Sales can be a tough task, leave alone selling when your buyer and you are confined to one place.
As the world is grappling from the effects of the pandemic, it has become essential for sales folks to get equipped with the nitty-gritties of remote selling.
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Remote selling can be a tedious task if not meticulously planned with the support of the right sales tech. Although, you have the liberty of being inside your home for the entire day while most of us work from home, it could be difficult to stay motivated and juggle multiple sales tasks effectively.
A disciplined remote sales person needs to ensure that he can utilized the time to optimum levels by ensuring tasks which are of utmost importance are prioritized first.
Automating tasks which are secondary or time consuming plays an important step to adding that discipline to your schedule and making sure that you have enough time at your disposal for important tasks.
There are a few tasks that every Sales Rep or Sales Manager must automate to ensure efficiency and save time:
1: Prospecting
In today’s world ask any salesperson which is tougher- Prospecting or Closing. You would have maximum people choosing Prospecting. In today’s world where buyers have loads of data and the information at their behest, the buying cycle has become much easier. Owing to this prospecting becomes more important as more than half your battle is won here. Automating this task with the help of tools like ZoomInfo, Seamless.AI, Linkedin Sales Navigator helps you save hours of manual work and time on finding leads.
2: Calendar Scheduling/ Appointment Scheduling:
Scheduling appointments ensures you utilize the best of your time. It also illustrates to others that you value your own time. While scheduling a meeting there are times you might be stuck in an infinite loop figuring out the best time and date for everyone.
This results in a lot of time being wasted and too much back and forth. Meeting scheduling software allows you to define your availability, remove the risk of double booking a time slot, and eliminate the back-and-forth. Calendly, Google Calendar, X. ai , Doodle, Hubspot Sales,etc ensure your availability is visible and your meetings are stacked correctly without any conflicts.
3: Document Sharing
Salespeople deal with a lot of documents in their day to day activities. It could be right from dealing with proposals to sharing presentations, there is a lot of time dedicated to documents. Automating this process helps in a lot of ways.
Improving efficiency- Salespeople can generate more proposals and contracts and spend more time selling
Increase Accuracy- Error free documents and proposals
Efficient Collaboration- Everyone receiving the document can collaborate without wasting time.
Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, OneDrive have made processes simpler for salespeople.
4: CRM (Sales Information Tracking)
This is a no brainer for every modern sales person. The value of a CRM increases ten folds when you are selling remotely. The information stacked in a CRM is readily available and super-efficient compared to maintaining excel sheets. CRM’s like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamicxs, Zoho, Pipedrive etc help ease this for salespeople.
5: Collaboration Tools
Imagine spending tons of hours discussing with your teammates about things to do via email. The entire waiting game along with the back and forth is a nightmare for productivity.
Tools such as Slack, Ring Central Glip, Microsoft Teams, Chanty help overcome this obstacle with seamless collaboration between teams. It could be collaboration between the entire sales group or it could helping with communications with the rest of the organizations.
6: Sales Conversation Intelligence
This one is an important tool especially for Sales Managers and SDR Leaders. Conversation Intelligence helps you analyse customer conversations across different mediums (calls, video,email etc). There is meaningful data achieved in terms of feedback for the reps. This totally eradicates the time consuming process of meeting notes after the call. A lot of important data is sometimes lost in this manual process. Tools like Gong, Chorus.AI, CallMiner, Avoma, Observe.AI ensure sales teams are at the top of their game by providing valuable feedback to their reps.
7: Sales Forecasting/ Revenue Intelligence Tools
This one again would be an important automation tool for Sales Managers and Sales Leaders. It’s a pain staking process to go through hundreds of spreadsheets with a lot of errors to forecast sales numbers. Sales Forecasting Tools enable a streamlined process to get reports and analysis. Clari, Gong, Pipe drive, Insight Squared etc. ensure error free forecasting in less time to increase efficiency and productivity for sales teams.
8: Sales Engagement Tools
What takes a lot of time of your Sales team? Manual- Repetitve Tasks, Personalization, Omni Channel, Multi- Touch Points, Filling in CRM data.
Sales Engagement is the answer to all pain points and challenges faced by sales teams
A Sales Engagement platform helps sales teams to efficiently deliver high-quality interactions with prospects and customers at scale.By Automating multiple processes the platform helps reps focus on importat activities.
SalesLoft, Outreach, Outplay, Groove, DeaHub, Xant.Ai etc ensure your sales teams turns into a revenue generating machine.
Although sales teams are working remotely now, it essentially doesn’t mean they need to work solo.
The modern day salestech systems are there to ensure better collaboration, team work and sharing of knowledge.
As we enter a phase where automation tools have become a necessity, Sales Automation tools are constantly evolving to make sure that sales team are at their peak. It’s just a matter of time when every sales team treats these tools as must-haves!