Digital Dealer - April 2020 - 29

in. Test them out. It will pencil. Those
costs go directly towards freeing up your
sales team to sell.

Remove the clutter
I ﬁrmly believe that most companies today
don't have a shortage of leads. The shortage is in the data needed to stack rank the
leads. And without that, salespeople waste
too much time calling the wrong people.
When your sales team can focus exclusively on the people who want to be sold,
it's very clarifying. There's software that
notiﬁes salespeople when their leads are
browsing your website. Imagine if the salesperson assigned to the lead got a text or
email alerting them to the prospect's latest
activity. And you got an email the next
day if they didn't do something about it.
Technology like that amps up efﬁciency and
instills conﬁdence in your team because
they know that they are pursuing opportunities that are interested right now.

Make Sales Efficiency Your Focus
The average sales professional spends 34%
of their time selling. When two-thirds of
their time is spent on secondary priorities, it
should come as no surprise that 57% of sales
professionals expect to miss their quota this
year.
So how can sales managers and business
owners support their teams and improve sales
outcomes?
Makes sales efficiency your focus for 2020 by
removing roadblocks, leveraging automation,
and implementing technology that enables
salespeople to convert more leads faster.

Get to the root of buying intent
So much of the tension between a salesperson and a buyer is aligning to where the
buyer is in the process and what they want.
If they want consultation and I try to close
them, I'm a smarmy sales guy. If they are
ready to buy and I try to be a consultant,
I'm wasting their time.
It's hard to ﬁgure out where a person is
in the process and to meet them with the
right level of service. Having software that
clearly shows where a person is in their
research journey is massively helpful here.
Once I understand that this person
has been in the market for 2 months and
they've looked at the same piece of inventory 11 times over the last 3 days, I can
better orient myself to the conversation
and where they are in the buyer journey.

" So much of what
a customer needs
when working with
a salesperson is
to feel like they're
being heard and that
their salesperson is
competent. "

Enable Listening
So much of what a customer needs when
working with a salesperson is to feel like
they're being heard and that their salesperson is competent. Whether I'm ordering
a sandwich with no mayo or specifying
that I want the SUV in black, I expect that
the person on the other end of the transaction remembers what I want. In reality,
I get a lot of sandwiches with mayo - and

April 2020

I bet your salespeople are struggling to
remember the nuance of our last conversation too.
Knowing what people want and remembering the previous conversation goes a
long way to reducing friction and making
sales. Look for technology that connects
your CRM data with user activities to

get a full picture of your customers and
what they want. A system that quickly and
clearly shows what buyers want and where
opportunities lie allows your salespeople to
look like experts of the customer and their
needs.

Choose Sales Enablement
I'm old enough to remember the days when
we talked about how CRMs were going to
solve all sales problems. Now, no one really
talks like that. Instead, we see that the value really lies in the bolt ons CRMs power.
The products that are valuable today aren't
too heavy, they don't have long complex
setup processes, and they enable sales efﬁciency in truly novel and helpful ways.
That is the crux of sales enablement
technologies and why they're so transformative for businesses. They give sales
teams the tools to get efﬁcient, go on
the offense, and deliver the results that
businesses need. They empower leadership
to move past classic problems and deliver
the buyer experience needed to achieve
business objectives.
To share feedback or submit questions/topic
suggestions, email magazine@digitaldealer.com

[ d i g i t a l d e a l e r. c o m ]

29
http://www.digitaldealer.com
Digital Dealer - April 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Digital Dealer - April 2020
