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Social Selling: What It Is and How to Enhance It (Part 2)

Last week, I talked a bit about what social selling is and how it can help your sales team become more successful. In part two of this blog, I am sharing how having a complete picture of an account relationship in SalesWise has enabled me to be even more successful in my social selling efforts.

As a quick reminder, “Social selling is when salespeople use social media to interact directly with their prospects,” according to HubSpot. Though, social selling is not using social media as additional channels for spamming prospects. A successful social selling approach enables salespeople to provide valuable insights to their customers and prospects by paying attention to and understanding their interests.

Once a sale is in progress, sellers know that understanding each person who gets pulled into a buying decision is paramount. Unfortunately, not every sales conversation ends as a Closed Won opportunity. When trying to revive those deals, every salesperson is familiar with the challenges of bringing an old opportunity back to life, specifically if it belonged to a rep that is no longer with the organization. These situations lend themselves well to social selling, and since joining SalesWise, my efforts doing just that have been enhanced thanks to the context the SalesWise platform provides.

Deal Revivals

Reviving old Closed Lost opportunities is a common, and often fruitful, technique for many sales organizations — especially during onboarding of new reps. But anybody who has ever tried to revive a deal knows this story well: a sales rep opens several Salesforce tasks hoping there are good activity notes, gives up, and then, essentially, cold calls the or emails the former prospect. This is particularly true if the sales rep is trying to revive a deal that belonged to a salesperson no longer with the company.

Having visibility into the content of emails that have been sent between my company and a prospect organization in SalesWise gives me far more detail than I would have otherwise and makes that initial interaction with a customer more valuable for them. SalesWise captures all the historical interaction with a prospect that exists on your email server, giving a picture of the complete relationship. Our connection to the email server also means that every action and contact is represented, regardless of how diligent (or not) reps have been about logging data in CRM. Being able to see exactly who was involved gives also gives me information on who I need to “socially surround” as I am trying to get reconnected with a prospect.

Once the Selling Begins

As you get deeper into a B2B sales cycle with a prospective customer, more and more people typically get involved. Whether that involvement is coming from within the seller’s organization or the prospect’s, the phrase “buying by committee” starts to come to mind. Fortunately, SalesWise organizes every contact in a relationship, merely by virtue of them sending or receiving an email or calendar invite. This enables the sales professional to know precisely who is involved in their deals – on both sides of the table.

The benefit of seeing the people my champion is bringing into the deal is fairly obvious — I can research those folks and come to future meetings and demos with a better awareness of their interests. Having visibility into everything that’s happening with my accounts outside of my workflow, even if I am not cc’d on the emails my technical team and their technical team are exchanging for example, helps me target my sales efforts within an prospect company strategically. It is also a great reminder to leverage the social connections of the people within my organization – something that’s often overlooked. As with most sales techniques in today’s environment, being able to successfully implement them with an account-based focus is crucial to success.

As tools like LinkedIn and Twitter become increasingly indispensable for conducting business, it’s unlikely that social selling is going away anytime soon. Being able to use these tools to provide more valuable information to your prospects will make you a partner in your buyer’s journey as opposed to just another salesperson. However, as with most things, social selling is improved when you have more context – exactly what SalesWise can provide you about your business relationships.

Social Selling: What Is It and How to Enhance It (Part 1)

August 17, 2017/0 Comments/in Business Relationship Intelligence, customer relationship, Sales /by Nicole Nystrom

In the two years since I took my first course on social selling, the approach has reached buzzword status as it spreads throughout B2B sales teams. There has been a lot of debate as to what social selling is as well as what it’s not. But one thing is undeniable – it’s useful. Teams that successfully employ social selling convert customers at a higher rate, acquire new customers faster, and are more likely to hit their revenue goals.

While no one LinkedIn comment or Twitter like has closed a deal on its own, social selling has become a way for high-performing sales teams to provide value to prospects long before closing a contract. But as great as social selling may be, sales teams still require traditional communication channels, like email and meetings, to convert prospects into paying customers. Or do they?
Since joining the SalesWise team in April, I have continued to use social selling techniques to better understand prospects and customers. Having the more complete picture of who is involved in an account that SalesWise offers has complimented my social efforts because I have a more informed sense of who to target with my sales outreach.

In this two-part blog, I will share the value of social selling and how the SalesWise platform enables you to capitalize on those benefits. In this post, I will examine what social selling is and where it falls in the broader spectrum of today’s B2B selling environment.

What Social Selling Is and Isn’t

According to HubSpot, “Social selling is when salespeople use social media to interact directly with their prospects.” But it’s more than just using sites like Linkedin as a channel to connect to prospective clients. At its core, social selling is about fostering actual relationships with prospects by paying attention and understanding their interests in order to share useful insights that apply specifically to them.

Social media is a great tool for allowing salespeople to be more aware of a prospect, but sometimes, social selling goes awry by being overly ambitious, and thus off-putting. Social selling isn’t about stalking your prospects online, liking, and commenting on everything they post or blasting them with cold pitches via InMail once they connect with you. Of course, persistence is a necessary trait of a successful salesperson, but it’s important to strike a balance between being persistent and being overwhelming (and creepy for that matter).

Social Selling and Account-Based Everything

Learning what the individuals on buying committees—from influencers to champions, to the one signing the check—value and connecting them with compelling material across different channels aligns with best practices in the world of account-based marketing and selling.
A popular phrase is “socially surround your buyer.” Though this isn’t very different from the notion of strategically targeting a prospect company and the buyers within that account. In today’s world of account-based marketing and selling, social selling has become an indispensable tool for sales organizations who want to improve their game. It bridges the gap of the “cold” sales outreach. Instead, social selling brings personality into the sales process.

Social Selling Still Requires Selling

Social selling is supposed to be a compliment, not a substitute, to today’s sales practices. It shouldn’t be a replacement for using phone calls and emails for prospect outreach, nor should it eliminate face-to-face interactions. Ultimately, successful salespeople use social selling as an addendum to traditional approaches to get business done. Otherwise, sales professionals run the risk of being seen as just another spam-filled LinkedIn notification.

Understanding buyer engagement is just as important if you have nurtured a relationship with prospects at a target account, regardless of if that’s been through social channels or not. Understanding the personas of all the players that join an opportunity only enhances a well-crafted social selling and account-based process. At the end of the day, though, business is conducted via emails, meetings, and calls, like it has been since before the days of social selling.

Enabling Effective Social Selling

This post explored what social selling is and why it is important, but enabling effective social selling can be tricky. In Part 2, we’ll explore how the SalesWise platform makes social selling efforts more powerful by providing rich relationship context about prospective customers.

Enabling Greater Account-Based Visibility Than Ever Before – Part 2

August 10, 2017/0 Comments/in Business Relationship Intelligence, CRM, customer relationship, Sales, Team, Visibility /by Nicole Nystrom

SalesWise recently introduced the first-ever Relationship Graph – a visual representation of account relationships and interactions occurring on both the buy-side and the sell-side.

In Part 1, we explained how the Relationship Graph answers sales leaders’ most pressing questions about the buy-side of an opportunity. Today, Part 2 details how the Graph provides key insights from the sell-side of deals.

When was the last time we engaged?

Too often, the answers tend to be “just last week” or some other subjective response that paints a more optimistic picture. Even pulling reports on recent activities can be cumbersome. Or worse, the interactions are not entered into CRM leaving reporting to be severely challenged. Credit is given when it was not deserved, or credit is not given where it is.

The Relationship Graph organizes all of the email, meeting, and CRM interactions instantly enabling easy understanding of the engagement timeline. Leaders are able to quickly see whether clients have been engaged recently, or if too much time has passed with no (or infrequent) touch-points. Now, managers can intervene before it’s too late. No other visualization provides this degree of accuracy, especially, not one requiring no additional effort from the sales team.

Who from my company is interacting with customers?

Less than half of companies give CRM access to non-sales departments, according to Capterra. While non-sales departments have important communications with clients, many of those interactions are never captured in CRM. The shift toward account-based selling only drives up the number of folks involved on the selling side. Orchestration of account-based sales, then, remains a huge challenge for companies before the Relationship Graph.

The Relationship Graph instantly completes the missing picture of sales by automatically aggregating all interactions between the selling company and the prospects and customers. This especially improves the effectiveness of enterprise, global, and outside sales teams.

Management would no longer have to constantly ping other people in order to get the answers they need. Did Susan from accounting send over the contract? Did Bill from engineering get their log-in set up? Did Mike from client success follow up? With the Relationship Graph, the answers are at your fingertips and no longer a walk across the office or an interrupting phone call away. As a sales leader, this is also critical for you to ensure that your team isn’t dropping hand-offs and making sure that the customer is getting their needs met.

Is the engagement reciprocated?

Looking at the frequency of outbound messages provides a better idea of how engaged a prospect is, but seeing how often and what the sentiment is of the responses completes the picture of an interaction. Tracking email opens and clicks is useful, but if all of the activity with an account is solely the sales rep pushing communication out to no response, it becomes clear that this is not an engaged prospect – and likely not a deal about to close.

The Relationship Graph visually shows the break down of internal communication and prospect communication with any account or individual. This allows leaders to immediately see how interested a prospect is, and as a sales leader, may be an indication that a given deal needs management intervention.

Harness the Power of Visibility

The new Relationship Graph from SalesWise provides instant, unprecedented visibility into the crucial accounts that matter most, both on the buy- and sale-side of your business.

Learn how you can unlock all of the contacts buried in email across the enterprise, and get Relationship Graphs for your most important deals – with no data entry and completely free for 14 days. Click here to learn more.

3 Reasons Why You Need an Account-Based Selling Strategy

June 8, 2017/0 Comments/in business emails, Business Relationship Intelligence, customer relationship, Productivity, Sales, Visibility /by Daryl

Shifting to an Account-Based Selling (ABS) strategy causes an organization-wide shift in all customer-facing roles – sales and marketing to customer success and renewals. It can be an intimidating task, but when implemented correctly, can yield significant sales opportunities. In fact, ~85% of marketers who measure return on investment (ROI) describe account-based marketing (ABM) as delivering higher returns than any other marketing approach (ITSMA).

Still need some convincing? We’ve compiled three chief reasons for an ABS strategy:

Purchasing groups are larger than ever.

B2B sales, today, involve an average purchasing group of 5.4 people. Adding in that second decision maker decreases the success rate by 67% (Forbes).

While in the past, you may have sold (and only engaged) to the primary user (“Champion”), you are now likely selling to the champion plus the CEO, CMO, IT Director, and Sales Manager. With the number of vendors vying for the attention of these Heads of State, successful closes require targeted, personal messaging

Landing and expanding is more challenging than you think.

The land-and-expand strategy is nothing new, and fundamentally has the same principle as ABS: a sale is bigger than the relationship between an individual and a product. It’s between the account, or company, with the product.

ABS inherently enables and in some cases accelerates this process, because of expanded, targeted engagement. When you’re involving more people in the buying process from the beginning, capitalizing on the introductions makes expansion into other functional groups more natural.

You need a specific strategy to be successful – and ABS provides that structure.

Because ABS involves many functional groups (on both your side and that of your prospect’s), it requires a unified plan. Without strategically looking at your potential accounts, the data surrounding them and the key players and messaging involved, ABS will inevitably fail. And while other sales and marketing methodologies may get the job done without this level of attention to detail, ABS forces this structure and collaboration.

Sending a barrage of emails is not an effective sales strategy. B2B email-only strategies are the most unsuccessful of any industry with only 24% being opened. Of that, only 12% are clicked through (Sign-Up.to). While ABS requires a major cultural shift, the potential growth in ROI greatly outweighs the effort needed to make this shift. In some ways, it’s also a required evolution.

Ready to start implementing your ABS strategy but not sure where to start? Read our recent blog post, How to Implement Your ABS Strategy or learn how SalesWise can provide greater visibility to your sales leaders and drive additional incremental revenue when shifting to an Account-Based Sales strategy (see how it works). Schedule a quick demo with one of our representatives to see how SalesWise enables ABS teams.

How to Implement Your Account-Based Selling Strategy

June 1, 2017/0 Comments/in business emails, Business Relationship Intelligence, customer relationship, Productivity, Sales, Visibility /by Nicole Nystrom

Account-Based Selling (ABS) is the hottest strategy on every marketer and sales leader’s mind. But, as with any successful strategic change, you don’t just wave a magic wand and “ta-da!” it magically works.

The growth of ABS is largely due to the organizational shift to larger buying groups. Running a successful ABS strategy requires planning, organization, alignment between functional groups and, ultimately, a strategy for execution.

In this post, we’ll walk you through the key steps to implementing an ABS strategy within your organization.

Define your Ideal Customer Profile

It’s important to keep in mind when executing an ABS strategy that you’re focusing on a handful of key accounts. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck trying to boil the ocean – you can’t send highly targeted, expertly personalized content to all of the thousands (or tens of thousands) of contacts in your CRM.

When you’re evaluating your accounts, you’ll first need to define the characteristics of your ideal prospect account, or Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Mine through your active pipeline to find the accounts that meet those criteria. Targeting the right companies dramatically boosts sales; increasing lead quality by only 10% can translate to a 40% improvement in sales productivity (Marketo). This isn’t to say you completely ignore those “non-ideal” accounts (and likely, the majority of your pipeline). Instead, continue with an outbound nurturing campaign utilizing some custom fields for personalization, but allows you to focus the majority of your efforts on your ICPs.

Define your Buyer Personas

Defining your target buyer doesn’t end after you’ve found the accounts. One of the defining features of ABS is that you’re touching multiple job roles within one ICP. The goal is to provide these contacts with compelling, useful content. Gartner found the typical B2B buying group now has, on average, seven different buying influencers. Mapping out the defining characteristics of each potential influencer provides a solid foundation for the messaging that will go to each.

In addition, these new contacts will play an important role if your long-term plan is to “land and expand” within accounts. Building these relationships early, and defining where your product or service adds value beyond the target buyer makes for an easier expansion into wider functional groups. In fact, when surveyed by Alterra Group, 84% of marketers said that Account-Based Marketing (ABM) had significant benefits to retaining and expanding existing client relationships.

Develop your content and messaging

If you’ve spent all of that time and energy defining your target accounts and individuals within those accounts, but don’t tailor your message to them, your ABS strategy will fall upon deaf ears and may even damage the relationship.

In this step, you need to put yourself in the shoes of your potential buyer: What are their pain points? What types of content would they find useful? How can our product solve their pains? These conversations should be about how this specific buyer can experience the most value in their role, not the high-level benefits of your product.

The good news is that you likely already have some content that can be repurposed to fit the specific personas. A good starting point is to map out your existing content and determine which pieces are relevant to a given persona and at which stage of their buyer journey. From there, decide which topics need to be tweaked and expanded upon, and which topics need to be created from scratch.

In addition, reach out to your team members in different functional groups, as they are subject matter experts in various aspects of your business. A member of your marketing team might be willing to put together a blog post for the CMO on your prospect’s side, or your Director of IT will be able to combat some of the potential barriers to buying your technology. Capitalizing on your internal resources not only takes some of the pressure off of the project leader but may provide insight unique to a person in that functional role.

Make the connection and diversify the messaging

Breaking through the noise and reaching prospects is a challenge most organizations go through. But once the initial connection is made, diversification of channels is vital to the success of your ABS strategy. While the message itself may be more targeted, endless emails and voicemails begin to lose their impact.

In a survey by Bizible.com, 87.5% of companies leverage email marketing, and 84.2% leverage social media marketing, making it a heavily saturated environment. Including personalized social media outreach, phone calls, and direct mail can help reach your prospects in a more personalized and effective way. For an even more memorable message, include physical mail and packages, or a video email that is customized to that individual recipient. These types of interactions are hyper-personalized in nature, leaving a lasting impression with your prospect.

Follow up

As with any effective sales strategy, persistence through multiple touches is key – only now, you need multiple touches with multiple people. Only 2% of sales occur within the first meeting, and 80% of sales need 5 follow-ups to get the job done (Marketing Donut). Multiply that by the other influencers in the buying group, and that’s a lot of content to distribute and interactions to take place. A series thoughtful follow up connections with valuable content will strengthen the relationship, and ultimately be key in closing the deal.

This step is truly where the “sales” in ABS comes into play, and where the importance of team collaboration is imperative to the success of the interaction. At this point, it becomes necessary to look strategically at the players involved in the conversation – on both the prospect and internal sides. Having accurate visibility into the key accounts and relationships allows sales leaders to see the progress and sentiment surrounding the deal as a whole. For example, if your Business Development Representative hasn’t talked to a given account in several weeks, it may be time to encourage them to reach back out and re-establish the conversation. SalesWise allows you to see the complete and organized view of your Account-Based Deals, and quickly intervene when necessary.

While the principles behind ABS may not be new to the classic enterprise sale, the return on investment that this strategy can bring is well worth the organizational shift and groundwork to implement.

Not sure if ABS is right for you? Read our blog post, Four Signs that Account-Based Selling is Right for You.

Learn how SalesWise can provide greater visibility to your sales leaders and drive additional incremental revenue when shifting to an Account-Based Sales strategy (see how it works). Or, schedule a quick demo to see how SalesWise enables ABS teams.

Four Signs that Account-Based Selling is Right for You

April 19, 2017/0 Comments/in Sales, Team /by Nicole Nystrom

One of the biggest sales strategies in 2016 was Account-Based Selling (ABS), and 2017 has been building on its momentum to drive today’s B2B sales. With the breadth of channels and depth of information sales and marketing teams have access to, gone are the days of “any lead is a good lead.”

Account-Based Selling has grown due to the strategy’s effectiveness in breaking through the noise surrounding digital marketing. While in the past there may have only been one or two decision-makers within the buying process, Gartner found that now 7-8 people are typically involved in all areas of the buying process, especially in enterprise tech sales. This buying process calls for a solution that engages with multiple functional groups within a single organization, rather than addressing a singular buyer persona.

According to the 2016 #FlipMyFunnel Account-Based Marketing Benchmark Survey Report, 64% of B2B marketers who don’t currently have an account-based marketing program plan to implement one in the next year.

Is your organization ready to take the plunge into ABS? If you’ve seen the following signs, you’re ready to make the strategic switch.

You know your target audience

This probably sounds like a no-brainer, but the first step to implementing an Account-Based Selling strategy is knowing the key accounts your strategy will focus on. According to the 2016 B2B Marketing Data Report, 75% of records analyzed lacked the necessary data on prospect industry, revenue, and employees crucial to effective ABS. The foundation of ABS is that your sales and marketing efforts are focused on the account at large, rather than a specific job role (“persona”) within an organization.
Furthermore, ABS is built around quality over quantity – if you don’t have a precise knowledge of your target audience, ABS as a strategy will be ineffective. With the traditional funnel, the top of the funnel is filled with as many prospects as possible. ABS, on the other hand, engages fewer accounts, but they are much more targeted and representing the ideal customer profiles (ICP) with a higher likelihood to close.

You’ve exhausted your inbound marketing strategy

This isn’t to say that inbound marketing is dead, by any means. But the B2B ecosystem is incredibly saturated, and may not be the most effective for your target market in 2017. With a market that is moving towards a group-buying process, inbound marketing loses effectiveness because it is difficult to consistently produce messaging that resonates with everyone (FunnelEnvy). A strategic combination of inbound marketing and ABM will establish your organization as subject-matter experts, while delivering highly-targeted content to those accounts deemed most important.

You have strategic, valuable content (Or, you’re ready to create it.)

If you’ve been using an inbound marketing strategy, it’s likely that your organization will already have some valuable content that can be tweaked and expanded upon. But remember, the success of ABS relies on attention to detail for an entire organization – not just the champion (or at least, the target personas targeted within the account).
This presents an opportunity for perfectly crafted content that speaks to the specific problems and needs of each point of contact. While your old content marketing strategy may just speak to the problems of a specific user, you may now be reaching six different functional roles within one organization.

True sales and marketing alignment

In an ideal world, an aligned sales and marketing strategy would be the industry norm, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Sales and marketing alignment are critical to an ABS strategy. Misalignment, then, inevitably leads to failure. Organizations with aligned sales and marketing teams are 67% better at closing deals (Marketo) and generate 208% more revenue from marketing efforts (MarketingProfs). In fact, Account-Based Selling and Account-Based Marketing can almost be used interchangeably – the process relies heavily on the collaboration of the two teams. This is because sales typically owns the account relationship, while marketing is generally responsible for the messaging and branded assets. In order for sales to provide the most valuable content available to their highly-qualified targets, they need to collaborate with the larger marketing initiatives.

Enacting ABS is no small task because it requires a fundamental change in mindset – both in your sales team and by your sales leadership. Clear communication and accurate forecasting to organizational leaders are imperative to the success of ABS. But when the signs are all present, account-based selling can be one of the most effective ways to land large accounts and expand within them.

Sales at a Stalemate?

January 20, 2017/0 Comments/in Business Relationship Intelligence, Sales /by Daryl

It’s still January and though you have set your sights on a banner year, your sales pipeline may be telling a different story. Why is it that sales seem so much harder these days? And, how can your sales team cut through the noise to create meaningful connections and successful sales?

Finding the Connection

With advancing technologies and growing corporations, the sales cycle has become even more complex. Where sales used to be one-to-one, now most B2B buying decisions involve 7-8 people (Gartner). That’s a lot of decision makers! How can you possibly make all the connections?

Traditionally, connections are tracked in your CRM system. However, with growing contacts, the feasibility of updating all those records becomes wholly inefficient for your team. In fact, today’s sales professionals update an average of 60 CRM records a day, and only spend 33% of their time actually selling (Toutapp)! There’s a need for a better way.

The reality is that much of sales relationships are fostered through your sales team’s inbox. Whether that’s an email, meeting, or shared document, a lot is taking place in the space between your team’s individualiz inboxes and CRM database. That’s why, with SalesWise, sales professionals discover an average of five times more contacts.

An essential step in creating meaningful connections is to first identify all those connections. Don’t get lost in the space between.

Making the Connection

Thank goodness you now have all the cards and players before you. But, what now? How do you make that connection meaningful? You’ve likely heard it before – as Entrepreneur recommends, you have to help your prospect buy rather than simply trying to sell to them. According to CSO Insights, sales teams have a 56% greater chance to meet quotas if they engage a buyer before that buyer is contacting the seller.

That requires your team to get curious. Ask your prospects questions, and work to build more personal connections. Access to data will become even more crucial as you work to anticipate your prospects’ needs and respond to them preemptively.

Business Relationship Intelligence (BRI) allows for full-access to critical data unencumbered by traditional per-seat licenses. Just as your contacts externally have grown, so have your internal contacts. With SalesWise, there are no limitations on who can access crucial customer data. Strategic collaboration between your sales team, marketing, finance, procurement and other functions enable more capable responses to prospects and customers – which, in turn, leads to more successful sales.

Don’t let sales get stuck in a stalemate. SalesWise offers sales leaders 300% more visibility into your team’s relationships and interactions with prospects and customers. Know everything. Be prepared for anything.

Learn more about SalesWise’s Business Relationship Intelligence platform by visiting www.saleswise.com/the-platform/.

Webinar with Cirrus Insight: Democratizing Relationship Data

November 23, 2016/0 Comments/in CRM, customer relationship, Productivity, Sales, Team /by Daryl

We are very excited to be co-hosting a webinar with our friends at Cirrus Insight on Democratizing Relationship Data next Tuesday, Nov. 29th from 1:30PM-2:30PM, so sign up today! We will be giving away some fantastic gifts to randomly selected attendees (just in time for the holidays).

About the webinar:

Technology advances the cause of sales automation, but doesn’t always result in equal access to information for everyone in the enterprise. The way software-as-a-service applications are provisioned often leads to fragmented data sources and siloed access. This can make the sales force the de facto administrators of data, as they field inquiries from others across the company without access to Salesforce. In this webinar, SalesWise demonstrates the power of democratizing relationship data for improved productivity and insights throughout the organization.

This is completely free, and you’ll learn about the importance of transparency in today’s business – modern sales teams, customer success efforts, executive leadership, and more! Plus, you’ll get to learn about the great stuff Cirrus Insight is up to.

Register today and make sure to share with your friends and colleagues — the more, the merrier!

How Sales Leadership Platforms Transform the Sales Management Role

October 28, 2015/0 Comments/in customer relationship, Sales /by Gregg

Sales leadership platforms take your existing sales software infrastructure and transform it, aggregating all the essential data you need to track what your sales team is doing. It automates data aggregation from the tools you depend on to get your job done, such as Salesforce, and brings it together in a way that makes perfect sense for sales. You cut out the time spent jumping between your communication apps, email, project management tools and CRM, and instead spend it on helping your sales team grow and reach its potential. To properly incorporate a sales leadership platform into your business processes, you need to understand how it transforms your sales management role.

The Starting Line Has Changed

Sales leadership platforms are focused on giving you the information you need to do your job effectively and strategically. Your typical CRM platform revolves around collecting prospect data and supporting the sales team, and many management features are added as an afterthought. You can make it work, but in some cases the software works against your goals, not with them.

A sales leadership platform looks at what you need to effectively manage a sales team and gives you the support tools you need to be a leader. You get a data canvas that presents all your sales team information in one place, instead of flipping through applications to try to get a view of the big picture. This big picture is delivered to you through an automated tool, which means neither you nor your sales team needs to spend hours compiling vital information. You can focus on sales strategies, nurturing your top sales representatives and finding ways to maximize your sales opportunities for your team.

In a typical sales infrastructure, your starting line has a lot of busywork before you get to the good stuff. With a sales leadership platform, you shift your starting line so you can immediately dive into the stuff that really matters. You can see everything that’s going on in a way that a traditional sales environment doesn’t offer.

Big Picture Visibility

As a leader, you should have a big-picture view of your sales team, but many sales technology solutions make it as hard as possible to understand what’s going on with your data. Sales intelligence is an essential part of getting the most out of your sales team and each sales opportunity, and that’s the approach sales leadership platforms take.

You see all the data that relates to a specific prospect instead of spending hours getting up to speed on what your sales team has done already. The right tools and platform give you this data so you can look at sales trends and potential ways to nurture high-value prospects, and they give you the luxury of focusing on ways to create real impact.

You aren’t playing catch up, you’re one step ahead of the game, which makes a big difference in helping your sales team achieve its goals. You become better able to accurately understand the true state of your sales pipeline. You get the comprehensive view you need instead of getting bits and pieces of data that your salespeople quantify. It takes some time to adjust to this shift, but once you do, you’ll wonder how you achieved sales goals with any other system.

The Love-Hate Relationship With Accountability

High visibility means that there’s a lot of accountability for the sales team as well. Underperforming sales team members can’t hide behind the top salespeople anymore. Your top salespeople are going to love a system that makes their job easier and lets them focus on the actual sales part of the job while the bottom half of your sales team can no longer blame bad numbers on the software or time spent on paperwork.

Your relationship with the sales team transforms because you’re not dependent on its reports to know what’s going on. You can change your sales strategy to focus on lifting up the top performers, nurturing those with potential and cycling inefficient sales reps out of the system entirely. You get to spend a lot more time on leadership and a lot less time on listening to excuses from your poor performers. A relationship intelligence strategy gives you the data points you need for effective decision making, which helps you become the sales manager and leader you aspire to be.

Changing your sales process foundations takes time and an adjustment period, but the short- and long-term benefits are substantial. You create strategies with the big picture in mind, give your top sales performers the tools they’ve always wanted and eliminate the time spent catching up on vital information.

Are you ready to change the way you handle sales, for free? Check out Saleswise today, without any risk, and see what it’s like to focus on your sales leadership instead of reading a novel’s worth of sales reports from your team. You can’t buy time with money, but you can free up a substantial amount of time by increasing your productivity and automating data aggregation and entry. There’s no set up, no data entry, and data aggregation is automagical.

Future of Sales – Reward on Excellence

September 24, 2015/0 Comments/in CRM, Sales, Uncategorized /by Gregg

The tech-fueled social world is a wealth of information. Buyers no longer have the time or patience for aggressive, uninformed sales people who don’t deliver on promises. Indeed, the future of sales hinges heavily on evolving customer relationship management (CRM) trends – namely relationship intelligence, where only excellence reaps rewards.

A Holistic View of Sales

Think holistic co-ordination, and rowing scenes from boat races come to mind. In order to smoothly propel the boat forward, all the team members must pull their oars in perfect sync. It’s the same with sales. Your sales force is the boat, and all the other departments working in the background are the oarsmen. The sophisticated tools and information your sales and marketing teams work with are the oars. Unless the various departments work in tandem, your sales force will flounder about like a ship without direction.

The Current Sales Scenario

Until recently, the sales and marketing departments of businesses have been working toward what they thought was a sound enough goal – the bottom line, or profit targets. Profit is almost always the metric productivity and excellence are measured by, and so CRM solutions are bandied about towards this ambition.

Disconnect Between CRM Solutions and Ground Reality

While CRM employs technology to combine market research with data analytics and provide customer insights, the overall customer profile is murky and incomplete at best. Why is this? The answer is the huge disconnect between these solutions and operational control.

CRM solutions are often framed by executives who don’t actually connect with customers, and so their efforts are mostly disjointed. Indeed, you can collect all the sales and marketing data you want, but it’ll be nothing but a pile of useless junk – unless you have a cohesive record of what happens to customers within the spheres of customer service, sales and marketing. When sales, marketing, strategy and execution run alongside each other rather than harmoniously integrate, customer retention is lacking and your business’s bottom line is threatened.

Relationship Intelligence

The new metric for measuring excellence is based on customer retention. Linda Sharp, in her book, Customer Relationship Intelligence, calls this metric, “relationship value.”

Atomic Unit of Sales

According to Sharp, every single touch point between your company and your customers or latent customers is an “atomic unit of sales.” Each of these units should be measured from the consumer’s perspective, instead of your business’s standpoint. Only then can you convert prospects and leads into sustainable sales.

Customers Are Your Partners

The whole business-sales-marketing process is a symbiotic relationship where you and your customers are equal partners. You have something your customer wants – products and services – and your customers have something you want – their money and continued patronage. The entire process is a continuum. So why don’t CRM solutions have some sort of framework that measures customer relationship value?

Relationship Value

In her book, Sharp defines relationship value as a “relative numerical value” that can be assigned to each of your company’s interaction with the customer. But how can you use it to measure your customer relationship?

Sharp outlines the use of a real-time tracking system to record Customer Relationship Intelligence (CRI). It is important to know what interactions leads to something, and also what that something is. Conversely, it is just as important to know what interaction prevented the conversion of a prospect into a lead. To measure individual customer relationships, and thereby relationship value, you must set up a system that automatically adds or subtracts the relative numerical value every time your marketing, sales or customer service department interacts with your buyers. In other words, relationship value should be measured with each atomic unit of sales.

Why Build a CRI Framework?

The problem is that the reactions of different customers to the same situation are wildly inconsistent. However, within the CRI framework, it is possible to know which actions will keep a particular customer happy under a given situation. You can boost your productivity when using CRI as your basis for making informed customer-related decisions.

Your Actual Profit Center

The profit center of your business is not the sale of a particular product or service. That may be the source of temporary gain, but when you think about it, your customer could just as easily get the same things from your competitors. How, then, can you measure profits if not in terms of your products or service? The answer is so: customer service is the actual profit center. This viewpoint is contrary to the current business practice of tagging customer service as a cost center, but customer service has to be removed from the slot labeled ‘cost center’ and put where it rightly belongs under ‘profit center.’

Until now, customer service has been viewed as a pesky problem to deal with, and not as the relationship-building opportunity it actually is. In this setup, you may believe you are focusing on excellence. If you are, then your perspective of excellence is skewed, because what you’re doing is beaming your focus on short-term gains with sights set on turnover. In the process, you lose sight of a more durable reward in terms of customer retention.

Saleswise is a comprehensive springboard that helps you harness and aggregate all the CRI you need, to reap the rewards of excellence and to propel your business to success, primarily in the form of customer retention. Visit our website today, and see how our free service can help you and your business grow.

Sources :

http://www.managementexchange.com/sites/default/files/media/posts/documents/CRI%20eBook%209780979965715.pdf