Sales Hacker CEO and Funnelholic Explain Sales Acceleration Technology’s Rapid Rise
Automated technology has drastically improved the capabilities of marketing, finance and human resources teams.
Yet for whatever reason, many sales organizations still haven’t taken full advantage of this important trend.
The current sales process is incredibly inefficient. One of our Lead Response Management studies determined that only 27% of leads are ever contacted.
Can you imagine working in your supply chain and boasting to your manager that for every 10 customers, only three received their deliveries?
When it comes to sales lead follow-up, this alarming statistic represents the status quo.
This is changing as sales acceleration technology reshapes the sales process.
XANT recently hosted the Sales Acceleration Technology Summit, featuring industry experts showcasing and discussing the most popular, groundbreaking sales technology.
In one session, Max Altschuler, CEO of SalesHacker.com, and Craig Rosenberg, founder of Funnelholic Media, discussed what they believed was fueling the sudden, rapid growth of sales technology.
Here’s a brief summary of their thoughts:
Prevalence of the cloud
The first catalyst for sales acceleration technology growth should be fairly obvious.
The development of the cloud, or software and services that run on the Internet, has done wonders for both personal consumption and business operations.
For one, the cloud has empowered a mobile workforce. Mobile devices and applications allow sales reps to keep in touch with prospects anywhere at any time.
In the sales industry, immediacy and adaptability aren’t just useful skills, they’re necessary for survival.
The second benefit of the cloud is the ability to create simple, easy-to-use applications that can integrate naturally within an organization’s current sales process.
While traditional client-server applications were bulky and difficult to implement, newer web-based applications are light and customizable, accommodating the preferences of today’s busy buyers.
Sales professionals are rarely looking to overhaul their entire process. Cloud applications allow for specific fixes to enhance the experience of the rep, instead of diverting it elsewhere.
The power of specificity
Specific solutions outperform generic ones.
After all, if you were suffering from a heart condition, you’d rather meet with a cardiologist than just a family doctor.
One-size-fits-all solutions are being replaced with specific applications designed to solve specific problems.
For example, you can find applications that focus on email solutions, dialing technology and sales hiring.
This is important because salespeople are not jacks-of-all-trades. As Max put it, they are an inch wide and a mile deep.
Sales professionals prefer to focus on what they do best.
If you make them think about too many different things at once, they can’t concentrate on the most important strategies and sales activities.
The expansion of data
The growth of wearable technology and the Internet of Things, coupled with social media and other online databases, add up to a deluge of data.
According to IBM, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. In fact, 90% of the data that exists in the world today was created in the past two years.
Data is more accessible than ever before.
All of this information has led to the creation of technology that can manage and analyze it in real time, providing valuable insights into customer behavior.
Big data has opened the floodgates of predictive analytics, which offers significant business value to sales professionals, like knowing which prospects to contact at the right time.
According to both Max and Craig, sales professionals are very excited by the prospect of increased insight into their ideal customer base.
Instead of building lists around job titles and company size, sales organizations can use data-backed applications to get more granular and find better indicators of those most likely to be in a position to buy.
Advancements in data science fuel powerful sales technologies that provide an almost unfair advantage to the sales teams using them.
High-performing sales teams are 4 times more likely to use predictive analytics than underperforming teams, according to the “2015 State of Sales” report produced by Salesforce Research.
To discover how sales acceleration technology can improve your sales results, get the free ebook below.
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Image credit: Chris Ford