Imagine all the good stuff happening in the field across your sales organization - the countless text messages, emails, phone calls, sales meetings, lunches, happy hours, many of which are happening outside the purview of sales management, operations, and marketing and are never being logged to your company CRM (like Salesforce.com). CSO insights says only 58% or reps are achieving quota and are spending only 37% of their time selling. But what if we could put more “sell time” back in our sales reps’ day while meeting corporate goals?
With your salespeople spending more time selling you may be thinking about:
- How you are capturing these contacts in you database?
- What are your sales reps discussing with customers?
- When a new reps come into the territory, how do they pick up where the last rep left off?
- If you are forcing your reps to log calls, is that behavior actually proving valuable data points to close more pipeline and replicate sales?
- If you are capturing analytics on your marketing materials being used by sales - do you know what your customers are doing with your materials?
After speaking to many corporate CRM stakeholders over the years, I’ve found that they encourage, influence, and even shamelessly bribe their sales reps to put information into their CRM. These methods cost companies time, money, and energy. But what if I told you there was a way to passively influence your sales reps to help you deliver meaningful data and glean insights into what is driving either closed/won deals or rejected sales cycles? As sales tools such as corporate emails systems, CRM, and best in class Sales Asset Management (SAM) systems (recognized by Gartner) begin to unite, there is now a way!
Here are some examples of what’s possible when you integrate SAM into your sales process:
- Field sales interactions such as sharing content with a customer or prospect are automatically added as leads or contacts based on Account Based Marketing rules, feeding upstream systems like Marketing Automation for nurturing and downstream AI systems like “Einstein” that help the rep decide what to do next.
- Sales reps are happy as they can avoid manual data entry.
- Marketing is happy because they can capture new customer data points.
- Sales Ops/Management is happy because they have new found insights into Who, What, and Why their reps are meeting with customer.
- As territories shift or reps are promoted, all account, opportunity, contact, and lead data is seamlessly logged into a single source (your CRM) and not your reps’ corporate email accounts.
- With your SAM, Corporate Email, and CRM all in synch, modern mobile first systems can allow your sales reps to present materials from a tablet and using technology like Bigtincan’s “SalesAI,” your reps can follow up with collateral presented in the meeting, log all content shown in the meeting, and capture all the contact records in the meeting calendar invite before leaving the customer meeting. This shortens sales cycles, helps to increase customer satisfaction, and gives marketing insight into how content is being used in sales cycles.
If you provide your sales reps with simple systems to do their job, and let your technology do the heavy lifting, data entry, and database building, your will see results. Your sales reps want to maximize their time selling, and you will now have some new ways to help them. Referring back to the stat above where sales reps spend only 37% of their time selling - imagine if you could get your reps up to an average of 50% selling time (13% increase) on an annual $1M quota - the possibilities to move the needle on your bottom line are astronomical!
