In a recent conversation of The SalesStar Podcast by SalesTechStar, Ed Hill, SVP and GM for the EMEA – at Bazaarvoice spoke about a few interesting ways for sales teams to drive business impact.
Read the snippets of the conversation or catch the complete podcast episode here.
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What can B2B Sales Teams Focus on More; with Ed Hill, SVP and GM for EMEA, Bazaarvoice
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Don’t Overlook the Fundamentals
In a tough and competitive market, it is important to identify prospects and organizations that are worth reaching out to, ideally, those that can benefit from your technology or offering and service on the whole, those that already have interest in your type of service.
Most times, sales teams end up reaching out to what they feel are ideal fit target accounts and they miss out on these crucial aspects above that can help them save their own time and filter targets in a more fruitful manner.
At this stage, it also helps to not just identify the right accounts and prospects but to also spend your time connecting with them in an orchestrated and professional way.
You need to position yourself accordingly and prioritize and segment your audience. Demonstrate how you can help them, while keeping in mind, it’s not about you, it’s about enabling them.
It’s about helping them think differently while you are being laser focused at the core. This is what can trigger those must-have long term customer relationships that drive retention and repeat sales.
At the core of it all, for every sales outreach: learn to – Deliver more, with less!
Identify what Needs to be Fixed in your Overall Sales Process
It is crucial for everyone across the sales hierarchy to understand how sales is changing.
For some target prospects and accounts, a face-to-face sales cadence might be more useful, for others, virtual sales models may work just as well. Seeing how digital sales processes have evolved over the years, this is where sales teams need to understand what their prospects would benefit from: a face-to-face meeting or a complete hybrid sales cadence/
Furthermore, using the right skill sets and tools is key to driving impact here. Sales is evolving, this is one part of the story, the skills needed to drive brand growth and ROI are evolving too.
While it looks like face to face meetings are picking up pace now, it is not always possible to do so if you have distributed accounts and sellers. You need to have the right hybrid sales best practices here to drive growth through virtual means.
A few tips to follow when driving virtual sales cadences:
- Ensure your mic and other connectivity systems work
- Have a clear cut agenda
- Wrap up conversations within a short duration
Additionally, learn to add value through the sales cadence you follow. Work closely with the customer and keep your key stakeholders involved when there are challenges at any stage. This can help fix things in real time.
Don’t overlook the importance of reaching out to the right individuals in a target account and to create the right value-add when in front of them.
Choose your SalesTech Wisely
The choice of salestech should depend on the kind of customer journey and prospect journey you want to provide.
Don’t look at salestech in isolation
Understand your sales process flow and then choose your salestech to help you deliver a world class experience. Work backwards to identify what kind of salestech can help you drive that intended brand journey for prospects.
Keep in mind, Sales Technology for technology’s sake is not the answer
What works for one business unit or organization may not work well for others. Moreover, for distributed teams – there could be a need to have different tools region wise based on regional needs, challenges and capability. The idea is to tie in all these tools into centralized reporting dashboard to have the right sales leaders evaluate results of each campaign or cold call to make fixes at the right time, in real-time.
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