Haniza Zakariya oversees diverse sales leadership portfolios within leading global technology companies, with a focus on the enterprise and public sectors in Malaysia and Brunei. As the head of sales for Orange Business Malaysia, she spearheads a transformational approach to foster a high-performance sales culture driven by mindset shifts and strong accountability. Outside of work, she enjoys staying active through golfing, jogging, and exploring new destinations.

In a though provoking interaction with Global Woman Leader Magazine, Haniza discusses the transformative role of women in driving digital innovation, particularly in sales processes. She highlights strategies to align digital tools with sales goals, enhance customer engagement through AI and analytics, and leverage digital transformation for both internal efficiency and superior customer experiences.

What role do women play in driving digital transformation within organizations? What are some strategies you've found most effective in aligning digital tools with sales goals?

Women in sales have the unique opportunity to bring diverse perspectives to foster innovations and inclusivity. For instance, women are better at engaging online, creating social media content that would resonate with the target markets, or even drive personalization to bring about customization for customers in the evolution of digital sales.

When it comes to digital transformation, along with the digital skills sets of women are technologies that have helped to simplify sales processes as well as to increase productivity and efficiency. Besides collaboration tools and CRM for business hygiene and forecasting, I have found AI-powered platforms and analytic dashboards to be really effective in providing datapoints and context about a company or prospective customers ahead of business meetings. As shared above, social media is another key tool to engage with our audiences and build our personal brand.

How does women’s perspective in the tech industry uniquely shape the future of digital sales strategies?

A lot of global companies are moving towards enabling remote sales personnel, not only because of the cost factor, but to also tap into the increasing digital landscape with tools like remote conferencing and AI-driven customer service. The shift to a digital sales workforce provides female sales employees with a flexible arrangement and environment especially when having to balance domestic commitments and family life with work expectations. In terms of customer engagement, AI-driven tools from chatbots and predictive assistance have been able offer call summaries from past interactions to support the sales personnel with more effective conversations that enhances customers’ satisfaction.

As for the integration of advanced analytics, women who have experience in data science, data mining and assessment could offer their expertise in understanding customer behaviors or trends that allow for more agile and responsive sales approaches.

How can women in sales and marketing leadership contribute to building and scaling diverse, tech-savvy teams? What is the key to fostering an inclusive, high-performance sales culture?

As a sales leader, it is key to be intentional in driving innovation and inclusivity when looking to scale diverse, tech-savvy teams or to build a robust talent pipeline who embrace digital transformation. I advocate inclusive hiring practices to ensure that there is no gender bias while enabling greater gender balance or representation in this highly competitive tech sector, so that the versatility helps to drive higher organizational performance and value for our customers and other stakeholders.

In fact, I’m attracted to recruiting talents who exhibit good and clear communication, ask smart questions to uncover opportunities and challenges, and who can effectively simplify their thoughts with examples or evidence. There are tools out there like the digital survey Aptitude test or Gamification techniques that can help to minimize bias and to actively seek candidates from underrepresented groups.

In setting clear sales goals, I also promote a high-performance sales culture by giving my team the empowerment and working flexibility, so that women with young children or those with aging parents can make use of remote digital tools to drive their sales motion from anywhere that best serves them in meeting their sales goals while catering to their families’ needs. Sales achievements are also further rewarded by unbiased performance reviews while ensuring equal opportunities for career advancement.

How can digital transformation be leveraged to enhance customer experiences in sales and marketing? Which digital tools should women in tech champion to create a more customer-centric business?

Depending on your industry, an organization should always find ways to offer customers the simplicity and ease of connecting with the service or sales teams, or forany escalation of issues.One of the ways is ensuring the availability of omnichannel that supports the customer’s end-to-end journey with an organization. Then there are self-service portals, intuitive CRM, process automation, and AI chatbots that can be made available to enable or retain a positive customer experience.

From the sales and marketing perspective, the impact of digitalization will profoundly impact how engagements are conducted – warranting for more proactiveness rather than reactive ones, and with collaboration at the fore of most – if not all – business processes. With customer and market data that can be easily retrieved from tools and algorithms designed to provide useful insights, women in sales can focus on what they do best, which is selling and engaging in personalized conversations with their customers.

How has your extensive network and experiences contributed to your success? How can women in tech sales leverage their networks?

I believe that extensive networking helps with providing referrals. My own network of relationships forged with different customers and prospects within and outside my industry circle has enabled me to gain new sales leads and referrals. The trust and credibility that you have built over the years are certainly an advantage as customers would look to sign a deal with the party they trust, backed by the reputation and credentials of the organization.

In the recent years, there are a number of women in tech networking community available to help mentor and develop aspiring female leaders. Some organizations have their own internal movements as well. At Orange Business, we have been empowering women in tech with our Women Up program, where we target to achieve 33% women’s representation in our workforce by 2025. It is also a testament to our commitment that a significant number of our top management are female, including our Orange Group CEO, Orange Business CEO and COO.

I’m also grateful that networking has opened the door of opportunities for me to continually drive new outcomes for the company, whether through co-partnership or shared resources to tap into new markets, or a new industry segment that has not been previously penetrated into. To this end, it has further helped with broadening market knowledge and lent a deeper understanding on key trends shaping business conversations and the local pain points and solution needs of customers.

When it comes to networking, it honestly remains a continuous work in progress for female sales leaders. Women often put such opportunities on the backburner particularly for those who carry dual roles as home caretakers too. The sales profession sometimes requires employees to be generous with their time in solidifying connections whether in a formal or informal setting, and to keep it sincere and authentic for customers- this goes a long way to establishing yourself and the organization as a valuable, top-of-mind resource in the industry, while gaining the competitive edge.