Sales Engagement

How The World's Fastest Growing Companies are Modernizing Sales Through Humanization at Scale

Manny Medina, Max Altschuler, Mark Kosoglow

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781119584346
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119584360
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

Engage in sales—the modern way

Sales Engagement is how you engage and interact with your potential buyer to create connection, grab attention, and generate enough interest to create a buying opportunity. Sales Engagement details the modern way to build the top of the funnel and generate qualified leads for B2B companies. 

This book explores why a Sales Engagement strategy is so important, and walks you through the modern sales process to ensure you're effectively connecting with customers every step of the way.  

 •   Find common factors holding your sales back—and reverse them through channel optimization

•    Humanize sales with personas and relevant information at every turn

•    Understand why A/B testing is so incredibly critical to success, and how to do it right

•    Take your sales process to the next level with a rock solid, modern Sales Engagement strategy

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in up-leveling their game and doing more than they ever thought possible. 

PART
1

Sales Engagement: Why It’s So Important

Chapter 1
The State of Modern Sales

The modern Sales organization is under unbelievable pressure. Quotas are higher than ever. Resources are the leanest they’ve ever been. So of course the modern Sales org is a well-oiled machine, running on all cylinders to create the maximum output possible, right?

Wrong.

In fact, the level of efficiency in the modern Sales org is startlingly bleak. According to the CMO Council, lost productivity and poorly managed leads cost companies at least $1 trillion every year.¹ Yes, that’s trillion with a t.

What accounts for this chasm? How can there be such low efficiency when expectations are so high? Surely Sales leaders are motivated to create the highest-functioning orgs possible, considering it is their necks on the line? Indeed, they are. But Sales leaders are not to blame.

Instead, an unholy trifecta hobbles even the most motivated, high-achieving Sales org into a no-win situation. Together with changing consumer behavior, business practices, and sales technologies, these factors help define the modern sales floor. They portray a chaotic landscape replete with shifting priorities, changing roles, formidable challenges, and emerging imperatives. However, this new reality offers scant clues on how Sales organizations should navigate the new terrain and come out undisputed as winners. If you are a sales professional today, you simply aren’t set up for success.

Common Factors Holding Your Sales Org Back

1. Overwhelming administrative work
2. Lack of sufficient data for driving desired sales outcomes
3. Outdated frameworks, mindsets, and technology solutions

Let’s look at them in more detail.

1. Overwhelming Administrative Work

Ask a sales rep or an Account Executive what takes much of their time at work, and chances are they’ll enumerate a litany of tedious administrative tasks. Updating customer records and other CRM data, tedious forecast meetings, jumping from one sales software to another, reading and composing e-mails, looking up contact information, and enduring long, torturous moments of analysis paralysis are just some of the activities that sap the souls of modern sellers and consume the largest chunk of their working/waking hours.

In fact, the need to perform noncore/nonselling tasks compels already overwhelmed sales reps to spend only a third of their time actually selling, according to an alarming study by Salesforce. And that, of course, leads to the more alarming statistic of falling quota attainment rates:

According to a study done by Salesforce, nearly 60% of sales reps expect to miss their 2018 quotas pretty much because they don’t have enough time to sell.

2. Lack of Data

Big data and business intelligence have been industry-moving buzzwords for some time, but the efficiency and impact of these resources in the field of sales have just started to mature—especially when it comes to low-funnel reporting such as revenue attribution, opportunity attribution, and tying dollars to activities.

Truth be told, sales has been lamentably unscientific for decades. The good news is that emerging technologies now offer exciting new data breakthroughs. Unfortunately, not every Sales org has gotten the memo.

Lead prioritization, revenue forecasting, context-based engagement, and visibility in customer intent are just some of the areas where sufficient data need to be collected and optimized. Without the right data in the right amount, customer engagement will remain intuition-driven, which simply is not enough anymore to improve metrics. Certainly human intuition, sales experience, and street wisdom will remain relevant, but the heavy lifting will be performed by data-crunching algorithms. Without these data-driven systems, Sales organizations stand to lose valuable opportunities to convert leads and nurture customers.

3. Outdated Technology Solutions

As always, technology plays the role of a key enabler in the world of sales. From the Rolodex to CRM, from rudimentary telephone systems to advanced Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) and video conferencing networks, technology helps transition a Sales organization to a new business reality.

The trouble is technologies almost always evolve much faster than the organizations that use them.

The vast majority of Sales organizations, for example, make do with outdated technologies until (i) their more agile and forward-looking competitors have adopted game-changing solutions; (ii) their sales performance has become so untenable that they are forced to seek technologies that can move the needle; or (iii) they lose enough top producers that they sit up and pay attention. By then, these Sales organizations often realize they have a lot of ground to cover just to catch up with smarter competitors—or that more powerful solutions than the one they finally adopted are already being launched in the market. They are officially behind the curve.

Today, having a decent CRM platform is a mere baseline, not an end-all, be-all resource. Artificial intelligence and machine learning rule the current conversation, along with one-to-one video, chatbots, and SMS texting, to name a few. Sales organizations need to embrace the brave new world and take full advantage of the array of solutions available to them. Yet most orgs still rely on anachronistic technology, with which smart reps succeed despite, not because of.

So How Do You Crack the Success Code?

If you’re a Sales leader, how do you get reps focused on meaningful, revenue-generating activities? If you’re a rep, how do you do more in less time? How does the whole Sales org work together to hit the number without encountering burnout and morale issues?

If you’re in sales, how do you stop choosing between hitting your number and seeing your kids’ baseball games or ballet recitals? How do you do both?

Believe it or not, there is a solution that solves all these problems.

Sales Engagement: The Next Step in the Communication Revolution

The answer is Sales Engagement. Following in the footsteps of e-mail and smartphones, Sales Engagement is the next communication revolution.

Once upon a time, the telephone revolutionized the way we communicate. Then, mobile phones made landlines obsolete. After that, e-mail came along and kicked snail mail out. Now is the era of Sales Engagement.

In the same way we laugh at the rotary phone now, salespeople will also look back on the time before Sales Engagement was a thing—and laugh at how ridiculously inefficient manual sales communication was. In manual sales communication, practitioners lack the software automations that help them perform their jobs faster and better.

Now, sales professionals access rich data-driven insight for prioritizing leads and designing sales activities, discern the best communication approach for each specific customer, and optimize value and revenue for their organizations.

By combining the best capabilities of human sellers and artificial intelligence, Sales Engagement brings system and science to the art of selling, making it easier and faster for businesses to reach customers at the right moment, on the right channel and to engage them with the right message. It makes it possible to humanize sales at scale.

Driven by artificial intelligence and data analytics, Sales Engagement tools enable salespeople to automate tedious tasks and allocate more time for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Sales Engagement
• Preface
• Who This Book Is for
• Part 1 Sales Engagement: Why It’s So Important
• Part 2 Diving Deeper: Essential Elements of a Strong Sales Engagement Strategy
• Part 3 Future Proofing: Where Sales Engagement Fits and What’s Next
• Summary
• Glossary
• Acknowledgments
• Bonus Content!
• About the Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement