The new year allows for a reset on strategy, tactics, and rep performance. Though the holiday season can be stressful, your team should return to work in 2017 with renewed optimism and focus to realize the goals that are set.
“Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.” - Francois de La Rochefoucauld
We’ve learned from our own mistakes and listened to our customer’s struggles in optimizing sales performance, and summarized what you need to avoid to make sure your sales enablement tools power your reps’ activities.
1 - Make it difficult for reps to access sales collateral and contact information
Now that content is produced in a variety of formats for cross channel engagement, (video, PDF, social media, PPT, images), the problem becomes determining and doing the work to archive and categorize this collateral in a way that is easy to find.
“70% of content never gets used by sales because they are unable to find content that is relevant and at a time when they need it.” - Salesforce Blog
Requesting and waiting for marketing to source content or searching themselves through a variety of portals, cloud-based drives, and other repositories burns up time that reps could be investing in closing deals. We made sure to include a document archive in GetAccept’s feature set so that reps would have the sales documents they need inside the tool where they prospect.
2 - Do not map out personas, their buying journeys, and the data flows needed to measure impact
Mature sales teams know that their best efforts will fall short without defining how the relationship between their personas, buying journeys, and data flows. If personas are articulated carefully, there will distinct behavioral considerations that lead to a distinct set of buying journeys, rather than one that is generalized for the whole. And the touch points associated with each of these buying journeys have different calls to action, with different data points.
Without a detailed understanding of how each persona moves through their buying journey, and what sort of information they are likely to share at each stage, your reps are flying blind or having to work harder than they should to connect with the prospect. Our customers have responded positively to our document tracking functionality, which adds an additional layer of information on top of traditional CRM info.
3 - Allow the gaps between sales enablement tools and marketing automation to widen
We are keenly aware that many teams have likely installed and connected sales enablement tools and marketing automation to one another. Yet upon closer inspection, the actual optimization of the platforms to trigger actions, pass data back and forth, and generate actionable reports are far from configured.
Taking a first things first approach means evaluating your dashboards. If no one is using these for performance evaluation or strategic decision making, it means that the information is useless.
By starting with dashboards, you will be able to work backwards into identifying the gaps between your sales enablement and marketing automation tools, and be able to build out an actionable plan to close the gap.
A bonus of this exercise is the collaboration with marketing, sales, and IT that will happen and a shared understanding of what is truly needed from sales.
The teams that have added GetAccept to their sales enablement tool suite have found that it can be the bridge between marketing automation and prospect data. Our API allows teams to pull and push documents, contact data, and trigger remarketing campaigns that provide the boost to your sales outreach and deal closing efforts.
What’s one thing you need to stop doing right now in addition to these three? Interested in a deeper dive in GetAccept to see how it can help you rock with your sales enablement tools?
