So, What is Sales Acceleration?
There are many definitions available online on sales acceleration, an article from Forbes suggests, Sales Acceleration means increasing the velocity of the sales process, the technology that fills the gap between marketing automation and CRM.
Sales acceleration is an end-to-end solution for go-to-market teams to help them deliver meaningful and engaging buyer experiences through content, analytics and resources. Traditionally, face-to-face meetings and business travels were normal, but as scenarios changed, with technological advancements and pandemics, selling digitally became important where sellers build relevant and personalised engagement with customers to keep the sales cycle growing.
At SalesPanda, we define Sales Acceleration as a well-integrated way to enable and empower extended enterprises such as agents, distributors, brokers, partners, sales teams etc., to sell more via effective digital automation. Equipping sales teams with the necessary tools and resources is necessary to find success in the sales process. It can result in improved performance and productivity, leading to further extension of the revenue.
Why Sales Acceleration is important?
79% of sales executives say a leading driver of hitting new targets is improving the productivity of existing sales reps. (Spotio)
Increased Sales Productivity
A lot of time is wasted when sales representatives spend most of their time searching for relevant marketing content. It also affects the revenue generation process as they are spending more time looking for relevant information while they are more productive when selling. Sales acceleration enables them to maintain high-level productivity that eventually helps in growing business revenue.
Sales & Marketing Alignment
One of the essential aspects of sales acceleration is sales and marketing alignment. Sales reps who are interacting the most with the customers must have a 360-degree understanding of their products & services to pitch & sell better. Hence, collaborating and aligning both sales & marketing can create a better impact for business, as well as, customer satisfaction.
Improved Sales Pipeline
With an effective sales acceleration tool, sales teams don’t have to worry about pipeline growth. They can consistently engage and automate tedious tasks such as lead qualification, prospecting, campaigns and others that help constantly feed the pipeline at a faster pace. Hence, the worry about pipeline growth is resolved while sellers can focus on more productive tasks.
How Sales Acceleration solutions can help extended enterprises?
Extended enterprise refers to the network of sales channels, which includes agents, advisors, distributors, partners, branches and more. These networks play a crucial role in generating business for organisations, hence we are discussing the ways sales acc
84% of sales executives cited content search and utilization as the top productivity improvement area. (Spotio)
Easy Access to Content
One of the most commonly faced challenges by sales channels is not having timely access to sales and marketing resources required to nurture and engage potential customers. Hence, a sales acceleration tool helps bring it to a centralised library where different sales and partner networks get easy access to share it further whenever required.
65% of employees say the quality of training and learning opportunities positively influences their engagement. (Spotio)
Skill Development & Knowledge Sharing
The ability to close deals is an important aspect of selling where effective training and coaching can help sharpen skills and grow knowledge to acquire more customers. Sales channels need to be well informed to handle objections, pitch better, information to share and much more to address the selling challenges with better products and services knowledge.
84% of sales executives cited content search and utilization as the top productivity improvement area.
Higher Efficiency
Sales acceleration tools can make sales channels more efficient by saving time and helping them focus on important tasks to increase business. So, activities such as content search, pushing social media posts and emails manually can be automated. These campaigns can be scheduled on both social media and email while eventually saving time to create and run campaigns. Sellers and partners can create landing pages, nurture, engage etc., from a single software.
CRMs can boost sales by 29% and productivity by 34%. (Salesforce)
Sales CRM
This is the place that helps them organise their contacts and leads where each interaction is tracked and monitored to understand the sales opportunities. A well-organised sales pipeline helps define the lifecycle of a potential customer from lead to closure. Hence, the attention span of sales teams and partners doesn’t spread too thin. CRM helps identify patterns and trends of customers to categorise the best prospect ahead of time instead of dwelling on guesswork. Also, optimise the sales acceleration strategy, content and campaigns accordingly.
Sales Analytics
A strong sales acceleration strategy is highly dependent on analytics. Sales teams and partners get a detailed view of the analytics to identify, predict and understand the trends where they can improve. The analytics help improves internal processes and also simplify the information available to you to grab opportunities better.
How different industries can leverage Sales Acceleration solutions to boost productivity?
Best practices to accelerate sales
Another vital aspect is content to keep customers engaged and resolve their objections. Providing the right content to the right people at the right time is essential in the sales cycle. Business leaders, managers, sellers and marketers should understand the sales funnel to create content that aligns perfectly with each stage. It helps provide relevant information and resolve their concerns to help them reach their buying stage.
Repetitive or manual tasks can be automated with the help of an effective sales acceleration solution. Automating certain activities means your sales team and partners can focus on high-value leads. Email and social campaigns can be scheduled in advance for timely delivery to customers while also giving enough time to sellers and partners to focus on improving the nurture cycle.
Since sales teams and partners are using multiple channels and sharing a wide variety of content, the need to track the channel that’s more productive will help focus on the one instead of everything at once. A well-aligned sales and marketing team can be a useful medium to determine the most effective channels, such as social media, email, WhatsApp etc. Each channel has its set of effectiveness and ROI so, it is useful to be aware of the emerging trends and experiment accordingly.
To build effective sales acceleration strategies that drive better results, it is important to have visibility in the engagement driven from various platforms. So, companies should track how effective their content is and how it is being used by their sales teams and partners to drive engagement. An effective sales enablement and sales acceleration tool should be capable of tracking customers’ behaviour and interest to see how content drives conversions and revenue opportunities. Analytics also helps optimise content and campaigns that are not affecting the sales cycle positively.
Sales acceleration software can help insurance, financial services, real estate, and many other industries shorten the sales cycle. With growing competition and many options available, if the waiting period for the leads is too long, they start looking for another option. Hence, platforms like SalesPanda ensure how insurance agents, sales teams and other partners can use digital marketing automation and accelerate sales. It bridges the gap between sales productivity, team alignment, engagement and nurturing by providing a well-integrated platform to your sales teams and partners. Interested to know more about SalesPanda? Request a demo of our sales enablement and acceleration platform.
