It’s easy to jump to the sales tool du jour in the hope that it will boost your numbers. Too many companies have discovered the hard way this is a mistake. Eric Estrilla of Sales Benchmark Index (SalesBenchmarkIndex.com) says the sales tools you implement across your sales operations should be defined by overall organizational needs, which are defined by your product, marketing and sales strategies.
Estrilla offers this five-point plan for eliminating misses and properly defining technologies that will drive your evaluation and guide your technology decisions.
Step 1: Understanding and connecting with your prospect
If your sales technologies, workflow and messaging are inconsistent, chances are your prospects will be confused or not understand the value you bring. A broken step in the lead nurturing workflow may displease the prospect. An inefficient set of sales tools cripples the sales team with too much “busy work” and causes the prospect relationship to suffer.
Step 2: Document sales technologies required to support operations
Accounting for corporate, product, marketing and sales strategies will provide the vision of where the company is heading. Dig deep for the critical objectives or goals where data must be collected or an obvious sales tool is missing. For example, the sales strategy may outline a stronger push into social selling and you know a “social listening” service is missing.
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Or you may see the need to reduce the sales cycle time.
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Or to increase the upsell pipeline to existing customers.
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Or improve the quality of sales leads through marketing automation.
All of these insights will help you document the sales tools or technologies you need.
Step 3: Identify what sales data is needed
Sales operations must determine how current sales data is being collected. Explore the effectiveness of your sales technologies. Seek to eliminate issues and diagnose improvements.
Ask yourself and your sales team:
• How many customer accounts do we have?
• How many accounts are assigned to each salesperson?
• Who are we calling on? Is this the right person?
• What revenue is produced?
• What is our closing percentage?
This information clarifies the gap between the existing and desired situation, tied back to the higher-level sales strategy.
Step 4: Determine how sales data will be used
When it comes to sales strategy implementation, ask the following questions:
Analytics
• What decisions can I make with this sales data?
• How are the sales tools helping my team derive insights?
• Where can we improve and make better decisions?
Reporting
• How can I display the sales data?
• Who will use this data? Why?
• How often is the data needed?
Step 5: Construct the sales technologies roadmap
Write down what technologies you need and how you will get them implemented/adopted. The final step is to document your insights into your roadmap. The previous steps help you match the sales technologies with the core objectives, challenges or unresolved problems.
This work must be timely, include engaging content, score lead quality, and result in more business. Each step in the process has challenges. The key is to match core issues in the sales workflow to appropriate sales technologies. It’s best to use the smallest set of tools with the greatest integration.
