Are sales technology skills part of your rep onboarding process?

Sales Technology

The social web has dramatically transformed the buying process by putting the buyer fully in control. According to the Corporate Executive Board, the average buyer completes 57% of her sales process before ever contacting a salesperson. The buyer conducts pre-purchase research using search engine queries, social media, and online reviews and comparisons. In most cases, the buyer purchases from the seller who provides them the right information, at the right time and in the right format. In an environment like this, how can a sales pro drive the outcomes?

A sales technology platform helps you sell the way your buyers want to buy

Sales teams are responding by deploying sales technology to help them sell the way their buyers want to buy. The foundation of an organization’s sales technology process is their CRM platform, which integrates with other sales and marketing tools like marketing automation software, pbx phone systems and social selling tools to create a unified sales technology infrastructure. A good sales technology process will produce the following benefits.

• Transparency into sales rep behaviors and activity. A good sales technology process will not only measure your sales team’s activities by channel, it will also provide benchmarks to help identify areas for improvement and coaching.

• Identify best practices and quickly implement them into your sales process. Your sales technology process will allow you to correlate sales rep behaviors and actions to closed deals. This in turn will allow you to improve your sales process (and results) by incorporating best practices across your sales organization.

• Generate more touchpoints with your target buyers. An effective sales process will streamline and automate sales research and preparation so that your reps have more time to interact with buyers. It will also help make each touchpoint more productive by giving reps real-time sales intelligence to improve the quality of their outreach. While it’s important to have quality sales outreach, simple mathematics show that the more touchpoints your able to generate, the more sales you will close.

• A good sales technology platform will create a predictable sales function that won’t create surprises for management. Over time, your sales technology process will identify the factors that result in sales, help you identify the right sales reps to hire and enable an onboarding process that produces productive sales reps. This will result in predictable sales results based upon past experience, which has been optimized for success. A good CRM-enabled sales technology process will provide management with a real-time view of your pipeline.