Sales deals are complex and involve a ton of moving parts both internally and externally.
Simply having a professional sales force doesn’t mean anything for your bottom line if you don’t arm them with proper sales productivity tools.
The right tools can help boost productivity by supplying salespeople with the information, repetitive or manual task automation, platform, and content quality required to communicate effectively with prospects and build rapport.
However, with so many tools out there, it can be hard to keep track of the right productivity tools that could be exactly what your team needs to level up.
Today’s sales professionals spend just 34% of their time selling.
Sales teams struggle to keep up with data entry, quote generation, and other tasks that take them away from customers.
Unsurprisingly, 57% expect to miss their quotas this year (according to Salesforce).
Boosting sales productivity isn’t about helping salespeople do more of the same thing—but freeing reps up to do the higher value tasks that can’t be automated: like building relationships and talking to customers.
Increasing productivity means salespeople have more customer-facing time to do what they do best: sell.
We sell to salespeople, so we know sales productivity results from a strong sales acceleration process. But, how do you increase sales productivity and where do you start?
There’s nothing worse than investing in a new sales engagement solution only to find your reps don’t use half the features it offers.
Sound familiar, Salesloft user?
Let’s get one thing straight: Salesloft is an amazing product. Nothing but love over here.
But it’s not for everyone.
And it don’t come cheap, either.
If you’re looking for something that’s a better fit for your revenue teams–with the specific functionalities that enable them to achieve true engagement right across the sales cycle—you’ve come to the right place.
For sales teams that are all about spray-and-pray.
If, however, you need to focus on nurturing prospects and building relationships, it’s not going to cut it.
If that’s you, chances are you’re looking for an Outreach alternative. But with so many to choose from, how do you know which is right for your sales teams?
You’re probably here because your sales teams are doing their best, but somehow they’re not hitting the numbers you need.
And that affects your bottom line and team morale, and can even cause burnout.
Maybe you just need to hire more of them?
Nope.
If your revenue teams aren’t operating at peak efficiency and effectiveness, hiring more is unlikely to improve your results. But it will add to your overheads, and sow panic among your reps if there isn’t enough opportunity to go around.
Instead, the answer lies in tracking and measuring sales productivity so you can empower your teams to achieve more with less.
It’s a common scenario: you can see your sales reps are overwhelmed and juggling tons of different tasks. But even still, you’re not getting the results you expected.
Maybe you’ve even hired more salespeople, so you know it’s not an issue of getting more sales reps to work even harder.
Instead, you need to increase their productivity so they can quickly and effectively move more prospects down the pipeline—without burning themselves out.
In an increasingly complex sales landscape, you don’t want your top reps juggling low-value tasks that don’t contribute to converting prospects.
You want to arm your sales reps with the tools and strategies they need to focus on finding and nurturing high-quality accounts and building strong relationships.
We’ve talked to our salespeople and other top sellers to compile sales acceleration strategies you can use to empower sales reps to efficiently and effectively interact and communicate with prospects for better results.
If you don’t take the time to dig deeper into your prospect’s challenges, key drivers, and company to understand how you can help them achieve their goals, then our guess would be, a lot.
Without being on the ball in discovery, you can have the world’s greatest product but lose your sale to an AE with better questions.
But in a rush to get to the demo, companies often skip this step altogether, which wastes precious time and resources and leads to prospects dropping out of the sales funnel because they were never truly a good fit.
Too many AEs make prospects sit through a call only to give them a vanilla demo that doesn’t specifically address their problems and pains.
We sell to salespeople, so we know all about how challenging discovery is.
We’ve all been on the customer-end of a contract coming up on renewal. How frustrating is it to be blind sided by an auto-renewal you didn’t get to cancel in time?
Surprises can be fun – like birthdays or celebratory milestones – but not when it comes to renewals for your customers. The cost of acquiring a new customer is over five times more than keeping an existing one, which is why your renewal strategy should be cohesive and weaved into the entire customer experience from Day 1.
Customer Success and Account Managers play a crucial role in properly preparing customers for the renewal conversation. When customers feel like they’ve been left in the dark, their expectations may not have been aligned with yours.
Luckily there are some easy steps to take right now that’ll set you up for a strong renewal conversation and improve your customer experience along the way.