How Prescriptive Sales Activities Optimize Your Sales Process

HD Data You know who you want to reach. But what is the best way to contact your leads and prospects?

Sales development reps are often unsure, so they bombard their managers with questions:

  • When should I call?
  • What should I say?
  • When should I email?
  • What should I say in my emails?
  • How many times should I follow up?

With all this confusion, managers sometimes feel they have no choice but to let each person do their own thing and hope that qualified opportunities and closed deals come out the other end.

Individual reps end up relying on their best guesses and past experiences to manage their contacting strategy.

Things reps often say and think

“It’s offensive to call business leaders after 5 p.m. and call more than five times in a certain period,” you may hear one rep say.

Another rep may strongly believe, “It’s best to only send emails as email is the only communication method decision makers respond to.”

And then there’s my favorite: “Nobody listens to voicemail, so why even bother leaving a voice message.”

XANT research reveals that 71% of leads are wasted and it’s not hard to see why.

With each sales development rep pursuing their own strategy and with no systems in place, reps find themselves forgetting about tasks that were put in a CRM or on a paper on their desk — and valuable leads slip through the cracks. 

Let the Finger-Pointing Festival begin

Marketing argues with sales about the amount of time and energy invested in the marketing spend as the limited reports show reps are all over the board on their follow-up strategy.

In some cases, organizations take over 40 hours to respond to web leads, when in reality, they should be responding within five minutes.

Customers complain about a lack of professionalism as reps struggle through elevator pitches and misspell words in poorly written emails.

Stop the insanity

Technology that combines the power of prediction with prescription can solve these common sales challenges through the application of advanced data science.

First, predictive lead scoring identifies the leads and prospects most likely to buy.

Then, prescriptive sales activities take it one step further by prescribing the right sales activity at the right time.

For example, depending on the prospect, an email might be the most appropriate contact method — with a specific message that will resonate with that particular buyer.

Prescriptive sales technology also determines the optimal number of phone calls over a certain period of time based on contact rate and conversion rate data.

XANT research shows that when companies adopt prescriptive solutions, they can increase close rates and shorten the sales cycle by up to 20%.

Leads stop falling through the cracks, marketing spend is optimized, and reps follow best practices to ensure sales success.

Learn more about prescriptive sales activities in the free ebook below. 

A Day in the Life of a Top-Performing Sales Rep

Free eBook: Cold Calling and Sales Prospecting: A Day in the Life of a Top-Performing Sales Rep

In this eBook, we invite you to tour a day in the life of a top performing rep to see how your team can can achieve top performance.

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