One of the most important elements to empowering sales professionals to engage in meaningful conversations which result in business opportunities is accurate prospect data. Without it, your sales team can be left in the dark about the needs and challenges of your potential prospects - without these key insights, attempting to convince your prospects to engage in conversation can be a real struggle, even for the most experienced sales person.
With the digital universe being predicted to reach 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020, we have more access to data than we have ever had before. Gaining access to this essential data is the first step in deploying a successful programme of Sales Enablement.
Contact Histories & Timelines
The ability to harness this type of data to generate insights into website traffic, collate lead information and reveal a detailed understanding of the content consumed by your prospects, is a critical step necessary in achieving a more effective sales streamlined process.
Collecting information on website visitors and how they navigate through your site is only useful to your sales team if they can use it. The processes behind Sales Enablement should allow your sales teams to access the complete histories and timelines of engagement of each and every one of the leads they are targeting.
Itemised information detailing each website page visited, every form field completed, emails engaged with and content downloaded, is invaluable in the effort to follow up, nurture and make your prospects new customers.
Data Dashboards & Standardised Reporting
While at the individual level, data on your prospects is key to an empowered sales team. An overarching view of performance and data analytics is crucial to derive valuable business insights. By agreeing and implementing a standardised approach to sales reporting, you can ensure that everyone in the business is reviewing the same facts and figures. This ensures a singular definition of success is in play, and all efforts are being made to meet confirmed KPIs and goals.
Reporting needs will vary from company to company, but here are some common reports:
- Activities logged by sales representatives
- Product demos delivered
- Deals won and lost
- Leads generated/worked
- The number of leads in each stage of the pipeline
- New prospects added to the database
- Website visitor to contact to customer conversion rates
- Prospect engagement levels
Sales leaders often have a detailed understanding of what reports are needed by the business, but can struggle to implement reporting processes to provide insights from all the data available and make the data useful/user-friendly/accessible/ actionable.
A successful programme of sales enablement instils the processes and frameworks needed to analyse and report on these key performance indicators in a way which is easily accessed and consumed. The ability to create and share Data Dashboards has become an invaluable step in ensuring sales have access to the data they need.
Review Process Audit
With these reports, you can begin to identify points within the sales process that require to be addressed by organisational leadership. For example, if you can notice the sales team are regularly booking high numbers of product demos, but that the conversion rate for these demos to close to customers is low, then a 'deep dive' into the demonstration process is needed.
A sales process audit is an in depth, data-backed analysis of a company’s sales processes. The goal of this activity is to discover areas where sales performance can be improved through the implementation of additional or supporting processes, insights or activities.
Lead Qualification Criteria
A complaint often heard from the sales team is that their time has been wasted chasing down leads who ultimately would never fit as a customer. To overcome this, you can enable your sales team to make more effective use of their time by documenting a lead qualification criteria and scoring system.
This document outlines the minimum, but essential, characteristics and information known about a prospect for them to be considered a lead. It ensures both sales and marketing teams spend time and effort on the leads which need it most.
Another tool which allows a more accurate prioritisation of leads is a lead scoring system. These processes assign positive and negative weightings to contacts and companies based on data, indicating how good a fit a lead is. This allows you to profile and segment the priority of your leads within a geographical region, by industry, turnover, or employee numbers. In addition, you can also begin to identify how 'sales ready' a prospect is by scoring them on behavioural activities such as the number or types of website pages visited; or content downloaded. This allows your sales team to prioritise contacting passive prospects who are most likely to welcome you connecting with them, and therefore most likely to convert to customers.
If you would like to learn more about how you could streamline your sales processes with Sales Enablement, download our free ebook.