With clearly defined quarterly and annual quotas, most sales teams understand where they need to go. But does everyone on the team understand the best way to get there? Sales acceleration tools can help by serving as a digital compass for sales organizations, so everyone on the team gets to the same destination.
For sales reps, sales acceleration tools increase their understanding about prospects’ needs and interests; where prospects are in the buying process; and let them more easily spot key decision makers. For sales managers, sales acceleration tools help them know whether their sales reps are focusing on the right prospects and are effective in their outreach; whether their team’s forecast is accurate; and how they can scale processes.
These criteria remain fundamentally unchanged from 5, 10, or 20 years ago, but meeting them has become increasingly difficult. With buyers learning about, evaluating, and obtaining referrals for products and services online, the B2B model is rapidly becoming “Amazonized.”
To accommodate these changes, best-in-class companies are adopting new approaches to get the data that they need to serve customers better. In doing so, the latest research reveals that they’re moving ahead of the pack.
New Aberdeen Group research pinpoints sales tools of the best-in-class
By using analytics and automation, leading companies are gaining the competitive advantage. New research findings from Aberdeen Group show these companies, when compared to other organizations, are seeing up to:
- 71% increase in achieving company revenue targets
- 18% shorter average sales cycles
Aberdeen Group cites “automated engagement tracking software” or AETS as key to their success. At a basic level, Aberdeen defines AETS as “a user-friendly tool allowing both marketers and sellers to understand, in real-time, the extent to which individual e-mail messages or attachments are consumed and actioned by their buyers.”
Aberdeen says that best-in-class organizations are 24% more likely than all other organizations to have these tools in place. With the real-time insights that these tools deliver on content engagement, companies using them are seeing across-the-board increases in revenue, quota achievement, and lead acceptance rates.
Analytics answer key questions to close deals faster
Leveraging prescriptive analytics, sales acceleration tools answer key questions for both sales reps and sales managers to help speed an organization’s selling process. Companies are able to close deals faster with:
- A better understanding about how to personalize messaging and content to different customer interests
- Greater visibility into sales rep performance and how they are engaging with prospects
- Increased insight into the sales processes that deliver the most success for the team, so they can be repeated across the organization
Automation gets reps to full productivity fast
Automation is a key component of sales acceleration tools. With automated processes, such as email templates and group email capability, reps can quickly send out customized emails to a group of prospects. This gives them more time to spend prospecting – rather than writing emails – increasing team productivity by decreasing the time that sales reps spend on non-core selling activity.
Scalability has also become a big concern for today’s sales organizations. As organizations grow, getting new reps to full productivity fast is critical. With automated processes, such as giving new reps a series of emails to use at different stages of the purchasing process, organizations can speed the on-boarding process and scale faster and more easily.
Personalization delivers proven results
Sales acceleration tools can deliver vast amounts of customer data. Companies gain the greatest value by taking that data and applying it to personalize and enhance the customer experience. By taking messaging and tailoring it based on a customer’s particular needs, sales teams are empowered to close more deals.
Not surprisingly, the best-in-class companies place a high priority on personalized content. Aberdeen’s report states that these top companies “aggressively align marketing and sales activities around content development, management, and deployment, to their mutual benefit.”
To achieve this end, they give sales reps the ability to customize buyer content through sales enablement platforms. By letting reps personalize prepared content, these companies are seeing up to 21% stronger lead acceptance rate and a 36% higher conversion average.
Set your team up for success
Organizations need to give their teams the right compass to get to their destination. By showing managers what content, emails, or email sequences get the best response rates, sales acceleration tools help organizations repeat the process on similar accounts with other reps. With insight into these patterns and behaviors, managers can also train reps to be more effective by emulating the most successful processes.
In addition, sales reps require real-time insights to gain understanding about prospects’ needs – and where they are in the buying process. This lets them personalize outreach to increase sales effectiveness.
With analytics and automation at the core, sales acceleration tools give sales organizations a digital compass to get them to their destination faster and in an organized, repeatable manner.
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Learn more in the complete Aberdeen report, “Engage, Personalize, Analyze, Win … Repeat.”
Original Post
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: A Digital Compass to Get to Your Sales Destination
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