How “smart” is your sales team? We explore how sales teams can achieve more success with modern analytics, business intelligence, and automated lead scoring.
3 steps to raise your sales IQ
Leads. Leads. Leads. For many in sales, every day’s about chasing and closing leads. To do that, sales teams use a lot of technology—apps, services, devices, you name it—only to produce sometimes less than stellar results. This post offers a step-by-step guide to raising your sales IQ using the latest, smart tech.
Step 1: Cover the basics
Sales people don’t work in vacuums. Quite the opposite, to really succeed, they need the rest of the organization to do its part.
First and foremost, sales teams require a product, service, and brand to believe in. They also need strong leaders to motivate, listen, and support them. Moreover, effective marketing, like ad campaigns, sales collateral, and a decent website is crucial to success. And, don’t forget proper on-boarding, and ample product training.
Now, on top of all that, most modern salespeople need proper productivity and communication applications, including video conferencing tools. They need a reliable CRM system to manage contacts. And they need it all to work on any device in the field or at home—laptop, tablet, and, perhaps most importantly, their phones.
And those are just some of their needs! Now, let’s talk about what they want.
Step 2: Get better intelligence
When you get down to it, most sales people want better information. They want richer insights into their prospects, more reliable reports on their activities, and up-to-the-minute competitive intelligence. They want the insights, data points, and facts they need to uncover opportunities, deal with objections, and speed up opportunities.
Social media monitoring (or listening) services can help provide a lot of this information in a cost-effective way. Sales agents use monitoring tools to identify and follow the trends, conversations, and keywords in the social web. They can also use these tools to monitor the activity of their own brands and those of competitors.
Then there’s business intelligence (BI). For a sales leader, BI translates into better decision making. Sales leaders can objectively track the performance of sales teams and/or agent networks. They can measure the effectiveness of programs and campaigns. Analyze sales data and identify the most profitable activities.
And, of course, today’s BI platforms deliver phone-friendly dashboards and rich visualizations—all with real-time data! No more waiting for days to run sales reports or wondering about their reliability. Just smarter decision-making thanks to reliable data.
Step 3: Create more excitement
Now, here comes the fun stuff! A whole new generation of sales software focuses on energizing your team by using gamification. These platforms allow you run competitions, set goals, share dashboards, monitor results, provide feedback and coaching, and recognize achievers, all in real-time.
While maybe not quite as fun, organizations can get giddy about their automated lead scoring systems, as well. Designed to nurture relationships over time, these types of systems allow sales and marketing teams to do content marketing campaigns combining blog posts, email, ebooks, and other educational assets.
Summary
Step 1: Cover the basics every sales team needs:
A brand to believe in
Strong leadership
Effective marketing
On-boarding
Product training
Productivity apps
CRM
Step 2: Get better intelligence every sales team wants:
Step 3: Create more excitement:
Software for sales teams
Automated lead scoring
Get the Ebook:
Let Microsoft Power BI help you interpret, present, and act on business data. In this free e-book, you’ll learn about how Office 365 and Power BI can work for your team. Includes 10 things you can do in your first 10 minutes with Power BI! (Requires registration) Download here.