Sales teams and their leaders continue to feel the pandemic’s impact on daily operations.
And it’s no surprise. The global B2B revenue operations experienced permanent shifts in the sales representative function as a whole, a growing need for advanced tools to support the dynamic remote workforce, and stark changes in customer behaviors, expectations, and overall engagement approach with sales members.
In the recent Sales Strategy & Trends Report, our partner HubSpot describes the evolved state of client-to-sales relationships:
“Building trust and rapport, crafting a personalized sales approach, and prioritizing existing customers is more important than ever to a successful sales strategy that not only attracts customers but turns them into promoters of your brand.”
Over the course of hundreds of engagements and our own internal growth strategy, New Breed's RevOps leaders have applied numerous approaches to helping guide sales teams through change management while creating processes laser-focused on optimizing revenue generation, improving the buying experience, and keeping reps motivated and productive.
Through this work, we have identified three core functional areas that, when optimized, drive measurable sales outcomes. While they don't represent a comprehensive RevOps strategy, they indicate where your sales ops organization should focus first to enhance sales team management for future-ready, scalable growth that easily adapts to changes in the industry.
Simplify and enhance your existing tech stack before making new investments — and when you do, connect them to revenue goals.
As they grow, companies often find themselves stacking one application on top of another to solve pressing team and client needs. No matter the cause, reactive tech investments often lead to a disjoined and unproductive environment that derails critical business functions.
To avoid a disjointed tech stack, it’s critical to assess every new tool’s contribution to revenue-generating activities. Documentation of pros and cons, measurable impact on the buyer’s journey, a plan for team-wide adoption, and stakeholder buy-in are key to strategic decision-making. However, the evaluation process alone takes a long time before the organization feels the impact — without even accounting for the timeline of proper implementation, migration, and team adoption efforts.
That’s why before investing time and resources into the discovery, purchase, and team training of net-new platforms, make sure to revisit your existing platforms to understand what can be improved through plan upgrades or integrations. Integrations, in particular, can be the most cost-effective way to solve and simplify the need for new software as operations scale.
For example, HubSpot’s Sales Hub comes in various product combinations to accommodate team needs, unify all customer and user data, and enhance the buyer’s journey.
Because HubSpot’s mission includes centralizing access to all tools a team uses, it’s also one of the most integration-friendly CRMs on the market — just look for “Certified App” in the HubSpot marketplace to ensure any new application meets the requirements for security, privacy, reliability, performance, usability, accessibility, and value.
Track performance from a granular to a bird’s eye view to inform growth strategy from all angles.
In sales operations, team management also means understanding pipeline performance, capacity, and exactly what works — and what doesn’t — on a granular level. Teams require visibility into metrics to set and meet goals, while managers are responsible for forecasting revenue based on team capacity, performance, and growth and updating standards accordingly.
A critical aspect of sales team management is building and maintaining a comprehensive reporting infrastructure that tracks the entire buyer’s journey — from the first touch to customer lifecycle and renewal — and equips sales teams with the insights they need for a strong pipeline.
To use Sales Hub as an example again, the platform offers a large arsenal of highly comprehensive and fully customizable reports that supercharge team performance. A few examples include:
Read our full post on HubSpot Sales Hub on full details of reports your sales team can leverage to advance their strategic approach to customer relationships and revenue performance.
Build lead routing around individual sales rep’s strengths to improve engagement quality, foster deeper connections, and propel buy-in.
Building a personal connection and rapport is key to closing a deal. However, it’s often difficult for reps to form meaningful relationships when leads enter their pipeline on a round-robin or capacity basis alone with few considerations on lead-to-sales-rep compatibility. Most all-in-one or prescriptive sales approaches set the rep to fumble from the start, as they aren’t equipped to engage the modern consumer who demands a high-touch, personalized experience.
As a result, sales team members may lose valuable time on research of a prospect out of their realm, struggle to gain traction during engagements, and ultimately lose the deal. By adopting playbooks based on connecting leads to the right rep at the right time, sales managers can maximize the value and productivity of their teams:
The best team leaders know to strategically use sales tools and automation to equip teams to reach the intended audience, engage a lead in a timely manner, and make an impactful connection that results in a closed deal and a long-term partnership.
And that’s the mission of Distributely. If you’d like to discover dramatic gains in efficiency and tech-enabled growth, get your free trial here.