6 strategies to boost sales productivity

1.  Meet customers at any point in the journey

Dynamics 365 for Sales provides sales teams with a better view of contacts, accounts, and leads. You can thus stay informed about buyer habits and trends. We can notice that after having identified their needs, more than 70% of buyers engage with salespeople later in their customer journey. Thanks to their wealth of resources, buyers tend to expect a sales process that can flex on their terms. However, they will be ready to engage with a sales professional at some point along their nonlinear customer journey.

How to engage on their terms?

Sellers must be ready to jump in anywhere along the customer journey and be well-equipped with context about what they prefer and their past interaction to gain and retain buyers’ business. By adopting the right sales method, you will quickly understand buyers’ demands and provide them clear answers. When you close the gaps between customer needs and what your sellers can deliver with a sales engagement platform, it will provide a contextual view of customer behavior, including service interactions and past marketing.

Mary Shea and Shanta Samlal-Fadelle, B2B Buyers Mandate a New Charter for Marketing and Sales both said: “B2B buyers want salespeople who can deliver insights, engage in a fact-based conversation around how their products and services can measurably affect business performance, and pivot the conversation to cover what matters most to them.”

2.  Favor seamless solutions

90% of sales leaders plan to invest in tech in order to help sellers engage with buyers. The truth is that your sales team tends to be overwhelmed by how many tools they have to manage. Indeed, if those tools don’t work together, it will trigger frustration for sellers.

The benefits of a seamless and scalable solution

A cohesive solution such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales is a solution that scales to your business. It works seamlessly across devices and give your sales reps the right tools including pipeline management, lead generation, coauthoring of sales documents etc.

Leverage intuitive productivity apps and benefit from automated tasks to help your sellers building buyer relationships. Elements such as real-time dashboards increase productivity and usability by helping your sales team turn data into actionable insights.

Microsoft solutions can scale with your buyers’ and sellers’ evolving expectations and business growth. Applications called “Ready-to-deploy packaged” can help your sales team get up and running quickly with the correct tools they need.

For example, Polling powerhouse Gallup needed a user-friendly and unified way for its sales team to serve customers and track leads. The familiar front-end functionality of Dynamics 365 for Sales and Office 365 was the best solution. After the implementation of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales, Gallup’s sales team could boost lead generation and grow the team by 30%.

 

We’re able to leverage the content that we create to drive leads and capitalize on that, and then we can see the ROI of all our activities, all the way through.

 

Brandon Schulte, Technical Project Administrator, Gallup.

3.  Emphasize sharing and collaboration

45% of global B2B services decision makers aim at improving collaboration between internal organizational silos to enable digital sales transformation. Resolving customers problems and serving them require sellers to act and better communicate. Most of modern business organization rely on healthy collaboration what makes teamwork drive growth and promote efficiencies through information and shared ideas. If your teams are located in different countries and your sales enablement technology doesn’t include intuitive and productivity tools for data collection, email and document creation, your team has to work harder with a hub for productivity.

That’s why it’s highly recommended to choose a CRM system that integrates with tools. Coauthoring tools and document sharing will empower your team to easily connect with internal and external collaborators to create productive and stronger team and customer interactions.

4.  Streamline engagement

Nowadays, we can notice that purchase decisions involve an average of 10 people. If sellers manage multiple accounts at once, they would not be able to deliver the level of tailor-made engagement their stakeholders expect. It can be harder to track information and close deals when your sales team’s data passes through many channels. It’s important to take a unified route to stakeholder engagement that enables sellers to interact with prospects in personalized ways.

A sales tool integrated with user-friendly productivity tools helps teams to manage relationships with greater efficiency. Email integration can track recent customer interactions, while social selling tools give information about accounts, contacts, and opportunities, enabling sales team to be more proactive.

A sales force automation solution with embedded insights easy to act upon and quick to deploy improves engagement then, seller decision making. This solution manages stakeholder relationships at scale and can reveal insights that your sales team needs to build trust.

5.  Ease alignment and on-boarding

60% of companies lack a well-designed sales process. If closing a deal will vary from account to account, your team can miss out on opportunities to close if they aren’t up and running from the first day. Ease on-boarding and alignment offers clear processes, configured to fit business needs, so new sellers see the specific steps needed to move deals forward.

Hiring rapidly and working with a sales process are both simple methods to boost sales productivity. Furthermore, your sellers have to work from a tool with a single user interface (UI) in order to be aware of the steps required to close a deal at your business. Try to provide a clear view of each step toward closing a deal with built-in sales force automation workflows.An intelligent sales process can keep your team focused on optimal outcomes and demystify expectations.

 

The benefit of Dynamics 365 lies in its ability to be quickly configured to align forms to unique business processes. I was able to use CRM’s workflows and business rules to create a tool for our sales team that adds value by making it easier for them to do their job.

 

Tom Faillace Senior IT Generalist, Luck Companies.

6.  How to get holistic performance insights?

73% of businesses recognize the value of data and aim to be data driven whereas 29% are acting on that data.

Sometimes, it can be hard to keep track of sales and sales rep performance. A global view on sales productivity helps sales reps and leaders to have a vision of their performance against business goals in order to set objectives and maintain accountability.

The optimization of your team’s outcomes

A platform can help evaluate your performance and sales cycle length for optimal outcomes. Greater visibility helps you to set and adjust goals to ensure your team hits their numbers. Creating clear objectives is a help to prioritize metrics like deal-cycle length and customer churn rate, allowing data-driven decisions to be made and creating accountability. Real-time dashboards can display data and results. All-access visibility for any deviations from your sales plan is a help to measure performance and take corrective actions.

The modernization of your sales process

Get holistic performance insights with Dynamics 365 for Sales to help your team monitoring results and stay on track by setting goals. It will enable you to investigate deviations from plan and take corrective action using real-time analytics dashboards that turn data into actionable insights. Dynamics 365 for Sales can perfectly integrate with Office 365. It allows sellers to work from anywhere with familiar tools. You will be able to close deals faster know how and where to innovate thanks to powerful insights.