How to sell more (and to the right people)

“Where do I even begin?” Every sales rep is familiar with the lost feeling of staring at their pipeline in CRM, torn over which opportunities to pursue and how to best reach them. Do they prioritize deals that are about to fall out of the sales funnel? Deals that are near closing? New leads that are waiting on initial contact?

Qualifying and prioritizing sales opportunities is often seen as an art—a sales technique based on gut feeling and intuition. Some sales reps do it well while others spend all of their time pursuing leads that will never close.

That’s not a good way to approach leads. It’s not teachable, replicable or reliable. And when revenue goals and high value deals are thrown into the mix, it’s just too big of a risk to rely on your sales reps’ “good feelings about a deal.”

According to CSO Insights, only 46.5% of forecasted deals actually close. Pair that with Sirius Decisions’ finding that only 18% of a sales rep’s time is actually spent interacting with prospects, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

Sales reps aren’t spending enough time selling as it is, and if they’re selling to the wrong people, they’re simply not going to achieve quota.

The solution is clear: sales reps need a way to spend more time selling to the right buyers.

Here’s what that looks like:

More time selling

Sales reps engage in a variety of selling tasks on a daily basis, with the most common being:

• Phone calls
• Emails
• Demos/meetings
• CRM data entry
• Researching buyers
• Finding/customizing sales resources

Buyer experience is a key component of winning deals. In fact, the Harvard Business Review found that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. Yet only the first three activities in that list require one-on-one, personalized communication with the buyer. These are the activities sales reps need to be focusing on, but unfortunately a majority of their selling time and effort is spent on the bottom half of this list.

CRM data entry, buyer research and personalizing resources are all things that need to happen, but they don’t have to be time consuming. In some cases, they don’t even need to be done by the sales rep.

• Automate the CRM data entry using activity tracking
• Automate buyer research using an aggregated market intelligence tool like InsideView
• Automate the buyer customization process using content personalization wizards

Through automation technology alone, your sales reps get back a huge chunk of their time to spend selling.

More selling to the right buyers

Imagine moving away from the “where do I even begin?” scenario to one like this:

When sales reps arrive at work, they log into their sales enablement platform, which pulls up their sales dashboard. It’s a clear and highly visual page that shows sales reps their opportunities, their interactions and responses with buyers, and their upcoming events and tasks.

All of the data is pulled from CRM, but it’s now displayed in a way for reps to assess in just seconds exactly what they should do today to move their most important sales deals through the buying process.

The platform is interactive, allowing sales reps to sort opportunities by name, account or value. More importantly, reps can organize opportunities by importance. The big data analytics engine that serves as the sales enablement platform’s foundation will analyze all of the data available for each opportunity—deal size, amount of buyer engagement, number of members of buying team and so much more. Then using Accent’s sales algorithm, the analytics engine will update in real time to show which opportunity is most in need of attention.

Sales reps can instantly visualize their sales pipeline, the total activity for buyers and sellers, and even the health of individual opportunities or contacts. This goes far beyond the generic reports available in CRM. Sales enablement systems build on basic CRM data by adding more data sources to the mix like buyer and seller activity tracking for a complete 360 degree view into the sales situation. Now display that data in a visual, easily digestible way—and sales reps can quickly grasp the important information they need to move deals forward.

So here’s the whole picture:

• A data-driven approach to sales opportunity qualification and prioritization.
• A big data analytics engine that removes the guesswork from the equation.
• A platform that visualizes data so that sales reps can tell at a glance which opportunities to pursue first and how to best interact with those prospects.

That’s how you get your sales reps to sell more and to the right people.

Interested in seeing the sales enablement platform for yourself? Schedule a 10-minute demo.