6 Steps to Customer Engagement and Sales Efficiency

Sales efficiency and pipeline health are top-of-mind for growth-focused business leaders today. With pessimism on the rise, sales organizations are experiencing longer — and more failed — deal cycles. As both businesses and individuals make more discerning buying decisions, it’s important to prioritize increasing customer engagement and sales efficiency.

Six Steps to Optimize the Sales Process

The organizations that optimize sales efficiency do so by employing the right tools and leveraging them effectively. Adapting your sales strategy starts with focusing on the right opportunities. It requires visibility to keep your team members accountable. These six steps will prepare your team to be successful in difficult selling environments.

Focus:

Identify customers that are most likely to purchase from you. This includes leveraging your existing customer base. By targeting your ideal buyers and top-tier customers, you can generate quality interest instead of spinning your wheels.

Assign:

Make sure each member of your sales team knows who they are personally responsible for and hold them accountable. Implement a comprehensive activity tracking process in your CRM and tie actions to a campaign for easy reporting.

Message:

Update your organization’s messaging and content to be relevant in today’s market conditions. What does your ideal buyer care about? What are their top concerns? How can you position yourself at the right time in front of the right audience?

Effort:

Ensure each member of your team is involved and completing enough sales activity to reach your sales goals. Dynamic reports and visual dashboards, for example, are a great way to measure progress and efforts.

Track:

Implement forecasting and other sales metrics that make it very clear to the whole team if the organization is on pace with your set goals. As the saying goes, what gets measured, gets managed. Use your data to ensure you’re managing to the right areas.

Support:

Increase your sales efficiency and effectiveness through real-time coaching and participation in sales calls, deals, and strategy sessions. Regular stand-ups are a great internal tactic to keep everyone on the same page and moving forward in the same direction.

Improve Sales Efficiency with Forecasting

Using sales forecasting reduces uncertainty and leads to increased responsiveness. It also acts as a mitigation measure by highlighting potential problem areas proactively. Using data to uncover obstacles makes them easier to avoid. Additionally, sales forecasting enables easier decision making by aggregating pertinent data. Sales leaders can feel more confident about the direction they are leading their team because they’re making data-backed decisions.

However, in order to generate and interpret sales forecasts accurately, you need the right tools.

Without a CRM and consistent data inputs, sales forecasting can be both unreliable and unscalable. CRMs like Salesforce and Microsoft D365 Sales can leverage AI technology to improve forecast accuracy, predict results, and track your sales team’s performance.

Regardless of your solution, the data you use to build your forecasts needs to be consistent and reliable. Without the right sales processes and inputs in place to combine sales activity, closed won opportunities, and aggregate that information against marketing campaigns and tactics, you’ll never have the visibility and access you want out of your sales pipeline.

You can use the following forecasting reports and performance indicators to drive better sales results.

In short, with the right key performance indicators and technology in place, you can take the burden of predictions and forecasting off your shoulders so that you can make strategic decisions that enhance the customer experience and support your sales team.

The Role Automation Plays in Sales Efficiency

Automation can help sales and marketing teams do more with less by taking over tedious, manual processes and enabling sales professionals to spend more time building relationships with customers and prospects. Entire sales cycles can be automated, from creating an opportunity in your CRM to closing won and all of the steps in between, including monitoring RFPs and generating proposals.

If the scope of automating your entire sales cycle seems too big, it’s important to remember that small automations can have a big impact, too.

Automating quote-to-cash fulfillment can have a big impact on revenue — over half of finance leaders say improving the quote-to-cash process could increase their revenue by at least 5%.

Additionally, simply automating contracts and invoice processing can save time, reduce manual errors, and eliminate inefficient paper pushing processes.

Watch the video below to see an end-to-end automation of an invoice approval and entry process.

Ready to get started with intelligent automation in your organization? Our team of professionals can help you build a platform that engages your customers and creates resiliency in your sales.