Drivers of Value
1) Dissemination of Best Practices
Training and ramping new sales hires costs money and takes time away from managers. Firing underperforming reps costs even more time and money while putting the company at a disadvantage by not operating at full capacity. By leveraging various intelligent sales tools like Gong and Otter, teams are able to record and analyze conversations with customers, capturing relevant and important data points from certain individuals that can be used to their advantage. For example, the actions of top performers can be taken and disseminated across the sales team to advocate best practices, teach new hires the proper tactics, and develop a playbook that gives reps an easy and understandable way to succeed. Additionally, sales engagement tools like Outreach not only give reps relevant and timely information, but also nudge them to act at times most critical to closing prospects. These solutions provide reps with information that spur best practices and allow new hires to ramp faster and more effectively.
2) Personalization is Expected not Rewarded
The consumerization of the enterprise is pushing customer expectations to all-time highs, and sales organizations are constantly trying to keep up. Enterprise prospects expect a personalized, consumer-like experience that reflects a deep understanding of their interests, problems, and future needs. As a result, teams are turning to more data-centric sales approaches, primarily driven by AI / ML, to promote cross-functional collaboration, surface and understand all relevant information, and coach them to be most effective. Intelligent software solutions provide behavioral, sales and profile data that can help deepen customer relationships, thus providing a better experience overall for customers and increasing their propensity to buy
3) Break Down Information Barriers
For these solutions to leverage intelligent applications or, at the very least, enable them, they need access to customer data generated from touchpoints across all customer-facing departments — marketing, sales, product, support, and customer success. However, as companies digitally transform, many times these organizations create unwanted data silos in each department that act as bottlenecks from getting the wholistic picture of the customer or opportunity. Fortunately, the emergence of sales enablement and revenue operations tools like Salesloft and Clari act as intermediaries or system connectors that allow various niche applications to speak to one another. They enable teams to communicate and, importantly, align across goals and timing, while automating various manual sales workflows in the process.
4) Realignment of Priorities / Focus Areas — Deeper not Wider
In the same way we’re seeing the rise of new roles including revenue operations, we’re also seeing a rise of new tools that take a narrow focus within the sales workflow. Part of this can be attributed to barriers of building software being lower than ever before, but it is mainly due to a shift from platform to best of breed mentioned earlier. Previously, teams were handicapped to a solution like Salesforce that was the central source of information, where automated workflows could be triggered in-app only. Now, because of enhanced API integrations and disparate workflow automation platforms like Tray.io or Workato, teams are able to turn to a best of breed approach where solutions are more customizable, flexible, and specific to a certain action without worrying about data quality or breadth of automations. Subsequently, knowledge workers are enabled to have a more quantifiable impact on their specific responsibilities without sacrificing information quality or productivity gains.
Credit: BecomingHuman By: Chris Gaertner
