Derived from sales enablement, sales engagement focuses on practical steps to accelerate sales processes by empowering sales teams to communicate and sell more efficiently. It also enhances personalization using advances in technology such as real-time data collection and analysis.
From CPQ to sales KPIs, sales engagement tactics empower sales teams to meet sales goals, close more deals, and increase productivity.
Here are the top four smart goals for Sales leaders to future-proof their sales process success in the coming year:
1. Shorten the Sales Cycle
A shorter sales cycle enables sales teams to expand their reach, engage with more customers and complete more deals within the time period. It’s also more likely to result in a positive buyer experience, as customers spend less time on sales calls and more time engaged in other business obligations.
One of the best ways to achieve this is through automation. By optimizing the sales process, your sales teams are able to spend less time on administrative work and creating proposals and more time actively selling.
2. Increase Deal Size and Lifetime Value
As sales professionals know, selling to existing customers is easier (and cheaper) than acquiring new ones. According to Marketing Metrics the probability of converting a new prospect is relatively low, just 5-20%. At the same time, the likelihood of converting an existing customer is 60-70% and returning customers spend 33% than new ones. As such, in-depth knowledge of customer demands and how to meet them is crucial. Time is of the essence, as they provide the customer with lifetime value. This value forges a bond between customer and sales team, opening the door to upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
The art of guided selling enables sales teams to enrich their proposals and present their customers with more upscale and premium offerings. The combination of analytic capabilities and the use of a playbook will provide salespeople with insight into what exactly interests a given stakeholder – and how to go about selling them on it.
3. Increase Win Rates
An effective way to increase revenue is not to add deals to your sales team’s workload. Instead, efforts should be directed towards increasing your sales team’s win rate, so that as many as possible of the deals already in motion end in successful sales. To do so, a buyer-centric approach should be taken, during which the salespeople focus on personalizing deals so they are most relevant to the customer.
DealHub’s guided selling playbooks provide sales teams with real-time insights and analytics on sales deals in progress. This enables them to foster a more responsive, personal and relevant approach to each individual deal.
4. Simplify Sales Training and Ramp-Up
When it comes to closing deals, time is of the essence. This makes training new salespeople crucial to the success of their selling capabilities. Without proper training, they cannot be expected to effectively lead customers through the sales funnel and convert.
The intuitive nature of DealHub’s Sales Playbooks enables accelerated CPQ training for sales professionals. Whether for new business, renewals, or expansions, sales professionals are guided through all aspects of proposal generation from product configuration, pricing, and sales content, to agreements. Typically taking less than 30 minutes, sales professionals are able to be fully onboarded and be productive in the shortest possible time.
Keeping it Smart
The rules of sales engagement are simple: get to know your customers and start giving them what they want. And remember, getting your team sales-ready goes far beyond just onboarding. It’s an ongoing journey of training, upskilling, and providing the teams with the tools to achieve success. Thanks to innovations in the fields of CPQ, data gathering, and analysis, communicating with your customers and helping them along the sales funnel towards conversion is a much more personalized and effective process.
