If you are revisiting your sales technologies to create deeper business impact in 2021, what are the top factors to keep in mind?
Companies worldwide have accelerated the pace of their digital transformation efforts. In fact, a recent IDC estimate indicated that over $7 trillion will be spent globally on digital change initiatives in the next three years.
In tune with these fundamental shifts in business priorities in the new normal exists also the need for sales leadership and sales teams to identify and invest in advanced sales technologies to meet changing buyer expectations; especially those that can help sales reps scale their efforts.
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The right salestech can help sales teams deal with the pressures of a demanding marketplace to help align processes connected to landing new customers, boosting customer growth rates and increasing revenues.
Before making a decision about your salestech in 2021, here’s what to consider:
Where is the friction in your current customer buying journey?
To truly achieve results with a digital transformation project that is meant to optimize investments in salestech, sales leaders need to identify the biggest problem areas or friction points in the buying journey. These friction points can exist between teams in the company or be created due to dirty data in the integrated tools being used by multiple teams.
Other common elements that can create a negative impact in the customer journey include error prone registrations and forms on the website, confusing pricing structures, tough-to-read web content or unclear updates about your company / product. In a digital environment, even a few of these issues can make prospects or customers churn.
Buyers don’t want introductory calls: Your sales technologies have to help create better prospect meetings
One of the biggest drawbacks of a long-term virtual selling environment – online meeting fatigue. This is something salespeople and even prospects might go through, especially now during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. This is where it’s important to recognize that sales and marketing teams have to plan meetings that are more impactful instead of the usual rounds used in a typical B2B prospecting cadence. In pre Covid days, setting up an introductory call then following up with a case study or sales collateral may have worked. With rising cases of meeting fatigue, its important for sales leaders to drive teams to book first meetings and use the time to drive the next level impact at that point itself – for instance; using a tool to help the prospect instantly compare feature and price differences in offerings with competitors.
B2B buyers are more informed and in most cases, by the time they agree to a call, they already have about 80% of the information they need. Tools that help enable attractive price quotes, boost product demos and enhance the power of sales content and digital content are some technologies that will help drive impactful conversations from the first meeting itself.
Can your salestech tell prospects and customers something new?
Most sales and marketing leaders comfortably follow a process to create white papers, blogs, and how-to content to get their prospects to move across the funnel. But sales teams need more ammunition. Sales reps will typically benefit from technologies that can help them create or update sales decks based on prospect behavior and prospect interests, or tools that can track calls (with AI powered features) to help drive better conversations in the next round, even email tools that can help send mass emails, personalize them and automate their send based on custom requirements are useful.
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Modern sales technology can help sales leaders experiment and test different methods to achieve the outcomes they need. Optimizing a sales team’s productivity can be achieved by leveraging the required sales tools.
What Should Sales and Marketing Teams Keep in Mind for the Rest of 2020? Catch these conversations where leaders from Chili Piper, PopIn, Zilliant (and more!) share some thoughts.
