fail even when they have sufficient visibility into their data. It’s important to recognize that data alone is just a resource. Teams must use it correctly to gain actual value from it, and artificial intelligence (AI) can help.

AI excels at recognizing easily missable trends in vast amounts of data. Consequently, it’s an ideal way to gain actionable insights from the large datasets omnichannel operations create. Such analysis is crucial because teams can improve revenue and sales efficiency by forecasting and responding to future trends through data.

Businesses can use AI to analyze many aspects of their sales data, but some use cases are more helpful than others. Some of the most valuable include demand forecasting, customer segmentation, cross-channel personalization and summarizing each channel’s performance.

Maximize Data’s Value

Of course, many organizations use AI to disappointing ends. One of the best ways to avoid suboptimal outcomes in cross-channel AI applications is to ensure the data from each channel is reliable and informative.

Sales teams can maximize their data’s value in a few ways. Overcoming data problems falls into three main categories — augmentation, cleaning and balance. Augmentation reduces noise to remove irrelevant values, cleaning deletes poor-quality information to prevent errors, and balance ensures there’s a sufficient mix of resources to provide comprehensive insights.

In some cases, companies can use synthetic datasets to train their AI models before deployment to boost their performance without gathering more real-world information. Standardizing data from various channels into a consistent format will also help.

Streamline Communications

Cross-team communication can also pose a challenge in omnichannel sales. These other steps are only effective if everyone can implement them consistently and report to each other about noticeable trends quickly. Digital technology is the answer once again.

All sales teams should use a single cloud-based collaboration platform to report data that may affect other teams. Automating updates as much as possible will also help by removing the burden of reporting from employees. Regular cross-team meetings can also help, and teleconferencing software provides the vehicle to streamline these touchpoints.

Similarly, sales departments should ensure consistent messaging across all channels. The key to doing so is providing a single source of truth for branding goals and sales targets. Creating a single master list of goals and brand ideals and placing it in an accessible cloud platform will help everyone stay on track.

Businesses Must Get Cross-Channel Sales Right

Selling across multiple platforms can be difficult, but companies must do it to remain competitive in today’s market. New technologies make such efforts easier and more accurate, so cross-channel strategies must include digitization goals.

While every sales team is unique, many obstacles are common across businesses. Recognizing frequent barriers and learning how to overcome them through technology will help organizations supercharge their cross-channel sales efforts.