B2B sales is about longer sales cycles, bigger financial deals, fierce competition and reaching out to more than one decision maker in an organization, which unfolds different set of challenges. According to Docurated’s report called the State of Sales Productivity, organizations are investing more and more in sales productivity in search for revenue growth. Therefore, we decided to share with you how you can improve your sales productivity by resolving the following three challenges in B2B sales.
Challenge #1: Disconnect between marketing and sales teams
A good marketing strategy doesn’t end at the campaign level. Marketing builds the foundation for your sales team to perform and to get business. Hence the main focus of your marketing team should be to support sales with quality leads. However, sales productivity is not resourced as a major priority within marketing departments and this creates a significant alignment challenge for organizations.
Solution: Quality over Quantity of Leads
Marketing and sales team need to work in unison, former feeding the latter with right the number of ‘quality’ leads. As a B2B sales leader you need to make sure that both the departments talk and exchange data and information on efforts that work or don’t work. This will ensure that sales team doesn’t waste its efforts on pursuing the wrong leads.
Challenge #2: Less automation and more manual work
After your marketing and sales teams have qualified leads in their kitty, the next step is communication. In B2B sales your reps’ significant number of hours should be spent in building relationship with the identified prospect, in influencing the decision makers and not on data entry and status updating.
Solution: Invest in robust CRM
You can help your sales team in being effective and efficient by cutting down on admin and manual work, which is often data entry and going through previous remarks/ communication. Hence, invest in a CRM that gives the option to automate and setup replies, alerts and notifications in advance. However, this unfolds another set of challenge for you as a sales leader. This means training your sales team, making them adopt and understand the importance of adopting CRM in sales cycle!
Challenge #3: Where is the right content?
Having appropriate content accessible and available at the nick of time is the prerequisite for your sales teams smooth functioning. Usually it doesn’t work this way! Sales productivity gets diluted when your sales reps have to recreate the content that they need for their pitching to go well. Sales reps do their initial research on your prospects’ portfolio, needs and on what features of your products or services they might be interested in. Based on the prospect’s need sales requisite is to have access to fresh or edited or even old content created by marketing.
Solution: Focus on one central repository to store content
For improved sales revenue, make sure that your sales reps are well equipped and have all the content at their disposal to make that pitch work. They shouldn’t be wasting time in recreating or looking through multiple repositories to find the content they need because this definitely mars their productivity.
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