The Art of Selling can be time-consuming and complex - sales pros must juggle between prospecting, understanding customer needs, and managing customer expectations. In addition, sales reps must combine all of these elements at the right time to differentiate their offerings from competitors. However, when this happens, it is a thing of beauty - it is a sale. The collage of information exchange, the fine weave of activity surrounding a sales cycle, is often referred to as the Art of Selling.
Art + Science: Accelerating the Art of Selling
Normally when one thinks of art, it serves as the antithesis of science. After all, how could the Art of Selling be automated or accelerated? It can. Leading sales executives today are investing in better processes to enhance the productivity of their teams.
The concepts are simple: help sales professionals receive more information faster and improve the precision of their tools and guidance. From there, simply let them do what they do best.
Here are three ways leading sales executives are accelerating the Art of Selling:
1) Provide Actionable Insight: Walk the halls of any modern-day sales floor and you'll likely witness the "Alt-Tab Problem." Today's sales makers bounce between quoting screens, Hoovers, LinkedIn, Purchase History, Company Websites, and CRM platforms for 10 minutes to 60+ minutes to prepare for a call. Call preparation is essential to positive outcomes, but today's CRM applications have failed to keep pace with big data, the myriad of customer and prospect information available to sales teams.
Accelerator: Integrate 360 degrees of customer information with the abundance of external prospect data to turn call preparation into valuable customer selling time. What would increasing sales productivity by 15% or more mean to your team?
2) Target the Right Prospects: Sales and marketing organizations once saw prospecting as purely a numbers game, the bigger the pile the better. Today, those who once sought ways to grow the pile are now faced with demands that can no longer be answered with guesswork and intuition. Executives are recognizing that which companies they allocate prospecting time to, matters.
Accelerator: Use internal data sources (CRM, contracts data, purchase history, etc.) and external data sources (social media, public records, third party data, etc.) to identify customers and prospects most likely to purchase your products and services. Make calculated trade-offs (i.e., incremental sales X likelihood of close) on which accounts/contacts to engage now and which ones to leave for another day. Sales makers with a fair number of high quality prospects have much greater chance of engaging effectively than those sales reps racing to the bottom of the pile.
3) Measure Execution: With sales pros picking company names out of hat, it is hard to track which methods are working. This leads to a significant gap between sales makers who "get it" and those who are lagging behind, in addition to poor pipeline health and low conversion rates.
Accelerator: Organize selling time systematically with Plays, segment-specific sales campaigns (e.g., Target customer segments most likely to purchase Product X, Customers who purchased Product X, opened an international office and are likely to purchase Product Y within 6 months). Create and test these Plays iteratively; double-down on successful Plays and remove Plays that are not getting traction. This will provide detailed insight into the behavior, activity and outcomes for each rep.
While it will never be possible to fully automate the art of selling, leading Fortune 5000 companies are leveraging big data analytics platforms to help their teams compete and win. Learn how to harness big data to generate more pipeline opportunity and close more deals, by clicking here.
Are you Accelerating the Art of Selling? Please share your thoughts below.