Inflation is near a four-decade high, meaning American shoppers are budgeting and keeping an eye on every penny they spend, ultimately adjusting their overall spending habits. During tough economic times, improving customer service and leveraging solid relationships to attract and retain buyers is a must for businesses to stay on track.
Maintaining the status quo or a one-size-fits-all approach to sales and customer services won’t do the trick in trying times when customers are seeking personalized experiences. However, resources are scarce, especially time and labor. Companies and their sales teams don’t have the luxury of time to reinvent the wheel for each prospect. Putting trust in a solution with knowledge sharing and collaboration capabilities can ensure that personalization and high-level customer communication are not forgotten in the hard-fought sales world.
Data Management Platforms to Increase Knowledge Share
Companies across the globe are swamped with structured and unstructured data, and many business leaders struggle to know what to do with it. Rather than letting it pile up and go unused, data can be beneficial for greater visibility and collaboration among sales teams, making outreach more strategic and proactive while shortening sales cycles. Economic headwinds also impact businesses and employees, so shortening the sales cycle and closing revenue faster is a major plus to strengthen every corner of the operation – not just sales.
Data management platforms can gather every single piece of scattered data and knowledge throughout your company. For sales teams, relevant data comes from product information, customer history (communications, purchase orders, support tickets, website activity), and information on like-minded customers or target audiences. These pieces paint a complete picture of the customer and their habits. When consolidated into a single system, insights can be gained and fed directly to the sales teams. The everlasting hot topic of artificial intelligence extracts meaning and recognizes patterns between different data points. Knowledge extraction can assist in answering questions like “What is the probability John buys our product right now?” or “What is the best way to approach John to secure him as a repeat customer?”
The above has a tremendous domino effect on customer satisfaction because the more you know and learn from your data, the more you can help a customer get to a point where they are happy working with you. In addition, the actual sales team grows more transparent, and processes become smoother.
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Transparent Communication is Key to a Great Sales Team
A great sales team is able to identify new markets, cultivate customer relationships, and generate sustainable and steady growth for the business. With different customer profiles, talking points, and interactions, every selling experience is unique. Often, sales teams have seasoned sellers who have been in the industry for a long time and newcomers from different backgrounds and experiences with selling the product. The sheer ability to leverage information and data collected from other sellers gives the entire sales operation a significant advantage. Sales are challenging to crack because there is not always an apparent reason to the human brain why someone bought or didn’t buy something. Managing data and analyzing holistic views of customers and sellers shed light on every aspect of a sale – behavior, intent, and ultimately the decision. For whatever purpose necessary, the holistic view can then be used as a tool for another seller. For example, they are attempting to sell to a customer with similar reservations to the product. What could be more beneficial to a salesperson than a complete scope of knowledge on a prospect with extreme similarities?
The Overall Goal to Help Empower Sales Teams
It is no secret that sales keep a company running, with consistent revenue streams a prerequisite to any financially sound business. Without a well-functioning sales department, sustainable growth is unfortunately not in the cards. In tough economic times and competitors showing up in every industry and niche market, dependable ways to increase efficiency and intelligence inside your sales teams and processes are highly sought after. With different levels and units of sales teams coexisting, as well as the wide range of communication channels and contact points, it is becoming more and more challenging to keep tabs and overviews of all the customers and potential clients in your pipeline.
Increasing transparency and allowing each touchpoint in the sales funnel of a single customer to generate knowledge for the entire department has a wide range of benefits. Instead of letting critical information about processes and customers vanish into departmental silos, even when standardized handover processes are in place, best practices suggest making the entirety of information fully available to your team. Of course, in full compliance with data privacy laws.
When it is all said and done, easier sales occur, leading to a happier customer base, a satisfied workforce, and more revenue streams.
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