Enabling Greater Account-Based Visibility Than Ever Before – Part 1

To sales leaders, there are key questions that help forecast if a deal is going to close. They are the same questions we ask during pipeline reviews, 1-on-1 sessions, and the sporadic Slack ping:

• What was the last touch-point?
• Are we speaking to the right people?
• Is the buyer well engaged?

Finding the answers can be a complex task. Maybe the information is buried in CRM. Maybe the answers are missing from CRM. What we have found is that the answers are buried in the emails and calendars of the sales team, so leaders rely on their teams to fill them in. But while they put forth their best effort to relay this answers, the actual answers get lost in translation.

With SalesWise, sales management can avoid the translation step and immediately have a complete view into key account relationships. It’s why we developed the first-ever Relationship Graph.

The Relationship Graph quickly illustrates sales relationships for leaders and their teams without complex reporting and catchups. Because we aggregate every email, meeting invite, and document ever sent or received across the entire enterprise, we show the most comprehensive visualization of an account—impossible to see in CRM.

In this two-part blog series, we’re sharing how the Relationship Graph empowers you, as a sales leader, to quickly and easily answer your most pressing questions. In this post, we dive into questions related to the buy-side of an opportunity.

Are the right people involved?

The modern B2B sale involves an average buyer group of 7-8 people, according to Gartner, but how many of these contacts actually exist in CRM? In most cases, only the Champion the salesperson has been interacting with is entered, and maybe a key influencer. In fact, we found 66% of contacts to be missing from the CRM buried in the email server.

For the first time, you can have an instant understanding of the players involved with any given account – are the right personas involved? The SalesWise Relationship Graph highlights every account contact being interacted with today, and all the way back since the beginning of the sales journey. Quickly understand the roles of each contact, and ensure the right personas are being engaged by the sales team.

Know, too, when more contacts are jumping into the conversation – a leading indicator of a progressing sale. Managers can now quickly determine if they should insert him/herself into the conversation to help close the deal, or coach the rep to close the deal effectively.

When/what was the last interaction with the key decision maker? Key influencers?

Recency – so much about sales is about timing – to be able to strike while the iron is hot, especially when leaders are staring at the end of quarter.

The Relationship Graph quickly gives sales leaders a view of engagement with those key personas mentioned earlier against a timeline. Stretch the timeline to the inception of an opportunity, or focus on the last 30 days when the deal has been heating up.

Sales management can now quickly see when the last engagement was – not just when a sales rep sent an email, but when the prospect sent an email. This gives a more accurate representation of how a deal is flowing – sales reps spamming prospects in the last month is not an indicator of success. Recent, consistent dialogue between sales and the prospects is.

The Relationship Graph helps leaders see this quickly and easily.

Are key stakeholders actively engaging?

One metric sales professionals have used as a proxy for relationship health is open and click rates. Someone who is opening more often is surely more apt to buy than someone who isn’t, right? Opens and clicks can excite sales reps. However, that’s not the case for more experienced sales professionals and their leaders. Unfortunately, sales reps may still give a rose-colored view of the sales relationship. How many emails a rep sends surely means the deal is progressing, too, right? Not quite.

The Relationship Graph enables leaders to quickly see how engaged a prospect really is. The Graph does not track opens. Instead, the Graph tracks sends and receives. Sales managers can now see explicitly if reps are sending a flurry of emails with no response. Managers can dive deeper into the actual interactions by clicking into any contact to observe every email exchanged, document shared, and meeting taken place or upcoming – objective insights.

Each key contact can now be visually represented by engagement with the Relationship Graph.

Let the Graph be your key to objectively assessing sales relationships.

Empower this Visibility into Your Own Accounts

SalesWise’s new Relationship Graph delivers unparalleled, enterprise-wide visibility into what’s really happening in key accounts and client relationships.

This post described how the Graph answers your important questions about the buy-side of a deal.

In Part 2, we’ll explain how you can gain insight into why the other half of the Relationship Graph is key to successful sales and customer experience – the sell-side.