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How Your Sales Tech Stack Can Improve Sales Performance
marketsource.com
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One of the tools that helps with this is voice analytics. Our calls are recorded, and the voice analytics tool looks for certain keywords. For example, if the call’s goal is a solution sale, we want to look for the seller to ask who the “owners” are in other departments and ask for permission to contact them. Similarly, if there are certain phrases sellers shouldn’t use in a sales conversation, those phrases are flagged as well. “We ask our sales reps to choose their best and worst calls every week and send them to their managers for weekly one-on-one coaching and feedback, which is managed by another piece of technology integrated into the CRM.” For field reps, we have video technology that lets them practice and record their pitch and then send it to peers or managers for input.
Your sales team is engaging with lots of accounts. Keeping those accounts interested, informed, and interacting with you is where customer engagement comes in, as it defines and determines the ongoing relationship between you and your customer. “It’s all automated and there’s a flowchart of what’s going to happen—how many calls the rep will make today to A accounts, how many emails or texts to B accounts, and how many social touches to C accounts, for example—all integrated into the CRM.” Our business analysts are essential here. For example, they look at buying patterns and tell us what time of month our prospects buy, and we build our cadence around that pattern. Because these tasks automatically show up on our sales reps’ calendars, their productivity goes up exponentially.
Skills & Acumen Training: Help Reps Master Their Craft “As part of our onboarding, we use skills assessment technology and selling scenarios to determine sales reps’ strengths and weaknesses.” Our goal with ongoing skills and acumen training is to equip our sellers with the techniques they can use to make the most of their “at bats” on the phone or in person with their prospects. There are about a dozen of these skills required, depending on the salesperson’s place in the sales process. For example, salespeople need different skills and acumen for different roles and goals, such as qualifying leads, getting past the gatekeeper, articulating the value proposition, or finding others who are involved in the buying process.
And you’re not alone: 85% of sellers say they lost or delayed a deal in the last year because a key client stakeholder switched jobs.i “So anchor your tech stack with a rich and powerful data source that provides insight into customer profiles, company attributes, and intent—one that finds prospects early in the buying process, looks for patterns, and can identify buying personas.” Some data sources are now using artificial intelligence (AI) to determine, for example, if prospects use their cell phones to conduct business, and if so, that number is added to the database. Every bit of data helps.
I don’t know of another company doing what we’re doing in terms of sales technology, and I am passionate about sharing how we do what we do. “The technology must increase skill or acumen, eliminate wasteful steps, automate a process, and provide sellers with useful information.” We support and surround our sales professionals with niche expertise that not only helps individual sellers become outperformers but also standardizes and makes our approach replicable.
I don’t know of another company doing what we’re doing in terms of sales technology, and I am passionate about sharing how we do what we do. “Our goal is always to decrease “red” time (administrative time) and increase “green” time (selling time).” We support and surround our sales professionals with niche expertise that not only helps individual sellers become outperformers but also standardizes and makes our approach replicable.