Unlocking New Terms
What is Account-Based Sales?
Account-based sales is an omnichannel B2B sales method in which each target company (also known as an “account”) is treated as its own “market.” Sales representatives develop a unique, highly personalized sales strategy for each potential business customer. By customizing their messaging for each lead, sales reps hope to increase their conversion and retention rates.
How Does Account-Based Sales Work?
Because account-based sales seek to strengthen customer relationships, your customers will come to expect high-quality engagements at each step of the sales pipeline. Due to the large amount of effort required, account-based sales needs buy-in from other teams as well: not only from your sales reps but also from marketing, customer service, finance, and product development.
This account-based model can also be used in other business functions, such as “account-based marketing.” When used across the organization, it’s often called “account-based everything.”
Account-based sales need a lot of attention and investment, which means it isn’t the right fit for every product (or even for every organization). For example, if you sell a basic software product with a monthly $40 subscription fee to a wide audience, the effort required for account-based sales likely isn’t worth it. On the other hand, if you sell highly specialized software to a niche audience that pays a high price for your services, account-based sales can help improve your conversion rate, which will dramatically increase your bottom-line revenue.
What are the Benefits of Account-Based Sales?
The advantages of an account-based sales approach include:
- A high degree of personalization: Study after study has shown that highly personalized sales messaging, as used in account-based sales, is more effective in gaining people’s interest and converting them to paying customers.
- Targeted messaging: Account-based sales allow you to target multiple people within an organization, using targeted messaging for each one. For example, CEOs may be more receptive to information about how your product increases productivity and efficiency, while CFOs might be looking for how your product cuts costs.
Account-based sales are an invaluable tactic for increasing business revenue. What’s more, it can be made even more effective with the right sales technology for digitally transforming your business.
Are you looking for a sales engagement solution that can improve the performance of your sales team? Conquer can help. Book a meeting with our sales team today to discuss how Conquer Cadence, the only Sales Engagement Platform Truly Native to Salesforce, can help your team.
What is Cadence Software?
Cadence software is a tool or application that allows sellers to leverage omni-channel (email, phone, video, social, text) sales cadences to communicate with prospects and customers.
Defining and implementing the right sales cadences can mean the difference between a dysfunctional sales workflow and an automated sales workflow that dramatically increases your revenue and grows the business. Sales cadence software tools are therefore essential to unlocking your sales representatives’ success and productivity and achieving successful sales management.
The Benefits of Cadence Software Include:
- Greater predictability: With cadence software, all sales reps have access to the same information and workflows at their fingertips. This introduces predictability and reliability into your sales processes, rather than haphazard attempts at lead conversion.
- Scaling your sales pipeline: Thanks to sales automation, cadence software helps your sales reps free up more of the finite hours in their workday. As a result, it’s dramatically easier to scale your sales pipeline and reach out to more leads in less time.
Cadence software should help you with the various components of building a sales cadence:
- Timing (days of the week and times of day to make contact)
- Frequency (how often to reach out to prospects)
- Channel (communication methods such as phone calls, emails, social media, etc.)
- Audience (the various groups and segments of different types of prospects)
- Content (sales material such as e-books, white papers and case studies)
Another name for cadence software is a sales engagement platform. At Conquer, we have the only SEP truly native to Salesforce – Conquer Cadence.
Want to learn more?
Book a meeting with our sales team today to discuss how Conquer Cadence, the only Sales Engagement Platform Truly Native to Salesforce, can help your team.
What is Digital Sales?
Digital sales is the term used to describe a sales rep’s utilization of virtual channels to contact potential prospects, provide them with education on your product or service and ultimately provide them with a solution that satisfies their unique needs.
Digital sales give sales reps the ability to build relationships through both social and digital channels. This methodology was popularized during the pandemic but is likely here to stay. Digital sales aren’t intended to completely replace traditional sales, but rather exist to enhance sales through the use of digital channels. These digital channels give you much needed access to key information that, in turn, helps you make smarter, quicker decisions.
How to Create a Digital Sales Model
There are several different strategies you can utilize in the creation of your digital sales model. First and foremost is the use of customer data. Whether this includes data your business already has on file or data you and your business can collect from social media profiles and the like, this customer data helps you to better understand your customer and better sell to them specifically.
Another key component of the creation of a digital sales model is the utilization of digital channels. Whether it be social media, email, text messaging or video, digital channels can help you create a digital sales model that gets the most out of its virtual channels.
Beyond this, there’s also the distribution of digital content to your leads. From personalized content you created yourself to curated content you gathered from third party sources to online case studies that show real-world examples of your product or service in action, digital content can take your digital sales model to the next level.
A critical tool for a digital sales model is a sales engagement platform that allows your sales team to reach prospects via omnichannel sales cadences.
Want to learn more about Conquer’s SEP? Book a meeting with our sales team today.
What is an Email Cadence?
An email cadence is a sequence of emails sent to prospects and customers via a sales engagement platform. Getting an email cadence right can mean the difference between a company that feels annoying to customers – and one that feels valuable, informative and worth building a strong relationship with.
When your business depends on making sales regularly to generate revenue, you should be using every channel available to you to reach potential leads and prospects. One of the most important avenues through which you should be communicating to potential customers today is email. If you can master the sales email, you can ensure you get your company on your audience’s radar—then ultimately convince them to buy. An important part of nailing sales emails is nailing the right email cadence.
Mastering Email Cadences
Here are some tips so you can master email cadence at your company:
- Sign up for competitors’ newsletters or email lists to see their nurturing sequence/email cadence. This can give you some good insight into what other companies in your field are doing, and to see if it feels like it works—or pushes you away.
- Use a data collecting and analyzing tool. Data is your friend when it comes to getting the rhythm of your emails right, so make concrete, information-based decisions instead of guessing when to send your emails.
- Get customer feedback. Your leads and customers may simply respond or unsubscribe to your emails, letting you know your email cadence isn’t quite right. Use their feedback to guide how you tweak the cadence.
Emails are a critical part of any sales cadence. Conquer Cadence allows you to create email cadences directly within Salesforce.
Want to learn more about Conquer Cadence? Book a meeting with our sales team today.
What is Guided Selling?
Guided selling is a sales process that allows sellers to have better buyer engagements by helping them deliver the right message, via the right channels at the right time, eliminating the guesswork, and giving them more time to do what they do best – sell.
Today, people who work in digital sales can consistently rely on technology to help improve their sales processes. Guided selling is a seller-centric process of utilizing technological sales tools to help sales team members find more potential customers, nurture more leads, and close more deals in a more efficient manner than ever before.
What Is Guided Selling? The Basics
B2B buyer journeys are faster than ever today, with more knowledge and information always at everyone’s fingertips. To close more deals, B2B salespeople need access to data-driven insights, which can guide how they engage with their leads. When businesses utilize a guided selling process, they create a consistent system by which all sellers approach and nurture their customers.
Guided selling is often done using a sales engagement platform and uses buyer data to ensure that every customer interaction is meaningful and effective and that every action taken by a seller adds value to a potential customer’s journey — so at every touchpoint with a potential seller, they feel more driven to buy.
Guided Selling: The Benefits
Guided selling codifies and creates a consistent selling process based on data. This helps all salespeople at an organization close deals, regardless of their experience or the depth of their relationship with potential customers. There are more benefits to guided selling, including:
- More time selling: With guided selling, reps don’t have to worry about when they should send messages and via what channels as they are leveraging a pre-built sales cadence that streamlines the selling process.
- Reps become invaluable consultants: Guided selling allows sales reps to become subject matter and product experts in their field. Customers can completely rely on a sales rep to know what they need and when they’ll need it.
- Reps create repeat buyers: With sales reps who are so good at knowing what a customer needs and when they need it, customers are happy with their buying experience — and they return to buy the next product or service when they’ve outgrown their first purchase because the first purchase met their needs so well.
Learn how Conquer can help your company with guided selling. Book a meeting with our sales team today!
What is Inside Sales?
Inside sales is a selling process that takes place remotely—rather than from within any office-based environment. The process of inside sales differs from selling in the days of yore, once called “outside sales”; no longer do inside sales professionals rely on any in-person meetings between the salesperson (or team) and their lead or potential customer.
Inside Sales: A Tech-Reliant Sales Technique
Instead of in-person meetings, inside sales teams rely on technological solutions to handle the selling process from the comfort of their own office (or remote workspace), and they may utilize a range of tools to help them communicate with leads in an effective manner, like the computer, smartphone, or even social media networks.
Sometimes, inside sales is done via email communications—and sometimes, inside sales teams use telephone technology, in conjunction with integrated sales software, that helps them sell via phone and keep track of every interaction along the way.
You may have heard the term before, and wondered: what is inside sales? One reason you may not have heard the term—despite the popularity of the process—is because the selling technique has become so ubiquitous that nearly all people mean “inside sales” when they simply use the term “sales.”
Benefits of Inside Sales
Inside sales works for both B2C and B2B businesses, but it has been more comprehensively adopted in the B2B realm. Why are inside sales so important and what are the benefits of adopting an inside sales approach?
- Boosted productivity: Conduct all selling from your desk, without needing to take time to travel and meet with potential leads in person
- Happier customers: Surveys show that even customers prefer to be sold to via online or phone communication, and not in-person meetings. Choose the type of selling that most appeals to the people whose buy-in you want.
- More streamlined in-office processes: Inside sales allows you to communicate from the office and keep track of all interactions in one place. That way anyone in any department can see how a lead has been contacted and where they’re at in the process, and it can help ensure there is no redundant communication, and that everyone is addressed in a way that moves the process forward. No more selling, marketing, or offering support in silos.
Ready to learn more about Conquer Cadence? Book a meeting with our sales team today!
What is Account-Based Sales?
Account-based sales is an omnichannel B2B sales method in which each target company (also known as an “account”) is treated as its own “market.” Sales representatives develop a unique, highly personalized sales strategy for each potential business customer. By customizing their messaging for each lead, sales reps hope to increase their conversion and retention rates. How Does Account-Based Sales Work? Because account-based sales seek to strengthen customer relationships, your customers will come to expect high-quality engagements at each step of the sales pipeline. Due to the large amount of effort required, account-based sales needs buy-in from other teams as well: not only from your sales reps but also from marketing, customer service, finance, and product development. This account-based model can also be used in other business functions, such as “account-based marketing.” When used across the organization, it’s often called “account-based everything.” Account-based sales need a lot of attention and investment, which means it isn’t the right fit for every product (or even for every organization). For example, if you sell a basic software product with a monthly $40 subscription fee to a wide audience, the effort required for account-based sales likely isn’t worth it. On the other hand, if you sell highly specialized software to a niche audience that pays a high price for your services, account-based sales can help improve your conversion rate, which will dramatically increase your bottom-line revenue. What are the Benefits of Account-Based Sales? The advantages of an account-based sales approach include: A high degree of personalization: Study after study has shown that highly personalized sales messaging, as used in account-based sales, is more effective in gaining people’s interest and converting them to paying customers. Targeted messaging: Account-based sales allow you to target multiple people within an organization, using targeted messaging for each one. For example, CEOs may be more receptive to information about how your product increases productivity and efficiency, while CFOs might be looking for how your product cuts costs. Account-based sales are an invaluable tactic for increasing business revenue. What’s more, it can be made even more effective with the right sales technology for digitally transforming your business. Are you looking for a sales engagement solution that can improve the performance of your sales team? Conquer can help. Book a meeting with our sales team today to discuss how Conquer Cadence, the only Sales Engagement Platform Truly Native to Salesforce, can help your team.
What is Cadence Software?
Cadence software is a tool or application that allows sellers to leverage omni-channel (email, phone, video, social, text) sales cadences to communicate with prospects and customers. Defining and implementing the right sales cadences can mean the difference between a dysfunctional sales workflow and an automated sales workflow that dramatically increases your revenue and grows the business. Sales cadence software tools are therefore essential to unlocking your sales representatives’ success and productivity and achieving successful sales management. The Benefits of Cadence Software Include: Greater predictability: With cadence software, all sales reps have access to the same information and workflows at their fingertips. This introduces predictability and reliability into your sales processes, rather than haphazard attempts at lead conversion. Scaling your sales pipeline: Thanks to sales automation, cadence software helps your sales reps free up more of the finite hours in their workday. As a result, it’s dramatically easier to scale your sales pipeline and reach out to more leads in less time. Cadence software should help you with the various components of building a sales cadence: Timing (days of the week and times of day to make contact) Frequency (how often to reach out to prospects) Channel (communication methods such as phone calls, emails, social media, etc.) Audience (the various groups and segments of different types of prospects) Content (sales material such as e-books, white papers and case studies) Another name for cadence software is a sales engagement platform. At Conquer, we have the only SEP truly native to Salesforce – Conquer Cadence. Want to learn more? Book a meeting with our sales team today to discuss how Conquer Cadence, the only Sales Engagement Platform Truly Native to Salesforce, can help your team.
What is Digital Sales?
Digital sales is the term used to describe a sales rep’s utilization of virtual channels to contact potential prospects, provide them with education on your product or service and ultimately provide them with a solution that satisfies their unique needs. Digital sales give sales reps the ability to build relationships through both social and digital channels. This methodology was popularized during the pandemic but is likely here to stay. Digital sales aren’t intended to completely replace traditional sales, but rather exist to enhance sales through the use of digital channels. These digital channels give you much needed access to key information that, in turn, helps you make smarter, quicker decisions. How to Create a Digital Sales Model There are several different strategies you can utilize in the creation of your digital sales model. First and foremost is the use of customer data. Whether this includes data your business already has on file or data you and your business can collect from social media profiles and the like, this customer data helps you to better understand your customer and better sell to them specifically. Another key component of the creation of a digital sales model is the utilization of digital channels. Whether it be social media, email, text messaging or video, digital channels can help you create a digital sales model that gets the most out of its virtual channels. Beyond this, there’s also the distribution of digital content to your leads. From personalized content you created yourself to curated content you gathered from third party sources to online case studies that show real-world examples of your product or service in action, digital content can take your digital sales model to the next level. A critical tool for a digital sales model is a sales engagement platform that allows your sales team to reach prospects via omnichannel sales cadences. Want to learn more about Conquer’s SEP? Book a meeting with our sales team today.
What is an Email Cadence?
An email cadence is a sequence of emails sent to prospects and customers via a sales engagement platform. Getting an email cadence right can mean the difference between a company that feels annoying to customers – and one that feels valuable, informative and worth building a strong relationship with. When your business depends on making sales regularly to generate revenue, you should be using every channel available to you to reach potential leads and prospects. One of the most important avenues through which you should be communicating to potential customers today is email. If you can master the sales email, you can ensure you get your company on your audience’s radar—then ultimately convince them to buy. An important part of nailing sales emails is nailing the right email cadence. Mastering Email Cadences Here are some tips so you can master email cadence at your company: Sign up for competitors’ newsletters or email lists to see their nurturing sequence/email cadence. This can give you some good insight into what other companies in your field are doing, and to see if it feels like it works—or pushes you away. Use a data collecting and analyzing tool. Data is your friend when it comes to getting the rhythm of your emails right, so make concrete, information-based decisions instead of guessing when to send your emails. Get customer feedback. Your leads and customers may simply respond or unsubscribe to your emails, letting you know your email cadence isn’t quite right. Use their feedback to guide how you tweak the cadence. Emails are a critical part of any sales cadence. Conquer Cadence allows you to create email cadences directly within Salesforce. Want to learn more about Conquer Cadence? Book a meeting with our sales team today.
What is Guided Selling?
Guided selling is a sales process that allows sellers to have better buyer engagements by helping them deliver the right message, via the right channels at the right time, eliminating the guesswork, and giving them more time to do what they do best – sell. Today, people who work in digital sales can consistently rely on technology to help improve their sales processes. Guided selling is a seller-centric process of utilizing technological sales tools to help sales team members find more potential customers, nurture more leads, and close more deals in a more efficient manner than ever before. What Is Guided Selling? The Basics B2B buyer journeys are faster than ever today, with more knowledge and information always at everyone’s fingertips. To close more deals, B2B salespeople need access to data-driven insights, which can guide how they engage with their leads. When businesses utilize a guided selling process, they create a consistent system by which all sellers approach and nurture their customers. Guided selling is often done using a sales engagement platform and uses buyer data to ensure that every customer interaction is meaningful and effective and that every action taken by a seller adds value to a potential customer’s journey — so at every touchpoint with a potential seller, they feel more driven to buy. Guided Selling: The Benefits Guided selling codifies and creates a consistent selling process based on data. This helps all salespeople at an organization close deals, regardless of their experience or the depth of their relationship with potential customers. There are more benefits to guided selling, including: More time selling: With guided selling, reps don’t have to worry about when they should send messages and via what channels as they are leveraging a pre-built sales cadence that streamlines the selling process. Reps become invaluable consultants: Guided selling allows sales reps to become subject matter and product experts in their field. Customers can completely rely on a sales rep to know what they need and when they’ll need it. Reps create repeat buyers: With sales reps who are so good at knowing what a customer needs and when they need it, customers are happy with their buying experience — and they return to buy the next product or service when they’ve outgrown their first purchase because the first purchase met their needs so well. Learn how Conquer can help your company with guided selling. Book a meeting with our sales team today!
What is Inside Sales?
Inside sales is a selling process that takes place remotely—rather than from within any office-based environment. The process of inside sales differs from selling in the days of yore, once called “outside sales”; no longer do inside sales professionals rely on any in-person meetings between the salesperson (or team) and their lead or potential customer. Inside Sales: A Tech-Reliant Sales Technique Instead of in-person meetings, inside sales teams rely on technological solutions to handle the selling process from the comfort of their own office (or remote workspace), and they may utilize a range of tools to help them communicate with leads in an effective manner, like the computer, smartphone, or even social media networks. Sometimes, inside sales is done via email communications—and sometimes, inside sales teams use telephone technology, in conjunction with integrated sales software, that helps them sell via phone and keep track of every interaction along the way. You may have heard the term before, and wondered: what is inside sales? One reason you may not have heard the term—despite the popularity of the process—is because the selling technique has become so ubiquitous that nearly all people mean “inside sales” when they simply use the term “sales.” Benefits of Inside Sales Inside sales works for both B2C and B2B businesses, but it has been more comprehensively adopted in the B2B realm. Why are inside sales so important and what are the benefits of adopting an inside sales approach? Boosted productivity: Conduct all selling from your desk, without needing to take time to travel and meet with potential leads in person Happier customers: Surveys show that even customers prefer to be sold to via online or phone communication, and not in-person meetings. Choose the type of selling that most appeals to the people whose buy-in you want. More streamlined in-office processes: Inside sales allows you to communicate from the office and keep track of all interactions in one place. That way anyone in any department can see how a lead has been contacted and where they’re at in the process, and it can help ensure there is no redundant communication, and that everyone is addressed in a way that moves the process forward. No more selling, marketing, or offering support in silos. Ready to learn more about Conquer Cadence? Book a meeting with our sales team today!
What is Lead Response Time?
Lead response time is the average amount of time it takes for a sales representative to respond to a lead. This can include anything from filling out a form, downloading content, answering a call, responding to an email, or any other form of contact. Being the first to respond to a lead can dramatically increase your chances of winning the deal. Why Lead Response Time Matters Lead response time is important because of the proven way it can secure deals for your business. Lead response time can also help your business gauge which lead will be the most worthwhile for you and your sales reps. For example, someone who requested a demo from you is going to be a more critical lead to follow up with than a lead who merely subscribed to your newsletter. The faster your lead response time, the more likely you are to win the deal. Calculating Lead Response Time Now, with a better understanding of lead response time, it’s important for you to form your sales strategy around an improved lead response time. You can do this by creating a formula: (Time and date of new lead contacting you) – (time and date of your response) = your lead response time (Amount of time it took to respond to all your leads) / (number of leads who contacted you in total) = your average lead response time Depending on how fast it takes you to respond, this amount of time in the equations can be in minutes, hours, days, or maybe even weeks. Whatever the lead response time may be, it’s essential for you to implement this formula into your sales strategy so that you can improve it and, in turn, win more deals. Guided selling can help improve your lead response time by providing your sales teams with the sales cadences they need to reach out to inbound leads so they aren’t creating messages from scratch. Learn how Conquer can help with guided selling. Book time with our sales team now.
What is Native Sales Engagement?
Native sales engagement is a sales engagement that is built directly – or natively – into the CRM so sales reps do not have to switch back and forth between applications when communicating with prospects and customers. Native sales engagement comes with numerous benefits, including the elimination of any type of bi-directional sync between two applications. This means that your data and reports will be accurate and up-to-date in real time. Additionally, sales reps no longer need to switch between separate applications as they will have all their omnichannel communication needs directly in the CRM. The benefits don’t only extend to the sales team. IT and security teams will have much fewer headaches as native sales engagement doesn’t require additional security reviews because companies have already completed that process when implementing their CRM. Many sales engagement vendors will try and sell you on their applications being native but only one is truly native, Conquer Cadence. Built directly in Salesforce, Conquer Cadence is the ONLY truly native SEP on the market. We don’t require a bi-directional data sync. Ever. Book some time with our sales team to see it for yourself. You can also take a quick product tour here.
What is a Sales Cadence?
A sales cadence is a sequence of sales activities or outreach methods that members on sales teams can use to create and nurture relationships with leads, so that they can ultimately encourage their prospects to take concrete steps towards becoming buyers. Sales cadences, as their names suggest, have a rhythm to them, and they unfold over time. The sales cadence is a selling strategy used by sales teams of all sizes and at all types of companies. Teams rely on sales cadences because they spread the sales process out into several strategic intervals. These intervals ensure you stay top of mind for a potential buyer—but that you don’t overwhelm or annoy a lead with your persistence. If you’ve been wondering, what is sales cadence? It can help to know that a sales cadence doesn’t just involve scheduled phone calls or emails. The entire process can take place over various types of selling technology or platforms, including: Social media networks Phone calls Text messages Emails Videos And more. Not only does a sales cadence allow reps to be more productive but it also allows for managers and reps to test messaging and touchpoints to determine which are most effective for prospecting. For example, sales teams can tell whether leads are most likely to respond to phone calls or emails, whether they’re most likely to buy after a social media message or a text message, and whether most buy after 3 points of contact, or they need at least 5. As a sales team member uses a sales cadence, they can continuously refine it, get more effective at selling, and sell more. Looking for a solution to build and leverage sales cadences? Try Conquer Cadence, the only truly native sales engagement platform for Salesforce. Talk to our sales team today!
What is Sales Engagement?
Sales engagement is the collective set of interactions between your sales team and your prospective buyers and current customers, often conducted via an omni-channel cadence within a sales engagement platform. These touchpoints can include email, phone calls, social media, videos, and sms messages. In today’s increasingly stratified, atomized digital landscape, just getting a prospect’s attention is enough of a challenge. According to Gartner, for example, it can take 18 or more calls to connect with a prospective buyer over the phone. It’s not hard to see why so many businesses see the value of gathering sales engagement data. Sales engagement gives organizations cold, hard, data-driven information about the successes and shortcomings of their sales operations. The benefits of sales engagement include: Determining which sales content, activities, tactics and practices are the most effective and which need refinement and improvement. Creating standardized benchmarks for different stages of the sales process. Improving team members’ pitches and conversion rates, ultimately increasing sales revenue. Tracking individual team members’ performance to identify training and coaching opportunities. Most importantly, sales engagement is an essential technique because it helps your sales representatives understand the best way to tailor their messaging to different segments and prospects. Your sales reps’ time is a valuable commodity: one study found that representatives spend just 35 percent of their time, on average, in revenue-generating activities (i.e. selling). Rather than wasting time on content or audiences that are unlikely to be productive, sales reps can use the guided selling functionality made possible with a sales engagement platform to invest more of their effort into the most promising prospects or topics. In order to automate and improve the sales engagement process, many businesses make use of sales engagement software that helps centralize and enhance the various components of sales engagement. Ready to implement sales engagement at your company? Talk to our sales team to see how Conquer Cadence, the only truly native Sales Engagement Platform for Salesforce, can help shorten sales cycles, increase productivity and drive more revenue.
What is a Sales Engagement Platform?
A Sales engagement platform, or a sales engagement software, is a software application that supports sales engagement activities within your organization by enabling sellers to utilize omni-channel sales cadences to drive revenue. Sales engagement refers to the interactions between your sales team and your prospective buyers before converting them into paying customers. Sales engagement platforms aim to collate and centralize all of the touchpoints between your business and your sales leads. However, with hundreds or thousands of prospects and many thousands of touchpoints among these prospects, manually keeping track of these interactions is nearly impossible—and a waste of time in any event. That’s where sales engagement software comes in. The goals of sales engagement platforms include: Automating low-level and repetitive parts of the sales process. For example, you can schedule an automated email once prospects enter their contact details on your website and follow up with a personalized call a few days later. Integrating data and conversations across different sources and channels. Sales engagement software helps your sales representatives access all the information on a given prospect in a single centralized location, saving valuable time. The benefits of sales engagement platforms include: Greater productivity and efficiency: By incorporating workflow automation into your sales process, sales engagement software frees up your sales reps’ valuable time to concentrate on higher-level activities that generate more revenue. Data-driven decision-making: Sales engagement software gives your sales team more information on your sales process from start to finish, from email open rates to social media clicks and shares. In turn, you can use these insights and metrics to optimize your sales workflow iteratively. Higher revenues: Ultimately, by increasing both the volume and the quality of your interactions with leads, sales engagement software seeks to make your sales team more successful and help your business revenues grow. Are you in the market for a sales engagement platform? Conquer can help. Get in touch with us today to chat about your business needs.
What is a Sales Playbook?
A sales playbook is a document that outlines tactics, best practices and strategies to tackle each stage of the selling process effectively. This detailed document should be tailored to your company and sales team, covering buyer personas, KPIs, discovery call questions, sample scripts, negotiations and anything else a sales rep would need to know to close successfully. Why Write a Sales Playbook? Taking the time to create a sales playbook is an excellent investment, as it will yield the following benefits. Make the training process more efficient — When you clearly explain who your customers are, what their pain points are and how they buy products, this makes the training process much easier. This step benefits both the sales team and the company. Make sales reps more productive — A strategic playbook frees up time for selling, which is more time to nurture leads and close deals. Highlight the most effective selling techniques — Share the most effective selling strategies and plays used by successful team members. Tip: Think of your sales playbook as a manual and a sales play as a tutorial. You can create these plays for specific stages in the sales pipeline or varying types of customers. How to Create a Sales Playbook The following steps are meant to guide you toward a sales playbook that will support your sales team. Remember to adjust each step based on your customers, goals and overall business model. Review and update your sales process. Focus on your latest products and features, how your reps sell, goals, buyer personas and so on. Outline your goals when creating a sales playbook — what do you want to achieve? Determine who will be involved in the process of creating a sales playbook, such as sales reps, marketing team members, managers, etc. Align your marketing and sales teams, focusing on communication and collaboration. Collect critical information on your buyer personas to share with reps (update as your business grows). Provide education on products and features. Reps need a deep understanding of what they are selling. Choose your plays to determine the focus of your sales playbook. Share and then track the success of your sales playbook. Don’t forget to include: An overview of your company, providing details about the sales organization, including how manages the team and the targets reps are expected to hit. Selected plays, ranging from a demo play to a lead qualification play, use case play to a closing play. Product or service overview, which is easy to read and reference. This overview should include core value points, use cases, pricing, etc. Explain each step of the sales process so that reps can easily refer to each phase. Specific KPIs and goals, sharing the most important metrics. Buyer personas so that reps can target unique needs and pain points. Resources to support reps every step of the way, sharing sample case studies, demo videos, etc. Are you in the market for a sales engagement platform? Conquer can help. Get in touch
What is a Sales Sequence?
A sales sequence, also called a sales cadence or a sales campaign, is a series of clearly delineated steps to convert your prospects into paying customers. Sales sequences usually contain between five to seven steps, and take an omnichannel approach. In other words, the steps in a sales sequence may consist of emails, phone calls, text messages, social media messages, or other points of contact—whatever you’ve discovered is most effective through sales analytics. What Are the Benefits of a Sales Sequence? Without a clear-cut sales sequence, too many sales representatives adopt a haphazard approach. They may give up after just one or two attempts to reach a promising lead or even forget about prospects they haven’t spoken to in a while. The purpose of defining your sales sequence is to remove ambiguity from your sales pipeline. By adopting a sales sequence, your sales representatives can all be on the same page, helping to establish best practices and remove the guesswork from the process. What Are the Components of a Sales Sequence? Businesses may choose to define many different components as parts of their sales sequence. One important element is the messaging to use during each contact. This may include: A welcome message for new prospects Nurturing messages to demonstrate your company’s value Engagement messages that ask prospects to actively engage with your content Conversion messages that seek to convert prospects into customers Follow-up messages that ensure customers are satisfied and engaged after conversion Other components of a sales sequence may include the type of channels used for given messages, the length of time between each contact, and the maximum number of attempts to reach out to a prospect. What Technology Is Used for a Sales Sequence? Sales sequences can be optimized through techniques such as workflow automation. When a prospect takes a certain action (e.g., viewing a webinar or downloading a white paper), you can automatically initiate the next step in your sales sequence (e.g., sending an email or scheduling a phone call). To efficiently perform sales management, high-performing sales organizations use sales sequence software. These applications help you manage, organize, automate, and personalize the messages of your sales sequence. They also integrate with other sales software such as CRM (customer relationship management) and sales intelligence applications, helping you enact a digital sales transformation. Are you looking to optimize your own sales sequence? Conquer can help. Get in touch with us today for a chat about your business needs and a free demo of our omnichannel sales engagement platform.
What is a Social Selling?
Social selling is a sales strategy in which businesses leverage the power of their social media accounts to sell directly to their followers and connections. While the validity of this statement is up for debate, what’s clear is that many businesses are looking for alternate sales methods to reach and convert prospective customers. One major problem with outbound sales is that businesses have no guarantee that their audience will even want to buy their offerings. Social selling is intended to address exactly this issue. Users who have chosen to view or follow your social media accounts are dramatically more likely to be interested in their products and services. Social selling likely shouldn’t be your entire sales pipeline, selling on social media can be an invaluable part of the sales engagement process. For example, you can schedule content to be posted at specific times, increasing the amount of sales automation in your pipeline. Using social selling can also help you get a better handle on your sales analytics. Social media platforms provide a wealth of information about the performance of your content (e.g. the number of impressions or engagements for a given post). This helps you understand which content is most effective so that you can refine your social selling efforts. Social media platforms are also an excellent opportunity for you to connect with prospects and customers more intimately and to use personalized messaging. For example, you can operate a chatbot that reaches out to prospects and customers who frequently engage with your content, or who have made a recent purchase. Given the advantages of social selling, it’s no surprise that it seems to be an effective sales technique. According to LinkedIn, 78 percent of businesses that use social selling have higher revenues than competitors that don’t use this tactic, while sales reps are 51 percent more likely to reach their quotas with social selling. Social selling is an important part of an omnichannel sales strategy that spans phone calls, emails, SMS, and more. Are you looking to improve your own sales pipeline? Conquer can help. Get in touch with us today for a chat about your business needs and a free demo of our omnichannel sales engagement platform.
What is Speed to Lead?
Speed to lead is a measure of lead response time in the sales process. When a potential customer fills out a form, makes a demo request, or initiates contact with your company in another way, how fast is your response time? The longer it takes to respond to inbound leads, the less likely it is that your business will connect with them and convert them into paying customers. Why is speed to lead so important? If you’re not meeting or exceeding your speed to lead benchmark, then you’re losing out on potential business and revenue. Speed to lead matters for the following reasons: Customer experience Faster lead response times improve the customer experience. If a prospect has to wait hours to hear back from one of your sales reps, the message is loud and clear: “We don’t value your business.” Bad customer experience causes churn and revenue loss because dissatisfied customers turn to other companies to meet their needs. Quality of leads Potential customers that have taken the time to reach out to you are likely to be very excited about your solution to their problems. The longer your sales team waits to respond, the more likely it is that the lead will lose interest. Maximizing your marketing buck It doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of money on marketing then lose out on potential customers because of poor lead response times. Great speed-to-lead response time ensures that your time and money spent on marketing is rewarded with quick sales. What are best practices for response times? Should they be within 5 minutes, or is 24 hours more reasonable? Response time will vary across businesses. However, in most industries you should aim for response times of less than an hour. Look at industry benchmarks to get a sense of how your company compares. How to improve your speed to lead There are several ways to improve your speed to lead. Use a Sales Engagement Platform A sales engagement platform can enroll your leads into a sales cadence to improve your speed to lead time and engage with inbound prospects in minutes. Hire more sales reps Increasing the size of your sales team can definitely improve your speed to lead. However, it’s not scalable and can be very costly. Incorporate lead response times This keeps reps accountable for their time and ensures they respond and connect with as many leads as possible. Use automation Can you automate steps in your sales funnel? If you’re struggling to provide quick responses, it might be time to invest in chatbots or virtual assistants that can help you respond to leads. Train customer acquisition skills Sales teams need training to stay on top of their lead response times. They should know when to respond, when leads are ready to progress through the sales funnel, and how much time they have before leads fall off. Route leads Channel the right leads to the right sales reps. Use technology to work out which team members are available to
What is a Text Cadence?
A text cadence is a sequence of text messaging touchpoints to engage with customers and prospects via a sales engagement platform. You may think of texting as a means of communicating with loved ones through your mobile device without having to pick up the phone. But, if you work at a business that relies on sales to operate, then you may be overlooking the power of the text as a professional tool. Texting is a great way for companies to reach customers who don’t want to get on the phone and who don’t have the time or patience to check their email inbox. With texts, you can reach prospects on the go, and you can communicate in a way that is efficient and appreciated—not bothersome or intrusive. One of the keys to getting texting right for your business is mastering a text cadence. When you master a text cadence, you nail the rhythm and frequency of your texting so it draws leads in and does not push them away. The Basics of a Text Cadence Texting your potential customers can be a tricky business. You don’t want to annoy them and feel like you’re invading their time or space. But, you don’t want to be so infrequent with your texts that they forget about you, or that they think you don’t value their potential business. By mastering a text cadence, you get the texting frequency right, so you know that you’re nurturing a relationship via smartphone, but not becoming a burden for customers. Here are tips to make sure you’ve got the right texting rhythm. Understand the Preferences of Your Leads and Customers Ask your leads if they are enjoying your texts or if they are too frequent (or infrequent). Your best source of feedback is the people you are trying to communicate with. They can let you know whether your cadence is spot on—or whether you can change it a bit to fit more with their needs. Look at Data and Insights Use a solution that can analyze customer interactions to see if your current texting efforts are working. Tracks all customer activity to get insights into whether your sales efforts are working or whether you need to tweak them. Data is your best source of knowledge. By using actionable insights from numbers and information, you can ensure that you’re making concretely-informed decisions.
What is a Voice Cadence?
A voice cadence is a sequence of phone calls to a prospect or customer via a sales engagement platform to drive revenue. Phone conversations are a critical part of the sales process if done right. However, if your voice cadence is off, you can become annoying or a nuisance to potential customers. Or, on the other hand, you might be forgotten by them if you let too long go between conversations. Using the telephone for sales isn’t as simple as picking up the phone once or picking up the phone whenever you feel like it. In reality, it takes mastering a voice cadence – or the right rhythm of having phone conversations with your leads so you’re sure that you’re reaching out to them at the right frequency. Learn the Preferences of Your Customers and Leads to Master Voice Cadences. Here are some tips for mastering voice cadence, so the telephone is a sales tool you can always rely on. Ask your customers and leads off the bat how much they like to talk on the phone. Younger generations might never want to have conversations and will want to be reached via text or email. Alternatively, some leads may indicate to you times that are good for them to talk on the phone and how often they appreciate being contacted. Get the information from the horse’s mouth, and you can trust it. Use data about calls to ensure you’re doing it right. Track all customer activity at every touchpoint to know if your sales call efforts are working or if you need to scale back. Conquer Cadence allows you to build cadences directly in Salesforce. Talk to our sales team to learn more.