Leveraging Sales Intelligence for Smarter Prospecting

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Mar 01 2017

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Sales intelligence and marketing automation is becoming more and more important because of the highly competitive business industry and the rise of startups. There are so many areas to tap into- social media, news, job portals, etc. that manual sales effort are just not enough, which is why automation is serving as an ideal solution.

Another big reason why businesses have started using sales automation products is to make up for their staff limitations. A mid-level business can hire only so many sales reps without disrupting the cash flow. This makes it your typical “David vs Goliath” situation as they have to compete against large businesses who have no shortage of employees who would everything in their power to consume their market share. However, since sales automation tools are relatively inexpensive, smaller businesses can enjoy impressive lead conversion results even with a few sales reps. Enterprise-level sales intelligence tools are so powerful that they can singlehandedly improve your yearly revenue by about 30%.

Reduced Manual Sales Efforts

Sales intelligence tools can minimize your sales efforts to a great extent, as the majority of the labor and time intensive work is automated. This gives you more time for improving your existing products and adding even more to the catalog. While you brainstorm business ideas and technologies for your company your sales assistant will continue to generate leads for you all by itself.

Here are some of the ways you can be benefited from sales automation:

Easy Identification of Bottlenecks

Sales automation provides you with a birds-eye view of your marketing campaigns. Thus, you can quickly detect the areas where you are falling behind, and make adjustments accordingly. For instance, maybe the reason why you are unable to improve the conversion rate despite relentless efforts is that your sales reps are spending time with low quality leads most of the time. There is no way this will work, but the problem is that it can be hard to figure out with traditional methods, especially when the lead database is massive. However, an automated system will identify the “hot” leads for you easily. By shifting the entire focus on these, you can observe a better leads conversion rate.

CRM Database Updating

A lot of companies update their CRM database on a manual basis, which is indeed not the most efficient way. Not only this approach leaves considerable room for error and discrepancy, but it also causes a tremendous waste of time and resources. Feeding the database entries manually leads to many misrepresented deals. In fact, there are many deals the business has, but are not included in the CRM database.

As if the issue of discrepancy in the database is not enough, businesses are also unable to update their database frequently. In fact, most businesses relying on traditional methods have as much as 50% of database entries that are outdated. This problem can be solved through the power of automation.

Improved Accountability

For a business to run successfully, every department must give its best. Unfortunately, it is not easy to monitor and measure the performance of sales and marketing. Well, yes, the number can certainly give you some ideas regarding their efforts. You can tell they are doing good if you see a growth in the number of leads acquired or converted per month. However, this is not the best way by any means.

If the marketing efforts can bring in a high number of leads, but the sales are not putting in much effort in nurturing them, it will give rise to a poor conversion rate. With an automated system that tracks and monitors the sales process of every individual lead and records it in the database, you can easily pinpoint the factors that are bringing down the business. You can then provide feedback and show the sales reps how they should focus more on nurturing the leads. These efforts will make them more accountable.

Easy Nurturing

Sales reps hate it, but lead nurturing is one of the most important aspects of making a sale. A lot of them try to slack off, simply because the process can be cumbersome and exhaustive at times. Learning about the prospects, such as their area of work, hobbies, career motives, and more is no mean feat. Sales automation, thus makes their job much easier by providing them personalized suggestions when they follow-up with the leads. They get the most recent information that can be used to nudge the lead in the right direction.

With Clodura you can update your entire database with just one click.  You can even set it to update the database every 30, 60, or 90 days. With an updated database your sales reps will always have fresh information on their leads. They won’t have to look for new contact numbers or email addresses manually, and every call will connect. This results in the effective utilization of time and resources, which translates to improved sales.

Clodura will inform you that a particular lead was promoted recently when you are about to call the person. So, instead of greeting them with a generic statement, you can start off by first congratulating them on their promotion. There is no way they won’t appreciate the gesture. Things like these are incredibly powerful for lead nurturing. They help you incorporate a personal touch even in an automated process, thus giving you the best of both worlds.

Conclusion

Manual efforts through cold campaigns are no longer effective in today’s era. No has the time to listen to a tedious sales pitch or respond to bland marketing emails that usually go straight to the spam folder anyway. The future is all about automation, or rather intelligent automation, and this is the path today’s sales have taken as well. To ensure that your business keeps pace with the competitive marketing industry it is best you deploy a comprehensive sales automation system ASAP and get ahead of your rivals.

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