Sales: Data, speed, relevance, and operational excellence

“Don’t call us. We’ll call you.” Modern sales is a challenging arena with a field full of highly-educated prospects. As a result, modern sales teams need to partner with operations professionals to ensure they have everything they need to engage prospects who are savvier, more skeptical, and part of larger and larger buying committees.

Sales organizations need the best possible intel on prospects to engage in successful opportunities. They need a complete data picture on their prospects that is up-to-date and comprehensively includes the details on every previous touchpoint. They need the agility to follow up with interested prospects rapidly. They need to offer highly-targeted, relevant messaging that speaks directly to their prospects’ pain points. And to ensure the highest win rates and the most efficient quote-to-cash process, sales organizations need robust data governance and operational excellence. With good data strategy, sales organizations can successfully orchestrate processes, from outreach to discovery, on through to closed-won and beyond. Without good data strategy, sales organizations struggle.

Learn how modern sales teams are using automation to tackle their challenges:

1. Creating a complete data picture for sales

More than ever, data matters for sales. Incomplete, outdated data hamstrings the sales process. Sellers end up chasing dead leads, skipping over valid accounts, or experiencing other friction. Without the full picture of their prospects’ needs, pain points, and timeline, the sales process starts to break down.

Sellers who lack mission-critical sales data often end up crunching the numbers themselves. Research indicates that sales professionals spend as much as 27% of their time on data entry, not on selling. To drive sales productivity and ensure that sellers have all the data they need at their fingertips, sales organizations are turning to automation.

Sales professionals of all levels spends hours of their day entering data - not selling. Image courtesy HubSpot State of Inbound.

Learn more about how to use automation to provide complete, up-to-date sales data:

• BLOG: Edge out competitors with conversation intelligence
• BLOG: Automate your sales pipeline to close more deals

2. Follow up faster to win more deals

In sales, speed wins. Following up on inbound inquiries makes you 7x more likely to speak to a decision maker, and up to 50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. Sales organizations need to drive more efficiency in the sales cycle to follow-up faster, which is easier said than done. It’s crucial to sales organizations to have smart processes to ensure they can surface the hottest leads and route them immediately to the appropriate sales team. Sales organizations are turning to automation to help them respond faster.

Many organizations are still slow to respond to inbound interest, which means fewer opportunities and fewer deals. Image courtesy HBR.

Learn more about how to follow up faster with automation:

• BLOG: Automated Slack notifications: The future of sales teams
• IN-DEPTH BLUEPRINT: How to automate lead-to-account matching
• CUSTOMER STORY: AdRoll boosts meetings 13% by routing hot leads to sales
• VIDEO: AdRoll integrates disparate lead data to target the best opps

3. Drive relevance to prospect pain points

What's one of the oldest mistakes that sellers make? Talking about themselves and their products instead of their prospects' pain. Research indicates that customers spend 67% of their pre-purchase cycle researching or discussing with buying committees, and only 17% of their time meeting with vendors. Buyers are already looking into features for their next potential purchase. What they need to see is a clear correlation between their business pain and how your company’s products and services solve it.

Sales organizations are combining automation with innovative strategies, such as personalization and account-based approaches, to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.

Buyers spend 67% of their time in research or buying committee discussions, and only 17% of their time meeting with vendors. Image courtesy Gartner.

Learn how to use automation to drive higher relevance in sales messaging:

• BLOG: Personalize emails with the Google search terms used to find you
• BLOG: How to automate account-based sales development
• WEBINAR: Master account-based sales development

4. Sales operations: Operational excellence

Reaching prospects is important. Winning deals is extraordinarily important! But the sales cycle includes many other critical steps. For example, your company needs to get contracted revenue into your company's coffers post-sale. You also need to ensure that CRM records for contacts, opportunities, and accounts stay up-to-date. These equally significant steps require a sales operations team that's aligned to sellers and can offer clean data and efficient processes.

Sales ops professionals are more than just the administrators of your company’s CRM. They ensure that leads get efficiently routed to the right sales teams. They execute the quote-to-cash process to ensure your company correctly processes invoices and payments. Sales organizations that streamline sales processes with automation see 2x revenue, as well as higher deal sizes and profit margins.

Sales organizations that streamline operations see more than 2x revenue. Image courtesy Aberdeen.

Learn how sales ops teams drive higher productivity and higher revenue with automation:

• IN-DEPTH BLUEPRINT: How to automate lead routing
• CUSTOMER STORY: Udemy automates the quote-to-cash process
• WEBINAR: How to close the sales-to-revenue gap
• ON DEMAND DEMO VIDEO: Integrate CRM with project management

5. Show me automation for sales in action!

See how automation helps sales organizations move faster, win more deals, and drive operational excellence in a monthly group demo. These sessions cover real-life use cases that sales organizations regularly use to consolidate sales data, accelerate follow-up, and ensure sales messaging is always relevant. Register now.