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PRODUCTIVITY
4 Key Signs It's Time For Adopting Sales Engagement
Be On The Lookout.
The primary goal for most sales enablement tools is to eliminate or decrease the time a sales rep spends on manual and repetitive tasks.
It may seem obvious but without sales enablement and prospecting tools, reps are forced to spend the majority of their time on administrative or follow up tasks instead of being in front of prospects.
Some sales leaders might argue that these types of tasks are part of the job, but here’s the reality.
Reps with the proper tooling can generate more pipeline and close deals faster than teams who don’t use prospecting platforms.
Ask any good craftsman and they’ll agree that quality work requires quality tools.
What We'll Cover
Below, we’ve compiled 4 common business challenges & priorities that suggest it’s time to consider investing in additional tooling for your sales team.
If any of these sound familiar, we’ll give you plenty of places to start looking for solutions.
1. Your Organizations Wants to Increase Revenue Without Hiring More
While some organizations have the capital to hire more sales reps to hit revenue targets, many organizations look for alternative ways to improve the current team’s performance. Why? Most Startups and SMB’s want lean growth which means that hiring more reps or top talent isn’t always an option.
If your organization isn’t currently using technology to make reps as productive as possible, implementing a prospecting tool is an easy way to increase output while maintaining the same level of overhead.
And when we are talking about output, we mean 4x more output per rep!
This can include streamlining the way your team:
- Searches and finds targeted accounts
- Finds and validates email addresses
- Sends email follow ups to avoid having to manually send each email individually
- Creates personalized emails at scale to increase engagement
2. Traditional Methods Are Holding You Back
Potential buyers today want to be engaged differently than ever before.
Here’s why these methods are no longer effective:
- Buying lead lists – Data degradation is averaging between 24-36% per year. This means a lot of wasted time and money trying to connect and follow up on bad data.
- Smiling and dialing – According to Hubspot research 80% sellers would rather engage first via email and 49% over a phone call. This doesn’t mean cold calling is dead, it just means reps have to diversify the way they reach out to prospects.
- Manual prospecting – It takes a lot of manpower and time to manually search and validate leads in order to create 1 simple lead list which makes this approach expensive and not scalable.
The fact is that today’s sales prospecting tools allow reps easily find and validate emails in seconds. So why make reps do this manually when technology today can do it in real time?
Similarly, sales automation tools can send automated email cadences to prospects and track open rates, click rates and reply rates. Without this information reps have no idea what is working or not to increase conversions.
That said, we already know today that top-performing companies are twice as likely to have automated sales processes.
So what’s holding you back from eliminating thess daily challenge for your sales team?
3. Your Reps Are Struggling To Find What Works To Engage Prospects
Email automation platforms provide visibility and reporting so sales reps can optimize results. More specifically I am talking about providing reps the ability to see the deliverability of their emails, the open rates, click rates and reply rates.
Why does this matter?
Here are ways sales reps can leverage email tracking and reporting when an email campaign has:
- More than a 6% bounce rate – the rep has a data problem which can hurt his or her email IP reputation. It’s to their benefit to find a better way to validate email addresses to increase deliverability and ensure emails aren’t sent to spam.
- 20% or less emails opened – the subject line didn’t resonate with the target audience. Have the rep resend the same email cadence with different subject lines. The more personalized and unique the subject line, the better.
- Less than 5% of prospects clicked within an embedded link – the sales or marketing content may not be relevant to the prospect’s pain points. Have the rep try to hyper-personalize links to increase the content engagement.
- Less than a 7% open/sentratio – the rep’s email may not be concise and to the point. On average you have 15 seconds to catch someone’s attention via email. Make sure reps deliver a quick personalized intro sentence that delivers business value versus talking about themselves or what they are selling.
From the examples above it’s very clear to see that without a sales reporting tool, outbound reps are operating blindly and unable to understand how to improve their email outreach to set more meetings.
4. The Majority of Sales Reps Are Having Trouble Hitting KPI's
You may be familiar with Salesforce’s research. According to their studies, 50% of sales time is spent on unproductive prospecting.
The implications of this?
In other words, for every hour that a sales rep without the right tools spends prospecting, they’re wasting 30 minutes. And if that rep spends even just 5 hours a week prospecting, they’re wasting easily 120 man-hours per year..
Ouch.
So, it’s really no surprise that 79% of polled sales execs agree that in order to hit sales targets, they have to improve productivity with their current team.
Let’s be very crystal clear on the takeaway here..
In order to achieve revenue (and take-home pay) goals, teams & reps HAVE to increase their productivity levels.
And just because you’re busy or you’re working hard, it doesn’t mean
Let’s isolate the real root causes of low productivity.
For prospecting, it stems from:
- Researching potential leads
- Finding and validating emails
- Manual follow ups
- Loading prospecting information into CRM
- Manual data entry and administrative tasks such as logging calls and email
Does this sound like you? Are you tired of being “busy,” but not really being productive?
Well, here’s the bottom line.
If you’re finding yourself spending excess time on these activities – and you’re disgusted with leaving potential on the table – then it’s time to adopt a Sales Engagement Platform.
"Are you tired of being 'busy,' but not really being productive?.. then it's time to adopt a Sales Engagement Platform"
Next Steps
There is no time like the present to enhance your sales rep’s performance!
Whether you work for a big organization with an established brand or a startup company that is trying to launch, there is no getting away from aggressive growth goals.
The beautiful thing about SEP’s is the fact that they’re applicable for so many use-cases. Just like CRM’s and marketing automation, they bring value in to so many.
It’s just a matter of finding the answer to the question.. “Which one is right for me?”
And that question is one we hope to help you answer.
Alex Gonzalez
Founder, CEO
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PUBLISHED ON
January 15th, 2020
Zach Sergio
Co-Founder
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