Whether you’re a sales executive, account manager or in sales operations, you know the challenges of navigating a complex sales market. With customers increasingly looking for customized sales experiences, content marketing and SEO creating more nuanced sales tracks and more integrated business divisions creating cross-functional buying experiences, your teams are working overtime to navigate this new landscape.
After working with sales organizations across the globe, we’ve found a direct correlation between high performing sales organizations and simplified sales processes. It may seem counterintuitive—when we want more, our knee jerk reaction is to create and do more.
But in our current sales environment, teams are getting bogged down in overly complex processes and clunky and inefficient systems. In fact, according to CEB, 87% of sales leaders say that complexity in the sales process is lowering productivity and conversion rates.
Here are three easy ways to simplify your sales process this year.
Centralize Your Data
Most sales teams gather and maintain their data in ad hoc spreadsheets, across disparate sales apps or in complicated CRM platforms no one knows how to navigate. All three options lead to data silos, making it difficult for sales teams to get a 30,000 foot, holistic view of their sales efforts or track, manage and analyze the journey of each customer.
Creating a central repository for customer data significantly simplifies the quote to cash workflow. Sales reps and account managers spend less time tracking down customer data or fixing mistakes made because of outdated data. At the executive level, sales leaders are able to quickly leverage opportunities and shift strategies based on the data intel.
All the most important questions sales teams asks—how can we drive more revenue? How can we leverage more upsell opportunities? Where should we focus our efforts this quarter?—lives in the data. Centralizing it not only shortens the sales cycle but creates a clear roadmap for moving forward.
Create a One Stop Shop Resource Center
With companies cranking out sales and marketing material at a higher rate than ever before, editing, updating and distributing sales and marketing collateral is another time consuming—and often inefficient—process for sales teams.
To help streamline the internal sales process and create a more modern customer experience, gather all your sales and marketing materials in a one stop shop resource center. This can either be a public or password-protected content hub that houses everything you want prospects to be able to easily access—from data sheets to use cases to videos. This gives sales reps and account managers a central repository to access updated materials as they need it and provides customers with an easy, referenceable hub to educate themselves.
Adopt a Simple, Clean CRM
Most sales leaders are currently running their organizations in one of three ways: with manual spreadsheets, disparate apps or complicated CRM systems. While the experiences are different, the challenges sales teams face are the same—tasks are duplicated, communication is hindered, processes are inefficient and chaotic, sales cycles lengthen and revenue is stifled.
If you want a clean, simplified sales process, you need a clean, simplified CRM that supports your team from quote to cash. We recommend looking for CRMs that offer:
- An easy way to collect, track and manage your data all in a central location
- Automated processes to reduce data entry and manual tasks
- A central repository for reps and account managers to easily access documents and contracts
- Customizable dashboards and reports
- An integration with customer service and business lines across the enterprise to further simplify important (and often time consuming) workflows
Here, we can help. We built SalesWon, a CRM and CPQ application on the NOW Platform®, based on best practices we learned from the most successful sales teams—which all came down to strategic simplification. You can learn more about the application here.