Tech-based Tools to Manage Sales Initiatives

Sales has never been an easy game to play, and you may not be able to manage sales initiative without the right tech-based tools. And when the challenges surpass the gains, a business fails. In the modern, digitally-driven, competitive market landscape, technology is imperative to manage sales initiatives successfully.

Listed below are a few tech-based tools that help manage new and existing sales initiatives to keep evolving with the ever-changing business market.

Analysis of Sales Strategies

In order to implement new sales initiatives, executives need to reflect and perform an in-depth analysis of existing processes to determine areas of opportunity for improvement.

The growing adoption of sales analytics is happening in every sized business, giving sales executives accurate, data-centric insight to create a more comprehensive sales report. Sales analytics technology requires minimal manual input, using complex algorithms to digitally monitor online activities including online traffic, customer interactions, turnover of products, and even in-store activities. These tools also track, monitor, and improve sales activities by allowing for informed forecasting of trends in particular markets to instill a competitive edge.

More precise and granular sales projections are generated based on tracked sales processes, production metrics, and campaigns to determine pain points and areas of success to ultimately expand sales methods. These sales analytics tools monitor salespeople within an organization as well to determine productivity metrics and sales numbers, find the right people for particular sales tasks, and ultimately yield better results. For more information about sales analytics tools, check out this informative article for more ideas.

Marketing Automation

After taking the necessary steps to analyze sales data, matured sales strategies are implemented to regulate brand recognition and possible marketing initiatives. A recent study found that 40% of salespeople agreed that sales prospecting was the most difficult stage of the sales process. By autonomously tracking consumer interactions and engagement with marketing, advertising, and social campaigns, specific consumer demands and interests can be verified and used to design more tailored brand exposure strategies.

Online ads on social media platforms can gain more exposure within target audiences and examine multiple prospect conversion paths with little to no manual input from marketing professionals. This assists in the turnover of prospective customers by creating personalized marketing tactics that focus more on building long-term relationships with the brand rather than only focusing on immediate sales.

Automated marketing tools collect relevant data that dives into prospect interests and recent transactions, as well, to design more customized and personal marketing campaigns. This time-efficient, real-time information technology gives professionals more time to make adjustments to marketing initiatives overall and effectively lead prospects through sales conversion funnels.

Internal Tech-Based Tools

Having the right operational tools implemented within an internal sales strategy has shown considerable influence on the success of new and existing initiatives. Studies show that 50% of sales prospects are not a good fit for what an organization is trying to sell. This is where customer relationship management (CRM) software comes in.

This tool is a modern, frequently used platform gaining popularity amongst sales teams, due to its capability to establish relevant target audiences that resonate with a company’s brand and sales techniques, all while building stronger relationships with customers and B2B clients. Using customer data in relation to past online and in-store interactions, as well as history with the company, salespeople are able to determine ways to better improve relationships and build stronger retention and consumer loyalty.

These complex software systems compile data from all customer-facing transactions and communication channels as well (e.g., websites, social pages, advertising, emails, and mobile sales) for a more in-depth analysis of customer/client interests to make connections related to the company brand. Then, using strategic processes to understand customer demands, these tools monitor market trends and consumer demands to remain competitive within a given market.

Taking a look into an important element of sales: the financials, it’s important to have the right tech-based solutions in place to monitor monetary and sales projection centric strategies. An expansive enterprise resource management (ERP) system organizes financials, procurement, project management processes, and enterprise resource management to keep internal operations running smoothly and provide the highest quality service to customers. These tools remain on top of financial reporting and automate core business processes in one digestible interface that is accessible across all levels of an organization.

Adapting to these systems allows for more efficient communication, which is key to sales strategy accuracy and timeliness of reports, deliverables and customer-facing interactions. An ERP system also helps to keep sales processes remain forward-thinking, making forecasting for risk and financial opportunity more streamlined.

Sales Intelligence and Acceleration

Sales intelligence technology includes all sales information and business strategy insights pertaining to sales and marketing efforts. These systems devise a viable sales strategy by providing marketing teams with real-time data.

Assembled insight metrics are divided into current and prospective target organizations based on their daily operations, then company information is indexed in real time, increasing overall timeliness of sales initiatives. It also increases the availability of granular information regarding an organization’s interests, type of technologies being utilized, and their overall buying signals (steps businesses take when getting close to buying decisions). This supports more accurate sales prospecting by tracking ideal customers that fit within an organization’s target audience as well as the important changes happening within prospective B2B customers.

Sales acceleration software enables the process of moving sales prospects through the pipeline with the highest level of efficiency possible. These tech-based tools assist in gaining sales leads using predictive analytics and other research tools to find relevant prospects that will result in faster conversion rates.

Sales lead software collects up-to-date contact information, while data cleansing technology eliminates low quality or inaccurate prospects. Sales acceleration research tools take this process a step further, and supplies salespeople with in-depth information on financial, legal, and competitive insight, while predictive analytics uses algorithms to compile the data regarding possible clients to make precise decisions when acquiring new prospects. It also aids in discovering up-and-coming prospect opportunities to remain forward-thinking on future sales objectives by collecting sales-driven data, refining based on relevance, and designing sales initiatives that center around growth and increased connections.

Wrapping Up

It can be tough to manage sales initiatives in the modern business environment. Having the right tools to support the new challenges is key to remaining competitive. Take a few of the suggestions above into consideration to bring your sales initiatives up to speed and ready to tackle whatever the sales market has in store!