Sales Operations

Sales Technology: Cost or Investment?

Sales technology is vital to understanding the way that your company communicates with its customers and the areas where your teams perform their best. Without the metrics, projections and all-inclusive data-capturing from a good sales platform, every stage of business suffers. From lead nurturing to cold calling, information and communication statistics are critical to making data-driven decisions.

Implementing a SaaS platform to support sales can make or break a business, carrying benefits which far outweigh the cost of software and services. Here’s a closer look at how sales technology should be seen as an investment in the future of your business rather than an expense.

Tech Stack’s Many Financial Benefits

Every growing enterprise needs a flexible sales platform which empowers reps and managers with all the information that they need to optimize marketing and conversions. Integrating a trusted solution such as SPOTIO improves service delivery and internal organization within an enterprise on numerous levels.

One could summarize the key savings benefits of an investment in sales technology as:

Unified Communications – Lower Communications Costs
Enhanced Productivity – Increased Profitability
More Profitable Marketing Campaigns
Lowered Cost of Outside Sales
Zero Data Backup Expenditure
Reduced Training Expenses
Faster Onboarding
Lower Labor Costs

Yet, good sales technology brings so much more than a basic increase in revenues and these eight rewards. Let us take you through a concise but comprehensive look at exactly what you can expect in features and value when taking on the cost of new sales technology.

Free and Cheap Software vs Dedicated Sales Technology

Many enterprises start off from meagre roots and end up adopting sales and marketing software gradually. Resorting to freeware packages and low-cost sales solutions may appear to be enough to start with but businesses quickly learn that more powerful software is needed.

What begins as a few customizations perhaps with the help of a technically-minded colleague soon turns into countless support calls, more hours billed and a configuration which involves so many apps that staff struggle to navigate the system. Yet the frustration is but a hallmark of much larger problems that can occur.

Running multiple databases devoted to different departments of sales and marketing can lead to everything from accounting errors to outright corruption of your valuable data.

Implementing dedicated sales technology will let you manage your leads, opportunities, customers and staff from a singular interface and unified database. Offsite data backups alone cost a fortune. When you resort to a SaaS provider, you’re not only reaping the benefits of a comprehensive customer relationship management platform with sales assistance, but you’re also investing in a secure backup for your critical data at no extra cost.

Automation and Your Enterprise

Cutting-edge sales technology supplies a business with expansive automation technology which can handle everything from document management and service queues to email marketing and up-sales.

Investing in sales technology can be seen as an investment in automation rather than an expense. When one looks at automated emails alone, open rates at 70.5% higher and click-throughs are 152% more likely. The dedicated templates, marketing, and email automation delivered by good sales technology gives proven results which are hard to match by any other expenditure.

The best part is that the benefits are forever increasing as you and your staff learn to harness the full scope of your sales system. The best sales software will have a learning curve which makes it easy for staff to adapt.

For example, SPOTIO is so user friendly that your sales reps are up and running and fully familiar within just one to three days after implementation. Within the first week of implementation, your sales technology will be used for everything from accessing prospect data on the move to sharing a collaborative calendar with the rest of the workforce. Real-time chat with managers and other staff ensures that everyone is in the loop while workflow automation and advanced queue management keep all processes as efficient as possible. Even field agents will be able to fit more in their day with optimized route planning and time tracking.

The benefits of sales automation are all-encompassing and vastly offset the cost of software.

Sales Tech and Lead Nurturing

Another key benefit of sales technology is the way that it supports your sales and marketing teams at every step of the sales process. Lead nurturing is integral to increasing your sales and conversions. After all, nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than prospects which have not undergone lead nurturing.

Lead nurturing is so much more than just a string of emails, transferring a clear idea of the buyer intent in an attempt to secure their business.

Good sales technology will give you intelligent reports which reveal the interests of prospective buyers and their behaviors, as well as logical groupings. With this leverage, your sales teams will begin to truly customize communication with leads and prospects. Managers are given a clear overview of the prospect as well as their place within the buying cycle. Good lead management is critical to success. Without this vantage, customizing emails and other marketing efforts is limited while estimations of any sales probability are nothing more than blind speculation.

Any lead nurturing campaign which hasn’t clearly identified a perspective to educate, individualize, and inform your prospect will most likely be time and money wasted.

Sales technology may require an initial expenditure, but complete profiles with a full buyer history and crystal-clear reports covering the whole sales cycle is invaluable.

HR, Team Optimization and Performance Metrics

When one compares the cost of sales technology to the cost of incorrectly placed sales reps, teams or managers, one will soon see just how valuable platform insights truly are.

Sales technology lets you keep track of individuals and sales teams.

With metrics and reporting available for activities and goals, you’ll always be able to shift your staff to the most productive place within the sales cycle. Certain reps will always be better at handling a particular demographic or a specific stage of your sales campaign. Businesses that forgo the cost of dedicated sales technology have no accurate way of assessing the performance of their teams, reps, and campaigns. One could see the minimal savings of going without sales software as money wasted rather than money saved.

Productivity is at the heart of profitability and without refining your management and internal optimization, a business is pouring valuable time and money into wasteful prospects and inefficient strategies. Efficient staff management which relies upon hard performance data brings improvement to the productivity of the entire workforce. With staff spending less time putting together information and formulating an approach, studies show that customer service labor costs drop by up to 40%.  

Enriching Online Content

Regardless of whether you’re utilizing field or outside sales, inside sales, or a combination of both, sales technology enables strategic management decisions and effective internal communication. The cost of sales technology is minimal when you consider that it supports remote sales, in-store sales, and it helps you enrich your online content. Sales is a segment of business which requires devoted resources in every industry. But the truth of the matter is that almost 80% of all buyers research your product and read reviews online creating a firm bias for their purchase before they interact with any member of your sales team.

The enriched reporting and data available concerning your buyer’s habits, preferences and the way that they interact with your website and online services is invaluable to any enterprise. Good software will give you the information needed to shape the best experience for your customers while delivering key insights as to how you need to improve your brand presence and marketing automation.

Website upgrades, feature improvements and extended functionality is wasted expenditure unless you have factual data indicating the efficacy of the upgrade. Leading platforms let you know exactly what needs to change to meet the needs of your customer. Field CRM software and current sales technology like SPOTIO makes your business more accessible online. It gives you the information that you need to customize the user-experience in the most lucrative ways to lead viable prospects to your sales teams.

Invest in Sales Software & Invest in Sales Prospects

Sales prospecting and the identification of potential new leads is the most challenging part of the sales process. Most salespeople find closing the next most difficult, followed by lead qualification itself. The sheer difficulty of assessing the viability of a new prospect has lowered over the years thanks to SaaS solutions.

When you give your staff the tools they need to successfully prospect a new sale or sales demographic, the challenge is transformed from a painstaking process into a profitable, exciting chase to exceed quota. Reaching out to leads in an effort to spark a conversation inspiring a sale is made much easier when you have access to a database which incorporates a full history of all prior customer communications, preferences and habits.

Profiling the most viable socio-economic demographic becomes a matter of analyzing hard facts, easy to read graphs, and in-depth comparative reports. 96% of all buyers will schedule a meeting5 with your staff if you focus exclusively upon the value delivered to them.

Sales technology lets you see where your customers perceive value in your product or service so that your teams know exactly how to formulate their approach.

Sales Technology and Effective Collaboration

The cost of sales technology can be equated to an investment in smart selling. There’s no better way to improve synergy between different sales teams. Cross-collaboration is up to 25% more productive on average while 73% of all sales teams find sales technology essential to collaboration across different departments of an enterprise.

Good sales software will not only streamline internal processes and personalize marketing and sales, but it will also facilitate clear communication across all channels and all departments. The vast majority of sales reps recognize that their capabilities to gain a single overview of all-important aspects of a customer is severely hindered without the aid of proven sales technology. Only 17% of all teams are happy with their unified customer profiles. The importance of aggregated data should never be underestimated.

Without efficiently integrated data from departments like marketing or service deployment, sales have a hard time delivering the best customer experience across the most effective channels. Inter-department communication puts the customer in the most capable hands at any point of your sales pipeline. Critical information arrives immediately which improves the favorable image of your company and frees up pressure on internal workflows. Siloed departmental systems are simply not efficient enough to give sales the edge that they need to stay competitive in today’s markets.

Forgo sales technology and you could be throwing away valuable customers, conversions, and sales.

The Importance of Proper Territory Management

Opting for a dedicated outside sales solution such as SPOTIO enables sales reps to optimize every area of business. From route optimization to territory management, SPOTIO B2B sales technology delivers an average efficiency increase of 46%. Territory and route management software supplies the insights needed to make informed decisions concerning your sales structure. It will increase sales within enterprises of all sizes and is near essential to large, complex organizations.

There are simply so many variables available to sales leaders when asked to improve performance and conversions that attempting to maximize returns without the help of dedicated software accrues a massive cost in time and manpower. Sales responsibilities need to be balanced across your enterprise. The correct customers need to be targeted by the right sales teams based on sales potential, geography, socio-demographic factors, performance history and current relevant statistics.

Sales technology gives your business the highest potential for securing a new opportunity by giving you all the tools you need to implement intelligent territory management. Mapping territories with the help of a dedicated platform is quick and easy. This means that your reps and managers will be equipped detailed profiles and maps filled with qualified prospects in just minutes.

What’s time worth to your business?

Saving Your Company Onboarding Costs

When you know your workload and the balance which your employees are currently maintaining, then you can onboard new reps more efficiently, skyrocketing the process of reaching full productivity.

Onboarding normally comes with a definite period of adjustment whereby new sales reps are learning customers and company protocol. Businesses which resort to a complex arrangement of individual software packages and pen-and-paper management solutions end up costing the company a significant tally of resources to get new staff up to speed. The simpler your sales system and the more diverse your SaaS platform, the more momentum onboarding gains. Instead of wasting hours on the road coming to know your customers and prospects, reps are allowed the full value of their most powerful asset – time.

The Sales Management Association carried out a study and found that 62% of all businesses feel that they are ineffective at onboarding despite it being a prime area of focus for sales leaders. The only way to increase the efficacy of training programs and the adoption of existing customers and leads without excessive HR staffing costs is to invest in proven sales technology.

Projections, Estimates & Quotas

Sales quotas are assigned on-the-fly far too often.

This leads to a massive productivity loss, unnecessary traveling expenses, and can even ruin your chances with a customer forever if your rep’s timing is terrible. Managers and upper level staff assign responsibilities based on quotas and projections which cannot carry any acceptable degree of accuracy without sales technology being used. Even onboarding and training costs scale sky-high in many businesses due to nothing other than a lack of information and comparative insight. Reps get assigned unrealistic goals and quotas which, other than sucking resources from your business, also drain motivation and enthusiasm. This in turn causes a long-term negative effect on your rep and his or her performance.

Poor customer placement due to speculation rather than reporting and analytics is another cause of collapsing conversions. Good sales software removes all the guesswork allowing every department of your business to strategize with minimal risk. As each decision, delegation and organizational change in your enterpriser is set in place, growth can be relied on rather than a blind-chase towards an earnest estimated goal.

Massive ROI from Sales Technology

No less than 50% of all sales teams report improved productivity after implementing sales technology. Despite the many benefits and numerous ways that you can see sales technology as an asset to your business, many enterprises bring decisions down to a basic deciding factor of return on investment.

Those eager to adopt new sales software and systems will be happy to know that this $36 billion industry delivers a whopping ROI of 245% on average. Over and above this sizable sum, your sales technology will also grow your revenues by 24% per-over-year as your database scales in size and detail.

The more data your software or field sales enablement platform amasses, the greater the scope of its capabilities, accuracy, and benefit to sales. With more information comes efficiency and efficacy improvements, better sales insights, and stronger bonds with existing customers.

From supporting canvassing and customer retention to expanding your marketing reach and even directly boosting revenues, sales technology comes at a fractional cost when you compare it to the massive value added to your ever-expanding enterprise.

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Questions or comments? Contact SPOTIO at info@spotio.com or comment below.

SPOTIO is the #1 field sales automation and performance management software that will increase revenue, maximize profitability, and boost sales productivity.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

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References:

1 – https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2018/12/70-email-marketing-stats-you-need-to-know/
2 – https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/3421285/Bbdboom%20Oct2017/BBD%20Boom%20Blog/BOOM-How-to-manage-leads.pdf
3 – https://blog.capterra.com/easy-and-affordable-crms-for-small-business/
4 – https://www.outerboxdesign.com/web-design-articles/mobile-ecommerce-statistics
5 – https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/prospecting-stats
6 – https://www.salesforce.com/au/blog/2017/07/is-collaborative-selling-the-answer-to-increased-productivity-an
7 – https://spotio.com/solutions/business-to-business/
8 – https://www.brainshark.com/ideas-blog/2018/september/sales-enablement-statistics?language=pt-br
9 – https://learn.g2crowd.com/sales-statistics
10 – https://www.readycloud.com/info/21-CRM-Facts-Your-Business-Needs-to-Know-Now

18 Experts Share Top Sales Enablement Best Practices

The B2B landscape has changed...a lot.

The traditional sales process used to look something like this:

1. Marketing would hand leads over to the sales team
2. The sales team would try to close the deal

The two departments operated in silos. And, while this simplistic “us vs them” mentality used to work, it doesn’t anymore.

Today, there are an average of 5.4 stakeholders involved in the purchase process. Consumers are more educated, and sales cycles longer.

The growing complexity of the B2B sales environment has blurred the lines between sales and marketing. It has become harder to ensure reps are having the right types of conversations with prospects, while being equipped with the right tools and content to drive deals through each stage of the pipeline.

The stats reflect this:

Content: Only 35% of salespeople think marketing knows what content they need
Communication: ⅓ of marketing and sales teams don’t talk regularly
Accessibility: 88% of sales professionals are unable to utilize critical sales material on their smartphones

The disconnect is evident. But, the opportunity is clear. Organizations implementing sales enablement best practices see big bottom line results, such as:

– 99% overall team attainment of sales quota
– 32% higher team sales quota attainment
– 4% year over year growth in average deal size

But, with so many moving pieces – content, communication, tools, processes – where do you start?

To help surface the answer, we reached out to 18 experts from leading sales organizations and training programs such as Sandler, and asked the following question:

List your top 3 sales enablement best practices for 2019?

While we recommend looking through each of the expert responses as they have unique takeaways, we compiled the five most popular best practices below.

 

Top 5 Sales Enablement Best Practices (Based on Expert Response)

We read through all the responses and compiled a shortlist of the top 5 sales enablement best practices to apply in your organization. For more information on each best practice, please read through the expert responses below this section.

 

#1. “Institutionalize” high-performer activities

Identify the best practices of your top sellers and “institutionalize” them for the rest of the team to leverage at relevant points in the sales cycle.

 

#2. Give reps quick access to content

According to the American Marketing Association, 90% of content goes unused by sales teams. The leading cause: sales reps simply cannot find it.

Experts recommend adopting a sales enablement software that is:

Flexible: recommends content based on performance and different sales event triggers informed by your marketing automation platform. This keeps sales conversations aligned with the different stages in the buyer journey.
Organized: acts as an easy-to-use repository for all content and sales tools.
Integrated: connects with other tools to automate and streamline the sales process.

 

#3. Provide continual training

According to research, 87% of new skills are lost within a month of sales training.

Successful sales organizations provide ongoing training and communication across their content, tools and workflows so that reps know exactly what will be most effective throughout the entire sales cycle.

 

#4. Align content with the buyer journey

95% of buyers buy from someone who gave them content at each stage of the buying process.

Align a) your selling processes and b) content strategy to the customer’s conversion path in order to drive meaningful customer engagement.

 

#5. Streamline with technology

This might seem like an obvious one, but a study by CSO Insights found that 60% of sales organizations report a longer sales cycle due to a lack of proper tools.

The right technology stack can fuel sales efforts because they help with forecasting, goal-setting, training and more. In order to maintain alignment, try to leverage the same technology as the marketing team, where possible.

 

18 Experts Reveal Top Sales Enablement Best Practices

Ok:

That’s a quick recap of the most popular sales enablement best practices. Now its time to dive deeper and see how the experts are applying the different best practices to achieve success in their organizations.

Gavin Harris

Apptega | Vice President of Sales and Operations

1. We have created a value model using DecisionLink that allows us to easily align the value of Apptega to our customer’s unique requirements. Using the platform, we are able to quickly deliver high quality documents that help our champions internally position the financial benefits of moving forward with Apptega.

2. We leverage hyper-personalized and professional quality video outreach for prospecting to new customers and prospects. Leveraging the Cyranoapp.io platform, we can easily engage our executives to participate in packaged outreach efforts to their peers in prospective companies.

3. We continually try to provide value, sharing blog posts and other relevant pieces of content that provide value at every touchpoint throughout the sales cycle.

Colleen Francis

1. Use your best to coach the rest. Identify the best practices of top sellers and “institutionalize” them for the rest of the team to leverage.

2. Create small bites of “just in time” skill development tailored specifically to active deals in the pipeline. Serve these up to sellers in your CRM based on sales stage, deal size, competition and product set.

3. Following every win, get the seller record a quick video documenting the top three things they did to successfully close the deal. Use these videos for real time training served up in your CRM based on when the training will be most effective. For example, trigger the questioning skills training video once the deal reaches the qualify stage.

John Barrows

1. Find a way to tie content to revenue. Determine which content types reps are watching/learning that drives the best results, and share them with everyone else.

2. Interview your best reps and ask them to walk you through their most recent and best sale, starting with qualification and going through each stage of the sales process. Cut up the content, tag it by stage, and put it into a repository where reps can go view what good/great looks like.

3. Invest in a tool that provides “just in time” learning for reps when they need it, instead of training them in-person once and expecting them to remember what to do months later.

Nate Bishop

TextUs | VP of Voice Solutions

My top 3 sales enablement best practices include:

1. Training/coaching,

2. Embracing technology,

3. Industry knowledge.

Everything is always progressing and we need adapt to the ever changing environment. To keep our team at the forefront of industry knowledge we leverage a variety of training and coaching solutions. It is important that we have a finger on the industry pulse, and upcoming trends.

Through weekly coaching we equip our team with a tool set to deliver deep industry insights to our customers and future customers. We’re continuously evaluating new technologies to improve our sales processes and operations to enable our team to focus on having meaningful conversations.

Steve Richard

ExecVision | Founder

1. First define your call types (cold call, lead follow up call, discovery call, demo, closing call, etc.). Then define the 7-10 key ‘behaviors’ that your sales reps should exhibit by call type.

2. Create coaching plans to follow that the reps are moving toward mastery on those key behaviors. Coaching plans need to be a series of coaching interventions over a period of time in order to beat the ‘forgetting curve.’ Google “forgetting curve” if you don’t know what that it. You need to move people from unconsciously incompetent to consciously competent.

3. Run a call of the month contest to make learning fun. Celebrate catching examples of what great calls sound like in the wild. Build your library of best calls to ramp the next generation of reps in half the time.

Bob Apollo

Inflexion Point | Founder

1. Sales enablement is a team effort. You need to actively involve your top sales performers in developing the program. Learn what it is that makes them successful and work out how to equip and enable their colleagues to emulate their success.

2. Package your sales enablement materials into easy-to-find, easy-to-consume, bite-sized chunks that are accessible anywhere. Proactively serve up the materials that are most likely to be useful to the sales person in their current situation.

3. Carefully analyse what is and isn’t used, and look for correlations between the use of specific sales enablement tools and subsequent sales success. Do more of what works, and stop doing what doesn’t.

Tamara Schenk

CSO Insights | Research Director

1. Formalize your sales enablement approach: Align your enablement strategy to the organization’s strategic initiatives. Create a sales enablement charter (business plan) and achieve up to 2-digit win rate improvements.

2. Focus on the customer: Align a) your selling processes and b) your enablement services to the customer’s path to drive effective customer engagement. Those who do, see better win rates.

3. Sales coaching remains a critical gap when it comes to adoption and reinforcement. Mature enablement functions develop sales managers as top sales coaches to improve win rates.

Daniel Disney

The Daily Sales | Founder

1. Utilize all the tools your customers are using. This could include the phone, social media, email, video, networking, post etc. If your customers are using it then you have an opportunity to leverage it to reach them.

2. Don’t fear technology, use it! A lot of salespeople are scared AI will take away their jobs, but the best salespeople are learning how to use it to enhance their jobs. Look at what tools are available, try them, practice and master them.

3. Start learning how to use video. Video is a huge part of the content world right now and is a fast growing platform for sales conversations. It’s also difficult to get comfortable with so now is the time to start practicing and getting past those initial challenges.

Craig Klein

1. Organize leads and prospects by source & disposition/outcome.

2. Ensure all leads (even the cold/dead ones) are getting automated emails from you regularly.

3. Call leads that engage with your emails quickly (within 4 hours).

Chad Burmeister

BDR.ai | CEO

1. Add more virtual BDRs – Until your quota carrying reps are completely booked up, add more virtual BDRs!

2. Remove low value work – Every quarter did into what your SDRs, BDRs, and AEs are doing. Then optimize their daily work so that they focus less on low value work, and more on higher value work (it’s good for them, it’s good for your company).

3. Look at Saleshood – Elay Cohen and their team is amazing. Great solution that will change how you train your sales team!

Matt Sykes

Salescadence | Founder

1. Shift from Managing Time to Measuring it. Effective Sales Enablers are ruthless with their time, they place real value on it, they never give it away for free and only exchange it for something in return.

Tip: Divide your ‘To Do’ list up into ‘Unpaid Admin’ tasks and ‘Paid Revenue’ tasks and spend a minimum of 70% of your day on activities which you can directly or indirectly assign an invoice to.

2. Develop Your Personal Brand. You are who Google says you are and in today’s social market place, it’s possible to position yourself as the ‘go-to’ sales person in your industry.

Tip: Sharpen up your LinkedIn profile and always produce and publish content that’s helpful and of interest to your target market. Providing consistent, valuable information creates a ‘known, liked and trusted’ status.

3. Invest in Your Personal Development. The world of Sales is ever-changing and Ultra High Performers don’t wait for their employer to send them on a training course, they take responsibility for their own success.

Tip: Listening to one of the many sales podcasts available on your daily commute will keep you up to date on the latest trends and on what’s new in the world of Sales Training.

Mike Kunkle

SPASIGMA | Vice President, Sales Enablement Services

Let me start by saying that the next best move for any given sales enablement function is highly contextual, based on how they and their sales force are operating today, and where they both want to be (what they want to achieve) over the next quarter or six months. With that disclaimed, here are the practices I’m hoping we see more of in 2019.

1. Shift to a buyer-oriented selling system
I believe one of the best possible practices is to foster a buyer-orientation across the business. A buyer-orientation means changing the mindset, language and behaviors of the leadership team and employees to an outside-in, other-focused, buyer-centric orientation.This orientation changes language, such as shifting from “quota crushers” to “customer problem solvers,” or from “overcoming objections” to “resolving buyer concerns,” and more. It means understanding your buyer personas and their COIN-OP (Challenges, Opportunities, Impacts, Needs, Objectives, and Priorities) and shifting your prospecting approaches from product-centric to problem/solution centric.

In opportunity management, it means a focus on meeting each decision maker’s buying process exit criteria, or things that each buyer needs to see, hear, feel, understand and believe in each stage of their buyers’ journey, to feel comfortable moving forward to the next stage with you. To learn more, I have a (free) recorded webinar on Sales & Marketing Management Magazine’s SMMConnect channel.

2. Get a sales enablement charter in place
Have you seen the number of sales enablement definitions in the market? Every sales analyst has one, the Sales Enablement Society has one, the Association for Talent Development’s Sales Enablement Community of Practice has one, and I think your grandmother might have one at this point.

I’m hoping we see more consensus this year about enablement being not just marketing-related or readiness and training related, or technology-related, but that it continues to evolve to a cross-functional discipline including marketing/messaging/content, training/readiness/ongoing development, and technology and tools, at a minimum, with possibly an expansion toward sales selection.

I recommend that you review these various current definitions and get a solid understanding of all aspects of sales enablement, and then develop a charter that clearly delineates what sales enablement aspects your function will address, who you will partner with cross-functionally, the outcomes you will support, and how you will work together to achieve them.

As the old saying goes, “you can’t hit a target you don’t see.” A charter fosters alignment and sets clear expectations, ensuring clarity and focus and increasing your chance of success.

3. Evolve toward performance consulting and systems thinking
Once you have the building block of sales enablement in place (see this SlideShare for the building blocks) you can begin to evolve to a consulting practice that identifies and solves problems to improve sales performance. I believe this is the highest and best use of sales enablement and is where I believe and hope the profession is heading.

Performance consulting is a systematic and holistic approach to improve workplace performance and achieve business goals.

Performance consulting:

– Is grounded in analytics, diagnostics, and root cause analysis
– Considers of a broad array of organizational and individual factors that influence human performance
– Includes selection, design, and development of the most appropriate solution to solve the identified performance problem
– Implements initiatives using proven-effective practices for the selected intervention and change practices including communication, follow-through, measurement, analysis, evaluation, and adjustment to ensure results are achieved.I believe this is a natural evolution for sales enablement and that we will see the more advanced in the profession moving toward performance consulting and holistic systems thinking in 2019.

4. [Bonus] Create more effective learning systems
I’m going to offer a bonus fourth practice. I see more organizations trying to train more effectively and get a return on their training investment, and I believe this trend will continue in 2019.I believe we’ll see more organizations favoring bite-sized courses (microlearning that targets one or two key learning objectives at a time, but often strung together into a larger curriculum, as needed).

I believe video will continue to rise in popularity, as well, delivered in these online courses, with reinforcement, crowdsourced best practice sharing, and the use of job aids/performance support and workflow performance support.

Finally, I believe we’ll see continued growing focus on enabling managers to diagnose performance issues to target their time with reps, and coach reps to mastery, whether through virtual/video coaching, team coaching, or one-one-one field coaching. This will include not just coaching in general, but also enabling, empowering and engaging managers in sales onboarding and other ongoing training, as part of the learning system, to coach their reps to mastery with any key skills and competencies that are taught.

Brian Sullivan

Sandler | Vice President, Sandler Enterprise Selling

To share three 2019 best practices, I’ll start with the definition of the term – “procedures shown by experience to produce optimal results”.1. First, meet with each new major account at the start of the business relationship to identify the account’s five most important success factors. These become the substance for client satisfaction, not boilerplate factors your organization uses to survey all accounts.

2. Second, convert your major account “quarterly business reviews” to “quarterly value reviews” focused on the value you’ve delivered in the previous quarter and the value you are expected to deliver in the upcoming time frame. This totally different perspective, while focused completely on client value, also breeds new business opportunities.

3. And last, understand that account retention is not a noun. It’s a verb. It’s not what you get. It’s what you do. Honestly assess your organization’s performance regarding the reasons that major accounts stay or go – their critical retention factors. But beyond simply assessing your performance, build accountable action items in each area to improve the relationships and actively increase account retention.So, three best practices to help, by definition, produce optimal 2019 results.

Irene Becker

Just Coach It | Chief Success Officer

Sales enablement becomes very important as an organization grows past a sales team of 50 representatives. Smaller teams should, however, have a system in place that creates ownership and accountability for sales and revenue growth. Each sales representative, each marketing collateral or initiative is critical to the customer experience, and the customer experience is the hot button for sales success.

1. Make the customer experience a vital part of your ecosystem.

The customer experience is a vital part of sales the sales journey. Now, more than ever before the conversations/interactions/touchpoints (face to face or virtual) you have with prospects and customers need to be delivered in the right way, at the right time and include using the right technology as a lever for sales enablement.

Sales and marketing teams must work together to provide the right incentives, channels and solutions that develop a strong customer management ecosystem that can be monitored; an ecosystem that will also identify any gaps in the customer experience that need to be addressed and how they will be addressed.

2. Coach and train with an emotionally intelligent edge.

Develop sticky coaching and training that helps people upskill, improve and also retain what they have learned. Xerox notes that 87% of sales training content is forgotten within one month of the training, we need to develop coaching and training programs that are tools, are aligned for maximum engagement and results.

Emotional intelligence, the ability to understand your emotions, manage your emotions and understand the emotions of others is critical to every aspect of the customer journey and sales cycle. Giving your teams training and coaching is emotionally intelligent is critical to sales results and to preparing your people to be the best they can be under stress and also when dealing with different peoples and situations.

3. Leverage marketing content and technology.

It is important to use marketing content in whitepapers, videos, blogs and all social/digital media to support every stage of the sales cycle. Develop systems that create transparency and report between the marketing and sales department so that new materials can be created with the input of those who are at the front line

There are many excellent digital sales tools and apps. Choosing the right technology and be a big help in goal-setting, training and more. The need to map the customer journey and to deliver the right message in the right format and at the right time is critical and technology can be a very important tool/resource.

Quyen Chang

Financialforce | Senior Director, Head of Global Enablement

As an enablement professional, it is important to remember the following:

1. Focus on sales playbook – content and assets for everyone to be successful.
– Make sure to have feedback from product, marketing, sales contributors
– Confirm that the playbook outlines the sales process and content to help throughout each sales stage

2. Focus on productive technology for those in the field to do their job: Salesforce, Saleshood, Outreach, Zoom.

3. Focus on the people: how often are you working on continued enablement programs for managers, individual contributors and the collaboration with pre and post sales teams.

Mike Schultz

RAIN Group | President

1. First, never stop training. Sales training is about changing behavior. This can’t be done in a 2- or 3-day training event and isn’t about one program or another. Sales enablement leaders need to provide ongoing training across a variety of sales skills in order to build a top performing sales team.

2. Second, they need to provide sales coaching. An effective coach can be the most significant factor in a seller’s success. They motivate sellers, help them build goal and action plans, advise sellers to win deals, and hold sellers accountable. Unfortunately, too many sales coaches either don’t do these things or they don’t do them well and sales performance suffers.

3. Lastly, building off of sales coaching, sales enablement should help sellers become extremely productive. Forty-three percent of sellers at Top Performing Sales Organizations have the skills to manage their time and day effectively, but only 26 percent of The Rest do. Running Extreme Productivity training and Challenges is a major priority for RAIN Group clients around the globe in 2019.

Michael D. Decker

Medallion Retail | Vice President, Marketing Strategy & Business Development

As a B2B Marketer and Sales pro looking to deliver road tested SQL’s, I employ valuable and consistent content marketing in the form of a weekly blog that simultaneously raises existing prospect awareness and new prospect accessibility on Search.The fun then begins in discerning client perceived “needs” from Vendor provided “solutions” that truly grasp and differentiate.

A great sales team delivers unexpected solutions that go far beyond expectations. This is what’s necessary today as digital solutions evolve at record breaking pace.

A great sales person leverages the advantages of seeing the forest from the trees.

1. See your Clients real competition.

2. Understand the gap.

3. Leverage your product and services to fill it with a tangible and custom solution — seeing is believing.

Germain Brion

Chargebee | Vice President of Sales

1. We are scaling heavily in 2019. Our biggest enablement pain is to streamline onboarding as we 3x team size. This means we hired someone to “own” onboarding and the LMS roll-out.

2. The second best practice is to “trust the team,” they can be experts in very niche areas of their trade; by giving them space to share learnings and shine, we encourage a culture of growth and learning and source great ideas.

3. Finally, we are now doing regular marketing check-ins to ensure the Sales Team has relevant collateral throughout the year.

What Sales Enablement Best Practices Will You Implement in 2019?

There you have it – 18 experts shared the top sales enablement practices to implement in 2019.

Which ones are going to use? Any others you’d add?

Let us know in the comments below.

Hottest B2B Sales Trends in 2019

Guest post by Scott Miraglia

2019 is another year in an era that is seeing rapid-fire advancements in technology. That means there are more channels than ever before in which to appeal to potential customers. It’s an exciting time, but one with an undercurrent of anxiety. For example, according to a LinkedIn survey of B2B sales challenges in 2019, respondents cited such things as pipeline consistency and having more meaningful interactions with customers as their prime worries.

These are all valid concerns. What’s interesting is that trends we’re seeing right now are poised to alleviate this stress and solve many of these issues in one fell swoop—provided sales teams leverage these trends wisely and effectively. Below we list how.

AI and big data benefit sales

This first trend gets right to the heart of the 800-pound digital gorilla in the room: big data. This is much more than a simple buzz term or fleeting trend—it’s the overarching theme of information accumulation in today’s world. Human beings generate a staggering 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, and, needless to say, your typical sales team can’t manage that data and extract crucial insights from it on their own.

This is where artificial intelligence enters the picture. With advances in machine learning over the past few years we’ve seen AI go from being a sci-fi pipe dream to a real-world component of many sales and marketing solutions. There are AI-powered tools that can help sales and marketing teams do everything from schedule meetings (X.ai) to ad retargeting (Shoelace) to workflow automation (Troops) to A/B testing and website personalization (Convertize) to… well, you get the idea.

But AI powered big data solutions also help B2B sales teams in three fundamental ways:

1. Generating new leads
2. Allowing for the creation of personalized marketing campaigns
3. Guiding product pricing

To the first point, AI is facilitating lead generation because no longer do individuals have to sift through market research statistics, survey forms, email lists, and social media info for actionable insight into customer profiles. With so much new data coming in every day, AI shoulders the burden by dealing with many mundane tasks, which frees up salespeople to better develop initiatives to reach their target audience and generate leads.

AI can then further sift through these massive data lakes to glean insight into market price points, which will help companies set product prices. But AI trends further benefit sales teams to the point we’re now seeing it become an extension of the team. More on this below.

AI becomes a virtual sales department

2019 is poised to become the year when artificial intelligence evolves from being a handy tool to a bonafide sales team in its own right. Enter AI and, specifically, chatbots. This is a global market that’s ascending like a rocket, as chatbots are expected to be a 1.2 billion-dollar industry by 2025. Indeed, chatbots have been around for a couple years, but the reason they’re becoming integral to the sales strategy now is simple: people finally trust AI.

According to Forbes, a majority of both baby boomers and millennials actually approve of the customer service provided by chatbots. These little virtual assistants can answer most questions instantly, and, most crucially, they operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week without a break.

The only question left is, are chatbots as helpful for B2B sales teams as they are in the consumer-facing world? Can they handle more nuanced and technical queries put forth by companies in the fields of information technology, software, manufacturing, and others? The answer is yes.

All chatbots use machine-learning algorithms to fuel their interactions, thus the more a chatbot interacts with a customer—in any field—the more effective it gets. Any small, medium, or large-sized B2B business with a solid CRM data-management tool in place might only need a few months to implement a customer-service-ready chatbot.

CRM goes 360

Above we mentioned how even a basic chatbot can handle complex customer interactions when it has access to well-managed CRM data. That’s where AI enters the picture yet again. Just like machine learning is powering chatbots, it’s also powering advanced CRM solutions as well, helping companies of all sizes to manage data that humans simply aren’t capable of.

But while sales teams now have a welcome assist from the aforementioned AI, the onus is still on people to turn all this data they accumulate into something useful. In other words, how deeply salespeople look into CRM data is going to determine how effective their strategies really are. How to do this involves going beyond sales forecasting and tracking interactions. It means gaining a single 360° view of customers across all channels. Doing so yields many advantages, such as:

– The ability to improve customer interaction and build better relationships
– More accurate customer segmentation
– The knowledge to provide better customer service based on buying habits

This is particularly vital for B2B operations, whose sales cycles are notoriously long. In the enterprise-facing world, it takes time to build a relationship with prospects and move them down the sales funnel. Being well-armed with comprehensive knowledge of a prospect’s interests and behaviors, as well as what channels they are using and when, puts your sales department in prime position to achieve the three goals listed above.

Conclusion

The most crucial lesson to take away from the points listed above is that of integration. These trends are facilitating the success of sales teams in today’s world—but only if the CRM in question is properly integrated. There’s an alarming report by Forbes that states many companies have data spread out across a whopping 35-different info-gathering systems. Not so surprisingly, these companies are unhappy with the results. The only way to solve the problem is to fully integrate your CRM, and let AI do the heavy lifting where it concerns big data.

Scott Miraglia

Scott is the CEO of Elevation Marketing. Scott is dedicated to helping his talented teams develop unique and effective integrated marketing programs that help employees realize their full potential while serving up impressive business wins for clients.

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Questions or comments? Contact SPOTIO at info@spotio.com or comment below.

SPOTIO is the #1 field sales automation and performance management software that will increase revenue, maximize profitability, and boost sales productivity.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

Shifting Your Sales Team Bell Curve

A bell curve is a performance management technique that is used to assess and measure the performance and hold people accountable. This technique can be applied to many facets of life and business, and a sales team is no exception.

A bell curve is an important business tool for sales reps and their companies, something that determines where leaks exist in the sales funnel and where improvements can be made; helping companies define how many of their sales representatives are high-performing, middle-of-the-road, or low-performing. All of which can help management to redefine training and improve sales quota attainment.

How Companies Benefit from Implementing a Bell Curve

By implementing a bell curve, companies can easily identify the performance level of every employee. This provides a straightforward system for ranking employees; something which is critical in the evaluation of employee performance including improvements, declines, and regular maintenance.

How Companies are Disadvantaged by a Bell Curve

With a bell curve, the biggest disadvantage is the fact that managers are forced to segment their employees by performance. This could unfairly place employees in a lower-tier simply because they have to distribute a specific percentage of employer performances into each range. Sometimes using this scale to rate salespeople is simply too rigid and it can cause negative competition among employees which could in turn impact morale.

Levels of a Bell Curve

When organizations rank their sales teams along a bell curve, employees are divided into different levels based on their performance:

High Performing Organization

Those who fall under the high performer category are employees that a company wants to keep happy, they want to retain them because high performers don’t require any coaching and are very effective when working independently.

Companies that achieve high performer levels for the majority of their employees tend to focus more heavily on consistently achieving high performance across their sales team. Within the high performer category, many employees on the opposite end of the spectrum might leave the company simply because they know they can’t keep up with the level of talent that surrounds them.

Average Performing Organization

Average performers are employees, with coaching, could rise up to the high-performance tier.  Conversely, without coaching, they may drop to the low/non-performer tier. It’s best for organizations to be in this situation because it paves the way for serious potential and optimizes growth with the right tools.

Low/Non-Performer Organization

An organization with many low/non-performers is usually the result of making bad hires. These are probably people who aren’t a good fit for sales so even if you do train them it’s not going to result in a lot of improvement.

Situations like this mean that management should take a step back and recognize that sales issues are caused by the sales staff specifically but rather by bad hiring tactics by the management. Most of the time poor management is a critical problem here and these problems compound with time. The bell curve continues to shift to the left because top performers will leave the company and work with a better organization. Obviously, this is something that should be avoided and rectified.

An Ideal Sales Performance Bell Curve

Ideally, it is best for a sales performance bell curve to be heavily situated around the mid-performance level; or a 20, 70, 10 ratio or a 10, 70, 20 distribution ratio.

The difference between low-performing and average performing reps is minimal, but the difference between top performers and average performers is very significant. Achieving a 5% performance improvement from your middle 60-70% of employees equates to over 70% more revenue than you would get if you achieved a 5% performance improvement from your top representatives.

This is why bell curve adjustments are so important. Focusing resources on your mid-tier is going to get you the greatest return on your investment.

A Good Bell Curve Optimizes Productivity

To optimize productivity with an optimal bell curve, you can use software like SPOTIO. SPOTIO makes your sales team 46% more productive.  It does this by shifting the bell curve forward toward improved productivity for everyone. Software like this helps to improve your bell curve on a general level which has been correlated to increased productivity.

There are key features that you want to look for in the software you select. You want to be able to track trends and establish your bell curve.  You also want the data that can be applied to your sales staff to help establish, define and refine the perfect sales bell curve.

How is this achieved?

Productivity is defined by three important things:

1. Shorter Sales Cycles
2. Increased Conversion Rate
3. Increased Revenue

How sales software (like SPOTIO) helps achieve the ideal bell curve

When you use sales software it engages your entire sales team and provides reliable information to help sales reps achieve performance goals. The ideal bell curve can only be achieved when sales reps have clear visibility into the needs of their customers alongside the analytics that helped them to get the appropriate products to those customers.

The KPI’s from software like SPOTIO  show managers what percentage of sales reps are making their plans, what the composition of the pipeline is. For sales representatives this might not be something that affects their job today but it can enhance their career long-term by providing them with a sales strategy and sales execution that work in tandem. When everyone in an office works toward the same goal, revenue and profitability increase for years to come.

In the end, using sale software as a manager will give you the ability to improve the performance of your middle-tier sales reps. Tools can be provided, reliable data can be viewed, and everyone in your sales funnel can work together toward the same goals.

By improving the performance of your mid-tier employee you can yield the highest ROI for your organization.

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Questions or comments? Contact SPOTIO at info@spotio.com or comment below.

SPOTIO is the #1 field sales automation and performance management software that will increase revenue, maximize profitability, and boost sales productivity.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

Weekly Reports Sales Manager Should Run [with Template]

KPI reporting can be time consuming, but good KPI reports are essential to data-driven business. Key performance indicators and metrics must be delivered as accessible, interactive reporting documents which give other staff and management key performance insights.

KPI’s are very important in helping a business achieve strategic goals while allowing management to gauge the actions of sales reps within the broader scope of your enterprise. If you take the time to consider what a good KPI report needs to contain before creating your report, you can deliver meaningful results in under 10 minutes every time. The reports that you generate help managers realize where skill sets are best utilized.

Here we’ll be taking you through a look at essential daily KPI’s to request from your sales reps. We’ll also show you which KPI’s work best for weekly reports and exactly how to put together a clear-clear report for your directors, presidents, or partners.

Daily KPI’s from Your Reps

There are many key performance indicators which are essential to understanding how your staff body is functioning as a team. Project management metrics empower management with the information that they need to run a business optimally. Without the hard numbers behind budgets and performance data, communication and delegation within your enterprise are simply ineffective.

Every target-driven sales environment needs daily KPI reports aligned to the strategic goals of your company. Use all or any of the following daily KPI’s to help optimize your enterprise management.

Daily Sales Revenues

Price Per Unit Sold X Total Number of Units Sold for the Week / 7 = Daily Sales Revenue

This simple calculation lets you see which reps are pushing the most gross sales on a day to day basis. Graphing your daily sales revenue KPI over a weekly or monthly time-period gives a clear overview of underperforming and top achievers. Revenues don’t reveal as much insight as profit figures, however, they will allow you to perform certain types of analysis better. Daily sales revenues allow you to gauge the effect of additional funding and resources on potential profitability and growth.

Daily Sales Commissions

Request a daily sales commissions report from all of your reps to ensure that both parties are up-to-date and informed concerning progress towards goals, and possible incentives. Staying aware of the incoming commissions motivates reps and management while delivering key employee insights.

Daily Wages

Depending on the payment structure of your reps, you may need to include a daily wages KPI. By staying current with wages on a day-to-day basis, everyone knows what they are earning and you always know that you have the fees due to your reps factored into your budget. Some businesses use both wages and commissions. In this case, cite both KPI’s on a daily basis.

Daily ROI

Daily Sales Revenues / Total Daily Expenses, Wage & Commissions * 100 = Daily ROI

Return on investment for sales is a calculation which needs to factor in all costs in order to display any degree of accuracy. You need to include fuel, the cost of communications, and any external fees which may be involved in delivering sales, service and support to your customers. One should, however, keep in mind that certain sales pipelines only present a positive return on investment after a significant period of time.

Don’t always accept the daily ROI of your reps as a determining factor of their performance, but rather as a gauge of the efficiency of your funnels.

Opportunity Win Rate

Total Number of Sales Closed / Total Amount of Opportunities = Opportunity Win Rate

This metric will show you which reps have the best closing rate. Sales hinges upon being able to seal the deal, making this KPI integral to finding out who is amassing leads and who is actually selling. Most successful sales managers see the opportunity win rate as one of the most important sales metrics. It allows for a clear overview of which reps are better at closing, which are better suited to each type of pipeline, and presents one with a world of new optimization possibilities when allocating resources to reps.

Weekly KPI’s

The close of every week must be followed by a comprehensive report of the key performance indicators reflecting immediate progress. Include any of these weekly KPI’s to help data-driven decision making by gaining a concise but highly-relevant overview of your business’ performance. Many of these weekly KPI’s could / should be included on your weekly report to upper management which we will cover shortly.

Lead-to-Sale Percentage

Conversion Rate = Total Number of Sales / Number of Leads * 100

Comparing the lead-to-sale percentage across your reps is a great way to assess individual performance.

For example, if you made 30 sales for the month out of 100 potential leads then your sales to lead conversion rate is 30%. A lead-to-sale conversion rate will show managers which reps need additional training or replacement to a different department. Any reps falling below the company-wide sales average need individual attention in some way.

Average Cost Per Lead

Total Lead Acquisition Cost / Total Number of Leads = Average Cost Per Lead

Obtaining an average cost per lead lets you know which reps are under-utilizing their budget, time, and resources. Many issues could be at the root of poor average cost per lead performance ranging from logistics dilemmas to understaffing issues.

Get a weekly report covering the average cost of your reps’ lead acquisition, and you’ll soon discover where your sales teams and pipelines need work.

Quote to Close Ratio

Weekly Quote Total / Closed Weekly Sales * 100 = Closing Ratio Percentage

The quote to close ratio KPI gives you a great indication of how quickly to follow up on prospects within your sales funnel. Sales reps often fail to perform due to quoting too early or too late. Once you find the right balance within your funnel, your reps will all be closing more sales thanks to attentive quoting at precisely when it’s wanted.

Sales Lead to Close Ratio

Weekly Sales Leads Total / Closed Weekly Sales Total * 100 = Sales Leads to Close Ratio Percentage

This KPI shows overall sales efficiency. Depending on your organizational structure, you may want to run this metric for both raw leads and qualified leads independently. You can run the sales leads to close ratio KPI on specific geographical areas in order to get a better feel for where you need to devote your time and resources.

Prospecting Activity

Your sales teams need to capture as much data as possible concerning the resources devoted to seeking and obtaining new leads. Let management and sales staff keep track of calls, emails, meetings, time spent traveling, service or product demos, and any other marketing activities applicable to your sales funnel.

Successful sales prospecting relies on information. Any substantial changes in statistics are usually a key indicator of growth and decline, marking areas that you can improve, replicate, or expand upon as you now know the connection. Capture and include as many prospecting activity metrics as KPI’s as possible to truly understand your potential customers.

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Average Purchase Value

Total Value of Weekly Sales / Total Number of Weekly Sales = Average Purchase Value

The average purchase value KPI gives you a measure of the average sales value of each transaction. Average purchase values need to be segmented according to specific demographics in order to reach an accurate comparison of your marketing efforts. This KPI also allows you to identify which reps are best at selling high and low-end products and services. Certain staff may be far more productive when assigned a particular demographic.

Sales by Product Line

Sales by product line will let you identify the most lucrative products and services in your range, while also uncovering which sales pipelines need better sales prospecting and lead nurturing.

Sales by Channel

This strategic KPI works on both short-term and long-term scales. It shows you exactly which areas of customer acquisition are netting you the most revenue.

Client Meetings Attended

The metrics for meetings attended is fantastic for weekly sales reports. Managers are awarded insights into which staff is making the most of their time, and which would be more productive with less out-of-office time.

Weekly Reporting to Upper-Management

Sales managers will need to deliver a selection of KPI’s and performance metrics to their directors, vice presidents, boards of staff, and other superiors. Weekly sales reports can also be shared between departmental heads to ensure that inter-company collaboration is functioning optimally with communications clear throughout.

A weekly sales report needs to present a comprehensive but concise overview of current sales, your team’s progress towards existing goals, revenues and costs, as well as growth. Additionally, recommendations for organizational and staffing changes which need to be passed by upper-management can be suggested along-side the data to back up the decision.

Putting Together a Winning Weekly Reports

When deciding which key performance indicators to include on your weekly reporting, take the time to compare possible metrics against the goals of your enterprise.

If the KPI you wish to cite doesn’t directly correspond to a strategic insight matched to the vision and operation of your business, then no one but you will be able to find any value in it without a lengthy explanation. Simply put, not all metrics are KPI’s and not all KPI’s should be on every weekly report.

There are, however, basic components which must be on every report. Regardless of the type of business, you do or the product/service supplied, good sales reports will carry these following components at a minimum.

Components of a Weekly Report

The sales and performance information of your reps need to be compiled as a weekly report. Make sure that your report contains all of the necessary relevant information such as the branch name, team, and contact details.

Every good report will start off with the date and the time period that the report will be covering. In this case, it’s a weekly duration. Next, it should list the current sales revenue against the year-end target, also displayed in a clear to read manner.

Progress towards your sales target for the month is handy, while a color-coded key and/or structured formatting always helps to keep everything readable. List the KPI’s which you’ll be reporting with a breakdown for each employee, product, or project that you’re reporting on. Keep every week’s report standardized and accompany each report with a short memorandum.

Crafting a Data-Driven Memorandum

Your memorandum should begin with the week’s main accomplishments.

For example, exceeding performance goals by meeting a sales quota early should be an opening statement which is best backed up by a useful metric or projection for next week’s growth based on this week’s numbers. In addition, be sure to provide a meaningful reason for any shortfalls in sales. If a public holiday resulted in you being shut for a day, or an IT-failure interrupted trading for hours, cite the disturbance. This will help the reader understand the full context of the report without needing to be there.

A good basic set of KPI’s to begin with are:

– Weekly Sales Wages
– Weekly Sales Commissions
– Weekly Sales Revenues
– ROI
– Weekly ROI

Feel free to include any other metric which is directly relevant to the organizational structure, strategic vision, and goals of your enterprise. Just keep in mind that directors don’t want to see hoards of raw data. Rather, provide meaningful results which are supported by rich visuals and explanations in clear-speech. Avoid ambiguity and share all results relevant to the profitability and management of your business.

Ideas, tactical advancements, staffing issues, infrastructure suggestions, and any other motivations for change should be discussed openly but supported by the numbers needed to make your reasoning understood.

Growth, Analysis & Your Own Basic Weekly Sales Template

Not all enterprises and business owners will want extensive reports with lengthy memorandums. Smaller businesses will get by and function better with a small selection of meaningful KPI’s reporting the basics.

In the early stages of growth, staying simple and focused is often better than getting lost along a progression of endless optimization. Once established, there are endless ways to analyze information, using key performance indicators as a cornerstone of actionable reporting and data segmentation.

Take a look at our weekly sales report template if you need a spreadsheet to begin crafting insightful daily and weekly reports.

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Questions or comments? Contact SPOTIO at info@spotio.com or comment below.

SPOTIO is the #1 sales enablement and territory management app to increase your revenue, maximize your profitability, and increase your team’s productivity in just 2 weeks.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

Weekly Sales KPI Report Template

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Reports Sales Managers Should Run [with Templates]

Download our weekly sales report templates if you need a spreadsheet to begin crafting insightful daily and weekly reports for your team.

 

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67 High-Impact Sales Enablement Tools for 2019 (By Category)

On average, 50% of a sales rep’s time daily is wasted on poor prospects.

Even if you only have five full-time reps, that’s 100 paid hours every week that have zero ROI. You can almost hear the cash going down the toilet.

However, this stat might be less surprising when you learn that companies spend 5x more on hiring a sales rep than they do training them.

Wait, what?!

That’s right. Talk about failing to set your reps and managers up to succeed.

Poor sales training and unequipped reps is a problem that persists in any industry — despite the fact studies have shown trained reps sell 50% more effectively.

The solution to this mess?

Sales enablement.

Let’s Get Clear on Sales Enablement

Sales enablement is a support function. Its goal is to provide sales reps with information, customer-facing content, and tools, so they can guide a buyer through the purchase process successfully.

This could involve creating fact sheets, industry-specific case studies, and comparison tables that help a rep persuade a lead to buy.

It also means coaching reps on best practices and equipping them with the tools they need to be efficient.

Being able to do this in your organization requires an understanding of the ideal buyer, so you can provide resources they actually need and want throughout the journey.

There are two key stages involved in building a good sales enablement strategy:

  1. 1) Understanding who the ideal customer is, and mapping the buyer’s journey.
  2. 2) Creating sales plays, content, and training for reps to leverage at each stage of the journey.

Sales organizations in 2019 have a plethora of tools available to make every part of this process easier, and in this post we’ll dive into the best for your arsenal.

But first, a look at the power of sales enablement technology…

The Importance of Sales Enablement Technology

According to SalesHub, only 13% of customers believe sales reps understand their needs.

Crazy, right?

When the majority of your reps aren’t connecting with customers, there is costly disconnect.

The solution? Better support for reps, and better content for customers to support them throughout the buyer’s journey.

Propellor research shows that this is a big differentiator for customers:

Being able to do this at scale (or at all), you need a sales enablement strategy. Tools are essential to this, research from Brainshark shows:

“More than 2/3 of companies that invested in sales learning and development technology realized a positive ROI.”

On the flip side, companies that failed to invest in sales enablement technology in the last year have seen a 12% drop in sales goal achievement.

Almost two thirds of companies that have piloted sales enablement programs and seen positive ROI attribute the success to software; according to a study by CSO Insights, 62% of organizations view tools as the top priority investment in sales enablement.

(Source)

Tools can be used for the majority of the top priorities in the study above, too, like content and process improvement.

So, what are the effects of investing in sales enablement tools?

This research from Salesforce found that 84% of companies hit quota with the support of sales enablement tools and coaching.

Let’s look at the tools across each category that can help you research, deploy, and optimize your sales enablement strategy.

The Best Sales Enablement Tools for 2019 (By Category)

Sales enablement is built around the idea that reps can optimize the way they sell, and provide customers with informative content that helps them make complex purchase decisions.

That makes it part market research, part content management — and heavily reliant on analytics to understand and support your ideal buyer segments.

We’ll look at tools across each of these core functionalities:

Market Intelligence
Sales Intelligence & Prospecting
Content Analytics
Content Sharing & Management
Market Automation
Sales & Team Communications
Sales Emails
Sales Presentations
Contract Management
Sales CRMs
Sales Training
Sales Management
Customer Feedback

Market Intelligence

To accelerate sales and ramp up rep productivity, you’ll need to make data-backed decisions. For sales, some of the most important data is around the companies in your target market. How many employees do your prospects typically have? What about funding, or annual revenue?

With that intel, you can make the way your reps sell and prospect more effective, and waste less time. Let’s look at the best sales enablement tools for market intelligence.

Artesian

With Artesian, you get access to a vast bank of proprietary company data through a convenient interface that lets you discover new prospects, track engagement metrics, and deliver content to targeted segments.

Artesian can help your team deploy custom sales enablement strategies by letting reps create lists of leads based on rich data from millions of companies. To make sure you get the right content to the right prospects, Artesian uses AI to analyze prospects and cuts the amount of time reps spend on manual research.

For £89/user/month, a team of up to 10 users can use Artesian for company profiling, content research, and team performance optimization. Teams with over 10 users should get in touch for the enterprise plan.

D&B Hoovers

D&B Hoovers integrates with the tools your team already uses — Marketo, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and more — to enrich lead data and help sales enablement teams analyze the pipeline and develop relevant content.

As well as enriching current data, it can be used to research leads in new markets and support strategies that expand your reach.

Pricing for Hoovers isn’t public, but a free trial is available before you connect with a rep.

Emissary

Ever wanted an expert insider when you’re chasing a big lead? Emissary gives you exactly that, by matching you with a recent former employee from any given company that can guide you on how to close the deal.

It’s aimed at enterprise sales — with 75% of its connections coming from firms in the Fortune 1000 — and over two-thirds of its contacts were VP or higher at the company. Emissary is an effective high-touch way to develop enterprise enablement material, but also serves as a way for reps to get coaching from successful insiders.

Get in touch with the providers for pricing info.

Mattermark

Mattermark combines company profiles with social listening to provide lead and contact profiles, with over 80 fields of data per entry.

It provides data on 4,000,000 companies and 20,000,000 contacts imported via API into your CRM, or in exports to spreadsheets. With Mattermark automatically gathering data on prospects, the sales enablement process is made simpler; far less manual research is needed when a tool can fill in the blanks.

Aimed more at startups (and companies selling to startups), Mattermark also lets you segment companies by funding recency/amount, and growth signals. It also has a lower price tag than the other intelligence tools on this list, at $49/user/month.

Sales Intelligence & Prospecting

Prospecting tools help your reps find the ideal customers for your product, based on a selected set of specific set of demographic and firmographic data points, like “leads within 50 miles of me, with over 200 employees, in the healthcare tech industry”.

An improved prospecting process is a core part of sales enablement because it helps reps up productivity by spending less time on bad leads and more time selling to those likely to convert.

Here are the prospecting tools we recommend checking out.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn has access to one of the biggest troves of business data on the planet, owing to the fact that it has gathered so much insight from user-submitted information on its social network and the connections between different professionals.

When you get access to that data (not fully available through the social network alone), you can unlock every insight the network has gathered, including data on company size, activity, news mentions, posts, engagement, and connections. It also lets you nurture leads and reach out with that data in context through LinkedIn messaging.

Pricing starts at $79.99/month.

Spotio Lead Machine

Spotio’s sales intelligence tool, Lead Machine, allows managers to generate a list of qualified leads for sales teams in seconds.

The tool allows users to define geographic territories and mine data on all the companies within that area. Reps can quickly create an ideal customer profile by mining and sorting over 50 different data points – income, credit capacity, square footage, age of home etc.

After leads have been qualified, extract the data and import into the CRM and start selling.

Lead Machine helps businesses close more deals by having reps focus only on the most qualified leads in a given sales territory.

Spotio is priced at $25/user/month for up to two users, with credits charged for lead machine usage.

NerdyData.com

NerdyData.com gives you access to company technology usage data. You could search the database for every Intercom customer because your tool integrates with Intercom. Or, see who’s running your competitor’s software so you can send over a relevant comparison sheet.

It’s easy to see how this enables your sales team to make more personalized and informed decisions, and how it helps sales enablement initiatives research the tech stacks of different market segments to better understand the lead’s internals.

NerdyData.com’s pricing starts at $50/user/month.

Clearbit

Clearbit is an API you can hook into your existing source of customer data, whether that’s Intercom, Close.io, or Salesforce. With a company name or domain, Clearbit pulls in anything else your sales team should know about that lead, such as the number of employees or industry.

As well as enriching existing data, Clearbit can enable sales to do a more efficient job by building prospect lists and revealing the company profiles of anonymous site visitors. This all helps your team get a better look at the kinds of companies they attract so you can create effective enablement content to support future deals.

Access to Clearbit’s Enrichment API costs $99/monthly. Pricing for other products in the suite is available on request.

SellHack

SellHack helps expand your funnel by making prospecting easier. It’s a browser extension, so you can add leads you find on LinkedIn to existing prospect lists and automatically hunt down their email address.

With segmented lists and easy email outreach built in, SellHack empowers teams to get the right content to the right leads, informed by data SellHack stores.

For 150 email lookups, you can get SellHack at $19/user/month.

Albacross

Did you know that a big-name exec and their team were browsing your site yesterday while evaluating solutions? You’ll certainly agree that would be powerful to know. But how will you find out if it’s not something you’re tracking?

Albacross enables all that and more by keeping a log of companies and potential customers that visit your site, and enriching the data with the best way to contact that lead.

Once the visitor data is stored in Albacross, you get a lead list that grows by itself and is able to be filtered by fields like revenue, company size, and location. Push that lead list to your CRM or any other sales tool you use by integrating Albacross with Zapier.

Pricing starts at $79/month for one site and 1,000 leads exported.

LeadFuze

LeadFuze helps sales teams build prospect lists quickly — not one-by-one — by giving reps access to data on a lead’s industry, media updates, company size, and even PPC spend. With that data, reps can search by tightly-focused criteria to expand their outreach lists and pipeline.

To help save time with data entry and manual research, LeadFuze can also take a list of domains or company names and turn them into the best point-of-contact with a double-verified email address.

Pricing starts at $97/user/month, for 500 lead credits.

DataFox

DataFox is an Oracle-owned CRM enrichment tool that allows sales team to harness AI — backed up by over 100 human staff — to expand sales intelligence and enable more targeted prospecting and conversations.

Based on filters, new leads in your CRM can be automatically assigned to reps. This makes it possible to train reps on specific plays with specific enablement content, and always ensure they’re pitching to the right people.

Despite being an Oracle product, DataFox has native integrations with Salesforce, Marketo, Slack, and Terminus. Its pricing is available by request only.

Growbots

Growbots allows you to create prospect lists by selecting an ideal customer profile, and then automate target outreach to those lists.

Straight away, it’s easy to see how this empowers a sales enablement strategy. Your Growbots prospect lists are created based on criteria like company size, industry, and email activity. With that insight, you can automate the distribution of relevant sales enablement content and design plays around specific market segments and prospect needs.

Pricing for Growbots is available by request only.

Owler

Owler is a lookup database for company information that can be used to explore profiles via the web or enrich CRM data with their API.

Uniquely, Owler focuses on the trust score of a company’s founders and the funding a company has historically received. This makes it great for selling to startups and early-stage high-growth businesses.

Alongside company profiles, you can see all recent news and social mentions for a given company so you can research competitor progress and prospects in context of current events.

Pricing for Owler is not public.

Content Analytics

Once you get a piece of sales enablement content like a product fact sheet in front of a lead, how do you know what happened next? With old school tools, you can make guesses on what content is converting customers and pushing the sales process along, but you can’t be sure how leads engage with it.

Content analytics platforms solve that problem by measuring user heatmaps, copy effectiveness, and other metrics beyond the scope of a non-specialized tool like Google Analytics. Optimize the way you measure the success of your sales enablement content with these hand-picked tools.

Atomic Reach

Ever wanted to know exactly how leads engage with your sales enablement content? Atomic Reach takes your content analytics past the point of just clicks and views, into the realm of rich engagement data that explains why content is performing, so you can replicate the formula.

To help you create content, Atomic Reach also analyzes pages you create for their ability to persuade and convert. Optimize enablement content easily, and accurately track its performance.

Pricing for Atomic Reach is available on request.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg provides heat maps and analytics that you can use to measure if/how leads and website visitors engage with your content.

With that data, you can run A/B tests on a page-by-page basis to boost conversions, dwell time, and other vital metrics you use to judge the effectiveness of your sales enablement content.

Crazy Egg pricing starts at $29/month.

Content Sharing & Management

You’ll need a centralized location to store and distribute customer-facing content and training material, or you’ll be stuck searching for files on your local computer (and so will all of your frustrated reps).

Content sharing and management tools let you create internal documentation, host files for customers, and control who inside your organization can access which resources. Let’s look at some of the best options for sales enablement.

Box

Your sales enablement training material and customer-facing content needs a home. When multiple reps need to access internal content — regardless of when or where — you need a robust cloud storage tool like Box.

Box is an enterprise file sharing and storage tool that integrates with plenty of top sales tools like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. The integration allows you to associate Box documents with leads, making it easy to match the right content to the right person.

Box’s pricing starts at $5/user/month for unlimited storage.

SharePoint

If you’re already living in the Microsoft ecosystem at work, then SharePoint is a great choice to manage sales enablement content, either on-premises or in the cloud with Office 365.

Create internal wikis for your sales team’s training material, and neatly categorize centralized enablement material with ease.

SharePoint is available on its own for $5/user/month, but is at its most useful as part of Office 365. For $20/user/month, you can get the Office 365 Enterprise E3 plan that has SharePoint included alongside Outlook, Word, Excel, and other Microsoft software.

Allbound

Allbound is a sales intelligence tool designed to help businesses manage relationships with partners and deploy enablement content to those partners that will make selling easier.

It features company data lookup, content collaboration, and analytics reports that give insight into content performance. If you’re running a partner sales program, Allbound is the perfect line of communication between you and your external channels.

Pricing starts at $995/month for access to the full Allbound platform.

Showpad

Named a leader by Gartner in the field of Sales Enablement Automation, Showpad is one of the first dedicated sales enablement tools. It provides a platform where sales and marketing can collaborate, sharing content and metrics.

With Showpad, it’s easy for sales teams to surface and share relevant engagement content with buyers and match content to lead profiles based on filters. It is also possible to build and deploy sales training inside the app, then track rep engagement with it.

Pricing is available on request only, and the content platform is sold separately from the training platform.

Marketing Automation

Any efficient sales enablement strategy is built around automation. It only makes sense that reps can do a better job if their lead nurturing happens automatically and they get better qualified or ready-to-buy leads as a result.

Plus, many marketing automation tools also act as a way to get insights into your lead’s mindset — find which leads open and engage with your emails most often, or reference a lead’s historical engagement to know which content they have and haven’t seen.

Here are our top picks in the field of marketing automation.

Marketo

For many companies, Marketo is where lead and customer data already lives. Leveraging this data, you can use Marketo to analyze your site’s content and find sales enablement recommendations based on the lead’s company profile and history. After sharing content, Marketo logs the lead’s interactions to gather metrics you can use to make optimizations.

On top of this, Marketo is an industry-leading marketing automation platform you can use to nurture leads with targeted messages and build a stronger pipeline.

Pricing is unavailable online, but you can request a demo to find out more.

Eloqua

Eloqua is Oracle’s marketing automation solution, aimed at the enterprise market. It integrates with your CRM to enrich lead data, trigger automated messaging, and track engagement with your website and content.

Since it stores data on your existing leads, Eloqua can be used as a sales enablement research tool that gives you a pulse on your current pipeline.

Pricing information is unavailable online.

Customer.io

Customer.io is email marketing for companies that collect in-product data — namely SaaS and web tools. Sales enablement teams can use Customer.io to develop relevant content and training based on the different segments of product user.

Customer.io can be integrated with other customer analytics tools like Segment and Heap, so you’re able to deploy content over email based on historical data like signup date, industry, user count, and last bill amount.

Pricing starts at $150/month for products with up to 100,000 users.

Sales & Team Communications

Conversation and collaboration tools bring your sales team closer together and put the resources reps need right at their fingertips — they also give managers a platform to analyze how the team interacts and sells.

Sales communications is a broad category. It covers anything internal content management, rep call analysis, and instant messaging. Here are some of our top recommendations.

Guru

Wherever you are — Slack, or in your browser — Guru allows you to find the enablement content you need without wasting time switching between documents, your CRM, and a dozen other apps.

You can query Guru to surface the right content for the right leads, and then deliver it through Salesforce, Intercom, or other tools with which Guru has native integrations. This gives you a centralized place to store content, so you can control what reps are distributing without making updates in 10 places at once.

Pricing starts at $380/month, or $2,400 if you want API access.

Chorus.ai

Optimize the way your reps talk to leads by storing and analyzing their sales calls automatically. This is great for developing training material or providing an AI coach for your team that fine-tunes their sales technique and helps them close more deals.

Chorus.ai stores call analysis next to lead data inside your CRM, so you can see call history and outcome wherever you already work. Pricing for Chorus.ai is not publicly available.

Slack

Slack has quickly become to go-to chat and notification hub for teams everywhere. Since it’s where your sales team hangs out already, why not power it up with integrations? Slack can be used to automatically notify reps when new signups come in, segmented by potential deal size with integrations to a customer data tool like Clearbit or DataFox.

Outside of strict sales activity, Slack is a simple way to hold team meetings, search conversations, and even deliver presentations.

Pricing starts at $8/user/month.

Skype for Business

Skype for Business is a collaboration tool for teams, offering a way to streamline internal communication and great customer-facing presentation features for sales demos.

As part of Office 365, Skype for Business integrates with PowerPoint and Word Online so you can easily search and present documents and slide decks that exist in your org’s folders, all without leaving the app.

Skype for Business starts at $8.25/user/month when you buy Office 365 annually.

UberConference

Connect your conferences with lead data and your CRM by using UberConference to run sales meetings, both internally and externally.

UberConference automatically pulls in data on participants so your reps can be as informed as possible while they’re on the call. As well as UberConference data, it’s possible to display data from most other likely sources, such as Salesforce and Office 365.

Shared content and call history is logged inside UberConference, forming a basis for sales performance analysis and a way for reps to surface content they shared with other prospects.

Pricing starts free, with $15/user/month for calls with over 100 participants.

Sales Emails

Vanilla email doesn’t cut it for sales. You need a tool that lets you create outreach playbooks, manage follow-ups, and track engagement metrics.

Here are our top tools for outreach and sales email management.

Attach

Attach is a centralized content hub for sales enablement material that allows your team to store material and then get insight into how leads consume and engage with it.

Unlike a generic solution like Google Drive, storing your content in Attach lets you see which leads viewed which documents and for how long. You can also easily deploy updates to live enablement content without having to send the lead to a new URL. In line with Forrester research that suggests 90% of reps don’t use content because it’s outdated, this is an invaluable feature.

Attach pricing starts at $27/user/month.

Yesware

Yesware is a Chrome and Outlook extension for sales teams, offering a way to supercharge your everyday inbox with CRM-like capabilities. This includes data on open/reply rate, attachment opens, and even presentation slide engagement.

With its email templates and sequences, you can add proven, relevant sales plays to your team’s repertoire easily.

Yesware is available for free, with premium plans starting at $12/user/month when billed annually.

Mailshake

Mailshake was built for sales teams to deliver personalized outreach at scale. It’s a platform that your sales organization can use to create sequences, lead segments, and automation that help reps reach more leads with more targeted messages.

Pricing starts at just $29/user/month.

Close.io

Close.io is a powerhouse CRM, with everything you need to track calls and emails with prospects, leads, and existing customers. It has support for custom fields and lists, so you can create tightly-focused segments that match your sales play and enablement material.

Integrated with a product data or enrichment tool, Close.io acts as a rich data warehouse, storing email history alongside in-app activity and company profiles.

Pricing starts at $59/user/month, but for automation the monthly fee goes up to $99.

Outreach



Outreach lets you create sales email sequences that save reps from the mental burden of remembering to follow up, or remembering to send the right content to the right lead. With its lead prioritization and task feature, reps will always know what the next step is with each contact. This keeps your team productive when they’re doing manual work, and automates the remaining emails.

Pricing for Outreach is available by request.

Sales Presentations

Reps need more than just a basic video chat tool if they’re going to deliver winning presentations. And managers need a way to file presentation content for reps and track its performance. Thankfully, there are powerful video conferencing tools that are built for sales demos, and dedicated meeting apps for measuring the conversion rate of outbound calls.

Here are the sales presentation tools we think are the best to check out.

GoToMeeting

GoToMeeting makes it easy for your team to give sales presentations to practically any lead, without having to get them to download a bulky desktop app or go through a lengthy verification process. For that reason, it’s low friction — a vital benefit in the low-patience world of sales.

For sales pitches and demos, it’s screensharing and annotation features are among the best on the market. You can give presentations that are as detailed and engaging as you need, or offer one-to-many training sessions with reps when you roll out a new piece of software.

Pricing starts from $14/user/month for the starter plan.

Prezi

Prezi is a different kind of presentation tool. Like PowerPoint 2.0, but with none of the boring WordArt.

Instead of forcing the presenter and audience through a linear narrative, slide by slide, Prezi is laid out like an interactive, free-form map that you can seamlessly zoom and navigate.

It also collects analytics on the audience’s reactions to the presentation, so you know where to improve in the future. In this way, it powers sales enablement to make optimizations to the standard presentation process reps follow.

Pricing starts at $7/month for the standard plan.

ShareDemos

ShareDemos is software specifically built for sales enablement. It’s a way to create and distribute sales enablement content internally and externally — that includes sales onboarding material and product fact sheets for customers.

Since rich content can be designed and edited through the ShareDemos platform, sales managers can make updates to content that appear whenever the lead or customer accesses it. This solves the issue of having old content being sent to leads, or reps worrying if the material they send to leads is up to date.

Pricing for ShareDemos is publicly available.

ExecVision

ExecVision is a sales call analysis tool that can process call recordings to gain insight into how the ways reps make calls is affecting your sales conversion rate.

Load you sales calls into ExecVision, and you’ll get an indexed database of your call logs which is searchable and includes metrics such as keywords and interchange frequency. With calls added inside ExecVision, you can get metrics like average call length, calls per rep, and more. As a bonus, you can feed all of this data into the CRM you already use, like Salesforce or HubSpot.

Pricing for ExecVision is available on request.

Contract Management

The exchange and review of contracts can be a long, drawn-out process. If it falls through, you’re wasting all of the marketing effort that went into winning that lead, and all of the sales work done to convert it.

Instead of relying on a Word doc template and freeform follow-up notes, try a dedicated contract management tool to help you create, distribute, and track metrics around contracts.

Proposify

Are you still making your sales proposals inside Google Docs? How are you going to track if your prospect actually reads and engages with the proposal you send?

With Proposify, you get a simple user interface to create proposals with, pre-loaded with data from your business that makes creating proposals a snap.

Pricing for Proposify starts at $25/month for one user account.

HelloSign

HelloSign is cloud-based document management software that makes paper contracts a thing of the past. For sales enablement purposes, you can use HelloSign to draw up contract templates for deals and make it easier for your reps to distribute them and track progress.

HelloSign features native integrations with Oracle CPQ, Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, and Zapier, which provides connections to over 1,000 other apps.

Pricing starts from free, for three monthly documents. The cheapest premium package, which offers unlimited documents from a single sender, costs $13/user/month.

DocSend

DocSend is a content management tool for sales enablement material. It helps you surface and organize your comparison sheets, white papers, and other content that your sales team needs to close deals. Since documents are distributed by the app, you can use DocSend’s analytics to track content usage and make optimizations.

Pricing for DocSend starts at $10/month for one user.

PandaDoc

With PandaDoc, you can create and send branded proposal documents that help you reps close deals.

Using pre-made templates and your in-built company data, you can spin up a proposal in minutes and get it distributed. Plus, after it’s sent you can track metrics that tell you whether or not a prospect is engaging with the material.

PandaDoc pricing starts at $49/user/month.

Conga

Conga is a content management system for sales teams that allows reps to create templated, branded documents with ease. Build approval workflows and templates inside Conga, and you’ll have the systems in place already to enable reps to create their own material and submit it for review.

Conga also integrates directly with platforms like Salesforce, so you can track customer metrics inside your CRM to get a better look at your content’s performance.

Pricing for Conga isn’t available online.

Sales CRMs

A salesperson’s CRM is their #1 most-used tool. If it’s a pain to use, won’t automatically enrich lead data, and doesn’t offer time-saving automation, it’s a big problem for sales enablement.

Since reps spend less than 36% of their time selling, the remainder is spent on data entry, menial tasks, and in the CRM. A good CRM could put an end to all of that time-sucking work.

Here are our top picks in the category.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a free CRM with a full feature set — contact management, email history, lead data, and more — all for free. This alone sets it apart from most other CRMs, which can come with a high price tag.

You can automation outreach and build follow-up sequences that are optimized to allow your reps to make the most high-converting plays.

As one of the most popular CRMs out there, HubSpot offers great support for other products and has integrations with over 1,000 apps through Zapier.

Best of all, HubSpot CRM is entirely free! No hidden costs 🙂

Salesforce

As the #1 CRM on the planet, Salesforce needs no introduction. It’s widely supported with integrations, so practically any data you collect from other tools can be added to your lead profiles easily.

It acts as a rolodex for your leads, whether that’s leads you haven’t reached out to yet, or leads partway through the funnel. For opportunities in the funnel, Salesforce tracks deal status so you can filter your sales opportunities and enable reps to save time.

Salesforce’s pricing starts from $25/user/month.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive tracks rep activity across every lead in your database and gives you a birds-eye view of your entire sales funnel.

Through its marketplace, Pipedrive has native integrations with over 100 apps you already use, like Asana, Intercom, Slack, and Help Scout. This allows you to pull in everything you already know about a lead and track sales activity no matter where it happens. More data means your reps are better able to make a pitch that converts.

Pipedrive is priced for the SMB and startup market, with packages starting from just $15/user/month.

SPOTIO

Spotio is a field sales CRM which houses your organization’s lead data complete with locations, rep and territory assignments. Leads are enriched with unique metrics like home value and eco-friendliness automatically, which gives reps a way to tighten their targeting and waste less time on qualification.



The SPOTIO CRM features a shared meeting appointment calendar and a historical log of rep activity.

Pricing for Spotio starts at just $25/user/month.

Sales Training

Sales training is a vital component of enablement. Not just as a one-off deal, but when practiced continuously. That’s because salespeople will forget 80-90% of what they learned in training within a month without revisiting the material.

Because of this startling reality, sales teams often use a dedicated platform to manage, deliver, and monitor training content for reps.

Here are our top picks from the category.

Brainshark

Brainshark is a sales training tool with a focus on video. With it, you can create sales training videos to deploy to your reps and enable them to close more deals.

Industry-wide, turnover for SDRs is high. That means you need good onboarding or you won’t be able to get reps up to speed fast enough. Brainshark optimizes your sales training by giving reps a centralized hub they can use to find and consume material. Then, you get metrics back that tell you how to improve.

Pricing for Brainshark isn’t available on the web, so contact sales for more information.

Playboox

With Playboox, you can build sales playbooks directly into Salesforce and make it easy for reps to know what to do next and cut time-wasting activities (like searching for information) to a minimum.

Taking a playbook-focused approach helps your reps ensure consistency and success because they’re using proven standards versus their own improvised techniques. With Playboox, this is simple to design and add to your CRM.

Pricing for Playboox is available on request.

Sandler

Sandler isn’t your typical sales training tool. Rather than leaving it all up to you, you get connected with a sales training expert to design your processes. Sandler teaches SDR their winning methodology to ensure you get the best results, and offers metrics that help you make optimizations.

As a service rather than a piece of software, all solutions are custom. Find a center near you for more info.

Lessonly

Lessonly is a sales training platform that helps you build, store, and distribute training content while tracking the most vital success metrics, like whether or not reps have undergone training and engaged with it.

Creating a solid knowledge base for new hires and existing reps — with material about selling a new feature, or key personas — is essential for onboarding and retaining reps because it empowers them to be successful and be motivated by more commission.

Pricing for Lessonly is not public, and only available through requesting a demo.

MindTickle

MindTickle helps organizations train and coach sales reps with microlearning, gamification, and quizzes. Admins can easily create and publish training content to the platform, and then analyze how it performs. Reps get a simple mobile-ready interface they can use to participate in bite-sized training courses that help them hit their goals.

MindTickle’s pricing is available on request.

Jiminny

Jiminny is an internal sales collaboration tool, CRM, and training base, all in one.

It’s a central place for you to share leads, notes, and training sessions with other sales managers and reps, ensuring that no vital information goes missing when you need it most.

Jiminny also integrates with Slack to feed your team’s best call into a channel you can use for training purposes and to keep reps on top of the company’s selling activity. For pricing, contact a member of the sales team.

Process Street

Process Street lets you create structured process documents, share them with your team, and then track their progress.

For example, you might want to make your lead qualification process more consistent and build a qualification checklist inside Process Street. This helps reps do the best possible job each time because they’re following an up-to-date, comprehensive process that has been tested and optimized.

Process Street integrates with over 1,000 other apps your sales team uses, like Close.io, Salesforce, and HelloSign, so you can automate your workflows with ease. Pricing starts at $12.50/user/month for unlimited processes.

LevelEleven

Managing sales rewards and training schemes can be difficult, especially if you have a lot of reps to track. That’s where LevelEleven comes in.

LevelEleven is a sales management and motivation tool designed to encourage revenue-creating behavior with competitions and scoring. With it, you can get insights into the top-performing reps’ habits so you can create training material that enables your reps to convert leads.

LevelEleven’s pricing is available on request.

Sales Analytics

Without sales analytics, you can’t hope to transform the way your reps sell. Why? Because you can’t measure what you can’t manage. Sales analytics tools let you collect and analyze data on reps and their deals, so you can make strategic decisions about the sales enablement work that needs to be done — and track your strategies effectiveness. Here are our top picks.

Spotio Sales Tracker

Spotio’s sales tracking software provides sales operations teams with real-time insights into what is happening in the field.

See detailed location activity of sales reps, deal support, and start making business decisions based on real-time data. Track sales rep activity across territories, and create custom reports using dozens of different data points.

Pricing starts from $25/user/month.

Lattice

Lattice is a platform for performance reviews, employee goals, and sharing feedback. It helps companies grow by giving managers a central hub they can use to track how sales reps are tracking against their performance goals — especially useful in large sales organizations.

Pricing for Lattice starts at $9/user/month, but reporting and analytics are only available on the $12 package.

6sense

With so much of the buying cycle happening in the background these days, sales teams desperately need to get insights into their anonymous traffic so they can be informed of the lead’s past activity and knowledge and be equipped to sell better. With 6sense, you get to look behind the curtain and reveal everything a lead has done before they reached out to sales — and analyze the lead’s behavior using AI.

Pricing for 6sense is available on request.

InsightSquared



InsightSquared makes it possible for you to create reports using your entire bank of sales data, from day one. Just connect it to your CRM, and you’ll get a library of pre-built reports that you can use to extract insight and sell more efficiently. InsightSquared has native integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, and more — anywhere your data lives, InsightSquared will be able to access it.

Pricing is available by talking to the InsightSquared sales team.

Sales Management

Managing a sales process also means managing the people that run that process. That includes performance metrics, employee engagement, and sales contests to improve productivity.

The sales management tools selected below will help you make reliable decisions about your team’s health and drive up motivation.

Hoopla

Hoopla is a sales performance management tool that gives sales managers a platform to run competitions with leaderboards. It’s designed for a TV screen in your office, so can be used as a static leaderboard or a place to display alerts and updates on sales activity.

The metrics you collect from Hoopla can be used for performance reviews and monetary incentivization, so you get the immediate benefit of a competitive leaderboard and the long-term benefit of gathering historical data on your reps.

Pricing starts at $199/month.

SocialChorus

SocialChorus is an internal content management platform that teams can use to share playbooks, standard procedures, and other documentation.

It’s not like just storing your files in Google Drive, though — SocialChorus features analytics that help you (and stakeholders) see the value of having a central hub for internal documents and communication, rather than using multiple disparate tools.

Pricing for SocialChorus is available by request only.

SpearFysh

SpearFysh helps reps be engaged with leads during meetings instead of checking their computer for notes and log timestamps. It does this by recording meetings on a tablet app, and then allowing the person giving the meeting to tap quickly to add notes to the conversation.

Using Spearfysh means you get a detailed history of rep activity and reps will be more effective and less distracted during important meetings.

Contact a Spearfysh rep for pricing information.

Customer Feedback

Typeform

Typeform is a simple, powerful, and beautiful form creation tool you can use to distribute post-sale feedback forms to your customers and improve your sales processes. Or, you can use Typeform to collect missing lead data, pre-sale, and send it to your CRM automatically.

Typeform is so flexible, it’s just about the last form builder you’ll need. You can even just use its API to give your team a central place to store and analyze form data, regardless of the way it’s captured.

Pricing for Typeform starts from free, with premium tiers from 25 euros monthly.

OpinionLab

OpinionLab integrates with your product to help you deploy customer experience surveys with ease. After installing OpinionLab, you’ll get a Feedback button in your app or on your website that customers can use to leave feedback that OpinionLab stores complete with metadata.

By collecting feedback from your customers, you can transform the way you sell. Feedback can tell you which kinds of customers should be sold on which features, or even what to avoid mentioning around a particular type of lead.

Pricing for OpinionLab is available by request.

Chameleon

Chameleon is a product marketing tool that lives inside your app — like Sumo for in-product messaging, you can deploy banners, modals and tooltips that coach users on the benefits and get them to their aha moment faster. But that’s not all.

As well as in-product messaging, Chameleon offers the option to deploy surveys to different segments of users with data brought in through integration partners like Heap, Segment, and Intercom.

Improve your post-sale survey response rate by triggering surveys contextually in-app, driven by your product’s unique metrics. Pricing for Chameleon starts at $99 monthly for unlimited users.

UserReport

UserReport is both a feedback form tool and a way to communicate with customers that leave feedback. With it, you can gather NPS feedback that tells you how to improve your sales process. For example, poor NPS feedback could be the result of a bad-fit lead buying your product — and with UserReport, you can find that out and get to the root cause.

It’s free to add UserReport’s feedback forms to your app, plus it integrates with Google Analytics to enrich your existing data. Pricing for the premium package is available on request.

Crowdsignal

Crowdsignal is a form-building tool that gives you an easy-to-use platform to collect information from leads and customers. With its simple interface, you can construct mobile-friendly forms that you can distribute through social media, your product, or transactional email.

Pre-configured reports can analyze data as it comes in, or offer exports to Excel where you can crunch the numbers. Pricing for Crowdsignal starts from free, but for premium features like reporting you’ll need the Pro plan for $200 monthly.

Ready. Set. Enable.


There you have it – 67 sales enablement tools to level-up your sales performance in 2019.

Which tools are you going to try? Any good ones we missed?

Let us know in the comment below.

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Questions or comments? Contact Spotio at info@spotio.com or comment below.

Spotio is the #1 field sales enablement CRM platform designed specifically for outside sales managers and reps to squeeze every drop out of their field sales efforts.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

AccuLynx Integration

How much more efficient would your reps be if the leads and data they gathered in the field automatically transferred between their software applications? Our integration with AccuLynx offers seamless data transfer between your SPOTIO and AccuLynx accounts; eliminating duplicate data entry and giving users the ability to quickly identify and track the lead source.

Integration Benefits

– Automatically import leads from SPOTIO directly into your AccuLynx account.
– Note the source of your leads & track its status throughout the lifecycle of the leads.
– Eliminate double data entry and seamlessly manage leads.

The result of this partnership will increase rep efficiency and streamline their time when our prospecting in the field.

How To Set-up

To set-up the connection between your accounts, follow the steps below:

#1 | Get your Access Token from AccuLynx:

#2 |  For Selective Sync, choose one stage to serve as the trigger point. This will then push data from SPOTIO into AccuLynx once a lead hits the designated stage:

#3 |  Establish the Field Map between your two accounts:

Now the leads and notes you enter from the field will automatically populate both your AccuLynx and SPOTIO accounts. A two-step process has just been trimmed down into one.

About AccuLynx

AccuLynx is the roofing industry’s first cloud-based software application designed to help contractors manage and grow their business. It’s packed with powerful features and easy-to-use tools that help streamline a roofing company’s processes, grow their profits and provide superior customer service.

With AccuLynx, roofing contractors can manage every aspect of their business from a single application.

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Questions or comments? Contact SPOTIO at info@spotio.com or comment below.

Spotio is the #1 field sales enablement platform designed specifically for outside sales managers and reps to squeeze every drop out of their field sales efforts.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

7 Ways To Drastically Reduce Your Sales Cycle

Reducing the length of your sales cycle is vital in order to positively impact your ROI. The faster you get deals through the pipeline, the more opportunities your reps can work on… increasing the number of possible closes. Below are some tips and techniques on how to shorten your sales cycle and get to more commissions, faster.

Understand the Needs and Wants of Your Potential Client

Go to each meeting with a game plan in place. This comes from asking the right questions and understanding the true needs of the prospect.

42% of sales reps feel they don’t have enough information before making a call.

Two reasons why you want to do this:

1. Not understanding the needs of your prospect can sabotage the entire deal. Not all prospects are capable of making a quick decision, so if you rush the prospect into a decision, you may close the deal only to have them gain buyer’s remorse and cancel the sale, which can cause the dreaded word: refund.

2. There’s no one way to reduce the sales cycle. It differs just as your prospects differ in how they process information to make decisions. The only way to shave off some time in the sales cycle is to ask the right questions on the onset to set up the process and get the answers you need to direct the sales to a close. Tailoring your approach with every prospect, you’ll save time and close more deals.

Schedule The Next Call While On The Phone With The Current Call

A lot of downtime between meeting with a client and closing the deal is usually not needed to make a decision. Most of it is dead time when both sides are just waiting to schedule the next call or in-person appointment. Your best option is to schedule the next call or in-person appointment before you leave the one you’re on.

Agree to a Timeline Early

It’s best to commit to a timeline as early as possible. This will also help reduce the time of the sales cycle. Don’t force the prospect into any agreement, but do  ask the right questions to gauge when you think the prospect will make a decision – assuming they get all of their questions answered.

Address Any Obstacles Up Front

Most sales reps tend to ignore anything that looks like an obstacle instead of addressing it up front. You need to ask the prospect qualifying questions up front to screen them on whether or not they have the buying power, what’s their budget, and/or if there’s any doubt that your solution will work for them.

Be a Tour Guide

Even though you may have been selling the exact same product or service, the prospect you’re in front of has never seen it. Don’t assume how a prospect would like to proceed, give them suggestions on how they might proceed. Take advantage of this by suggesting a roadmap for the process while offering your guidance at every turn. This is known as the Buyer’s Journey.

Map Out The Entire Process in Advance

More than 50% of prospects want to see how your product works on the first call.

It’s important to be a great tour guide and plan on how the process will unfold and anticipate any obstacles. Mapping out the ‘entire’ buying process is important to avoid any obstacles and keep the sales cycle to a minimum. Make sure to ‘connect’ with and meet all of the decision makers, if possible, agreeing to any legal terms and making any amendments to revisions and conditions. By being a great ‘tour guide’, as mentioned above, you can move the sales cycle along.

A Breakdown of the Buyer’s Journey

Chart showing the evolution of the buyer's journey

Awareness Stage.  The buyer identifies they have a challenge or problem that they want a solution to. They also determine how big of a priority a solution is. In order to understand where your buyer is, you can ask yourself the following questions:

How do buyers describe their goals or challenges?
What are the consequences of inaction by the buyer?
Are there common misconceptions buyers have about addressing the goal or challenge?
How do buyers decide whether the goal or challenge should be prioritized?

Consideration Stage.  The buyer has clearly defined the goal or challenge and has committed to addressing it. They determine how they want to approach the goal or challenge and the methods available to resolving that goal or challenge. Here are some questions you can ask yourself:

What categories of solutions do buyers investigate?
How do buyers educate themselves on the various categories?
How do buyers perceive the pros and cons of each category?
How do buyers decide which category is right for them?

Decision Stage.  The buyer has decided on a solution to the goal or challenge by going over pros and cons on what they want to pursue. Questions you can ask yourself in this stage are:

What criteria do buyers use to evaluate the available offerings?
When buyers investigate your company’s offering, what do they like about it compared to alternatives? What concerns do they have with your offering?
Who needs to be involved in the decision? For each person involved, how does their perspective on the decision differ?
Do buyers have expectations around trying the offering before they purchase it?
Outside of purchasing, do buyers need to make additional preparations, such as implementation plans or training strategies?

Answering these questions will provide a solid foundation of the buyer’s journey and help you reduce your sales cycle.

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Questions or comments? Contact SPOTIO at info@spotio.com.

SPOTIO is the #1 sales enablement and territory management app to increase your revenue, maximize your profitability, and increase your team’s productivity in just 2 weeks.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

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Sources:

https://www.insightsquared.com/2015/05/the-best-way-to-get-your-reps-to-shorten-their-sales-cycle-its-not-what-you-think/

https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/what-is-the-buyers-journey