Show me the way: How guided selling helps seal more deals
The modern B2B sales process is dynamic and fast-paced. Through guided selling, businesses can empower their sellers to engage more effectively with customers and win more deals.
Are you empowering your sales organization to overcome challenges, connect with prospects, and win business? Do you have the agility and flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing market conditions?
According to a McKinsey and Company study, many business leaders aren’t aware or haven’t taken advantage of sales automation benefits, which are growing across a range of use cases.
Sales automation solutions provide three strategic benefits:
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Provide a holistic view of the customer
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Increase sales productivity and effectiveness
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Optimize sales processes
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Let’s explore the purpose of modern sales automation and how advanced technology is helping sales teams become more agile and effective.
Sales automation benefits: A far cry from traditional CRM
It’s important to understand the difference between today’s sales automation technology and traditional CRM. Traditional CRM solutions were designed to help organizations capture and manage customer data, but there’s a lot more to customer relationships and selling than data alone.
The manual nature of data entry into the CRM wound up hurting sales performance and reduced CRM adoption. In turn, that created new problems: Poor sales experiences, sales rep attrition, and bad customer data making its way into the CRM.
The true folly of traditional CRM was the unusable nature of CRM data. Frankly, legacy CRM solutions failed to provide actionable insights to the individuals who needed them most, like sales reps and sales managers.Modern sales automation, on the other hand, is designed to help organizations automate and connect critical sales processes from lead to cash, enabling customer-centricity throughout the sales process. This improves the experience for the seller and customer alike.
Previously laborious administrative and reporting tasks are streamlined through connected data, so sellers can really focus on what matters: engaging with customers, building customer relationships and helping drive revenue growth. Simply put, they can focus on selling and delivering customer value.
Effective sales automation solutions help organizations streamline and optimize:
- Forecasting
- Pipeline management
- Lead management
- Opportunity management
- Activity tracking (calls, emails and support tickets)
- Visit routing for field sales
- Reporting and analytics (win rate, close rate, conversion rate, renewal rate and more)
- Resource allocation and talent management
Complete customer view, empowered sellers
Without sales automation, sales reps can waste precious time trying to track, reconcile, and correlate historical customer data only to find that the outcome of their labor is unusable. Bad data, disjointed data, incomplete data… the list goes on.
Not to mention the activities and touchpoints that might be missed during this tedious process. How can they manage what they can’t see, let alone understand?
With sales automation benefits, organizations can empower sellers with a holistic view of every customer. They can understand where customers are in their journey, where they’re coming from, and what their intent most likely is. Sellers can view all customer touch points and gather the right insights at the right moment.By deeply understanding buyers, sales reps can engage with them strategically. They can make every interaction count, build strong relationships, and capitalize on opportunities.
More sales, more $$$$
As manual tasks are reduced with sales automation, sales reps can spend more time growing the relationships while helping drive revenue growth.
Moreover, a modern sales automation solution leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to provide recommendations and activity guidance. It can also prioritize leads and opportunities based on intelligent scoring and provide forecast intelligence and visual pipeline analysis. Armed with this insight, sales reps can become the trusted advisors customers need.
By focusing on the right opportunities and by better managing sales pipelines or forecasting sales more accurately, organizations can boost sales effectiveness to increase deal velocity and win rates.The sales process audit: 7 magic questions to ask (and answer)
A sales process, like every other machine, needs maintenance. Learn how to conduct a sales process audit to understand your weaknesses and strengths.
Measure and optimize
How can you act when you can’t measure?
With a modern sales automation solution, sales teams can access critical insights to take action in real time. They can seamlessly drill down into problem areas and access the underlying data or transaction, both online and offline.For example, sales managers no longer have to harangue sales reps to find out the true status of a deal; they have the objective data to determine whether a deal is in trouble. This can help them take next steps to remedy the situation.
With interactive dashboards, organizations can optimize sales processes, better support sales teams, simplify the reporting process, reduce administration time and increase close sales rates.
The multiplier effect: Benefits of sales automation
One thing that we’ve learned over the past year, is that organizations need to embrace technology and better enable their people in order to be more resilient, responsive, and successful.
According to McKinsey and Company, leading companies are adopting automation as a key driver of cost efficiency and increased sales.
You can multiple the benefits of a sales automation solution by connecting and combining it with a customer service management solution.
When sales and service teams can collaborate and have access to the same view of the customer, they can both help achieve better business outcomes. Customer service teams can help drive new product sales and increase service contract sales. This is what I like to call a multiplier effect!By embracing sales automation, organizations reap multiple benefits: Customers will have better experiences, sales reps are more engaged, and sales will soar.
