More than half of B2B tech companies report that sales cycles have become significantly longer in the past three years, and they are likely to grow even longer during the indefinite period of slow or stagnant economic growth ahead of us.
All of this means that sales teams need to become even more efficient at driving sales and closing deals. Sales automation can play a significant role in achieving this goal, helping sellers nurture leads more effectively and cut the time they spend on activities that take them away from actual sales.
Here are five ways for your organization to apply sales automation and improve sales performance, even when the economic climate is stormy.
1. Keep leads engaged to speed up sales cycles
With longer sales cycles, leads can languish in the funnel without arriving at closing. Sales representatives end up spending a lot of time reaching out repeatedly to disengaged leads, cutting into the time they need to close deals with prospects who are closer to purchase.But sales automation can help you nurture leads more efficiently. Use it to open up new opportunities by re-engaging previous leads that have since “gone cold.” Identify buyers to contact, reaching out through email, text message, or LinkedIn at the right intervals, asking discovery questions, and understanding the answers using natural language processing.
Automation like Heyday can bring together signals from multiple touchpoints, including email, social media, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and its own chatbot solution. The platform analyzes them to identify the best time for human reps to enter the loop, and filters conversations to the right contact so they can seamlessly continue the communication.
2. Maximize upselling and cross-selling
According to a recent HubSpot survey, 41% of all salespeople report that 20% or more of their revenue is derived from upselling. What’s more, 72% of sales reps who upsell and 74% of those who cross-sell agree that these activities drive up to 30% of their revenue.
But upselling and cross-selling can be fraught with difficulty for sales reps. Your firm’s product catalog is vast and customer needs are complicated, making it tough to come up with the ideal bundle that both pleases the customer and maximizes revenue for the company.
Fortunately, sales automation software can push the most appropriate upsell and cross-sell suggestions for each prospect. Sales teams won’t get bogged down trying to weigh up too many options, and prospects won’t be irritated by irrelevant bundles or overwhelmed with a flood of possibilities.
3. Strike while the lead is hot
The longer it takes for you to send a proposal or amend a quote according to the prospect’s requests, the more opportunity you leave for your competitors to nip in and steal your customer. But waiting for manager approval can add weeks to the sales cycle, and many companies are (justifiably) nervous about giving sales teams the authority to issue quotes independently.Sales automation can make the whole process much easier for sales teams. It applies complex parameters with built-in rules and guard rails that carry out back-end calculations for the sales agent, helping avoid costly mistakes while also removing the need to wait for manager approval. In situations where approvals are required, that process is also automated.
Accelerated process is exactly what SourceScrub, a data company, discovered when they stated using DealHub. With DealHub’s CPQ platform, SourceScrub was able to cut the time that sellers spend creating proposals by 94%, while the built-in “deal room” interface and its e-signature feature removed friction from the deal approval process.
4. Align all departments to retain customers
Retention is always vital, but it’s even more important during a recession, when you expect to make more sales to existing customers than to new ones. Success in this regard requires you to align all your departments, including post-sales support, into a seamless, positive customer experience.For example, SaaS companies should use automated monitoring tools to track product use signals and spot the best moment to suggest an upgrade, add-on, or cross-sell to the relevant customer at the right time.
Similarly, businesses selling subscription-based products need to track renewal times so they can send a timely reminder or suggest an upgrade, like shifting from a monthly to an annual subscription, or from one year to three years.
5. Reach the right lead at the right time
Today’s B2B buyers want self-service nurture and checkout experiences across channels, but they also want to speak to a rep when they are ready. At these junctures, they expect the agent to already know all about their pain points and purchase journey up until now; 87% of business buyers expect sales reps to act as trusted advisors, according to Salesforce.
Meeting these expectations calls for using automated website visitor identification and tracking solutions like those enabled by Albacross. With the right intent-based workflows in place, you can set up CRM automations that score leads based on actions like opening emails, downloading ebooks, visiting specific pages of your website or clicking on your social media posts, and then notify you when a lead is “hot.”
In this way, automation stops sellers from wasting time on leads who aren’t really interested, and supports them to reach out to those who are at the perfect moment in the purchase journey.
Sales automation can boost your sales team’s selling power
When the sales get tough, the tough get sales automation. These solutions allow revenue teams to streamline quote generation, align departments, track the purchase journey, nurture leads, and optimize upselling and cross-selling opportunities. In this manner, sales leaders can refine sales pipelines, make sales processes more efficient, and ultimately close more deals.by Irfan Ahmad via Digital Information World
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