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Top-performing reps close your most strategic deals, but making your quarter depends on amplifying the performance of all reps. CSO Insights found 92 percent of sales teams raised their revenue and quota targets in 2016 – even though sales rep plan achievement has remained stagnant at 58 percent the past three years.
Why the disconnect? Despite investments in sales enablement, 60 percent of sales leaders say they lack the tools and insights to transform performance. Ionize your sales force with these tips to electrify deal flow, improve forecasting, and supercharge rep performance.
USE ENGAGEMENT DATA TO POWER YOUR PIPELINE
Aberdeen Group research finds that 46 percent of sales leaders don’t have the data they need to determine the likelihood of deal close. CRM alone – whether because of incomplete activities, the reliability of rep self-reported data, or a lack of real-time updates into deal progress – is not enough to solve forecasting challenges. Sales managers still spend hours every week scrubbing pipeline data and understanding deal progression.
Engagement moves beyond the simple measures of activities and self-reported metrics – emails sent, meetings held – and provides actual customer response to sales activities. How long did the buyer spend with the proposal? Which parts? Did they share it? Combining engagement analytics with CRM creates a powerful data-driven pipeline management machine.
MAXIMIZE MEANINGFUL CUSTOMER INTERACTIONS
According to Aberdeen Group, 42 percent of sales leaders cannot identify which sales activities drive success. Your top reps may not be the ones making the most calls or scheduling the most meetings. Top reps reach out at the right time, with the right content, to close the deal – making every interaction with customers and prospects more meaningful. Instead of setting arbitrary goals (such as number of meetings held each quarter), leverage customer engagement data to benchmark your team on the actual outcome of selling activities and interactions. When reps are measured by engagement quality instead of engagement frequency, they will have better sales conversations, and your team will close more deals.
DELIVER REAL-TIME COACHING
Many managers lack the insight they need into the selling activities and results of reps. As a result, traditional coaching is too little, too late – superficial, hazy feedback about deals that have already been won or lost.
Customer engagement allows sales managers to deliver on-the-spot metrics-based sales rep coaching. Engagement analytics provide “insider knowledge” on which buyers are responding to which messages and help you coach reps to avoid dead-end deals and focus on more promising opportunities.
Complement data with “game tape” – meeting recordings that capture what was said in meetings, the content used, and the customer response. Increase the timeliness and relevance of coaching – and then, scale best practices by sharing recordings and engagement data of top reps team-wide.
Most teams are addressing productivity issues by using sales tools that address only small pieces of the sales cycle. Leveraging a complete Sales Engagement Platform can transform how you manage opportunities, teams, and individual reps by powering your sales process with engagement data. ClearSlide – the Sales Engagement Platform leader – has focused its ION release on features designed to supercharge sales results. Watch how LinkedIn has ionized its sales teams using ClearSlide.