Embrace technology to help your sales team work more efficiently, make compelling sales pitches and close more deals.
In B2B sales, traits such as persistence and building excitement around a product or service are crucial. However, your B2B niche competitors emphasize the same characteristics within their sales teams.
In today’s competitive market, technology tools that streamline the sales process and make it easier to close deals can be game-changing. By implementing technology appropriately during your sales process, you can gain the competitive advantage you need to thrive.
1. Provide and track documentation through the cloud.
Finding ways to improve your strategic sales process is vital to maximizing the potential of your people. One of the biggest holdups in sales negotiations is keeping track of what different parties agreed to or when contracts were updated or altered.
If your team is not careful, this could lead to a more adversarial sales negotiation process. Sales reps try to wear the other party down rather than simply working together to find the best solution.
Cloud tools can go a long way in alleviating these stressors by helping your team create digital deal rooms where all documentation and agreements related to a sale are stored in one convenient location. More importantly, sales reps and prospects have access to this information to help prevent miscommunications.
Such tools don’t eliminate the need for face-to-face meetings — instead, they ensure that everyone has an easy reference point for future negotiations. Readily available documentation will increase transparency and trust at every stage of the sales process, making it that much easier to close deals.
2. Utilize personalized product demos.
For SaaS sellers, few things can be more impactful than a product demo — but only when they are done right. After all, successful salespeople must focus on the prospect’s needs — not the list of features their product has available. Solutions-focused sales teams should take a similar approach when providing product demos, personalizing the solutions in ways that are more meaningful to the prospect for a better sales experience.
The right demo software can improve your team’s ability to offer these demos effectively. According to a Walnut case study, IT services brand Odaseva shortened the demo prep time from one and a half hours to three minutes while enabling over 50 sellers to demo independently by providing a demo library tailored to different market segments and use cases.
Shortened, focused demos that also took advantage of cross-platform capabilities enabled sales reps to sell better by making it easy to select the appropriate demo for each prospect quickly. Improved demo delivery led to a better customer experience, even helping the company break into new markets.
3. Automate whenever possible — and train your team.
Research from Xant reveals that sales reps spend 64.8 percent of their time on non-sales activities that don’t generate revenue. The biggest time wasters were account and contact research and administrative tasks. These tasks can take time away from the sales-focused activities that are better at generating revenue, such as account planning and sales follow-up.
Surprisingly, much of the inefficiency in the Xant survey was also linked to poor use of CRM tools, with many reps using spreadsheets or other tools because they were frustrated with the CRM.
This is the exact opposite result a B2B sales team would expect when implementing CRM tools. In a perfect scenario, a CRM would streamline sales by automating administrative tasks and making it easier to track prospects.
While automating administrative tasks can create more time for your sales team to focus on prospects and clients, it is even more critical that they receive the training to understand how to use these tools effectively. Creating buy-in for any tech tool is crucial in ensuring it becomes an asset rather than another hindrance.
With the right tech, you can win more sales.
It doesn’t matter how talented your sales team is — without the right tech to support them in their roles, they will ultimately fall behind your competitors. By strategically using the available technology, you can unleash your team’s full potential so they can work more efficiently, create a more compelling sales pitch and ultimately close more deals.
This article was written by Heather Wilde from Inc. and was legally licensed through the DiveMarketplace by Industry Dive. Please direct all licensing questions to [email protected].
