Professional services firms are rarely referred to as having “sales organizations.” But we can learn a lot from those that have them.
If sales organizations want to succeed, they must employ a combination of sales technologies. Using such technologies allows sales and marketing people to gather, and share, more information about their prospects and clients and gives them more ammunition to get the job done, according to Aberdeen’s report Sales Intelligence: Preparing for Smarter Selling.
A recent survey of 528 organizations by Aberdeen Group found that Best-in-Class companies used sales technologies sometimes twice as much as companies that lagged behind the industry average for sales. Best-in-Class companies are firms in which 52% of sales reps are achieving quota, time spent searching for company and contact information was reduced 9% year over year, and the sales cycle was reduced by 5% year over year.
The greatest difference in technology use was with dashboards and other visualization tools: 67% of Best-in-Class companies used performance dashboards, while only 33% of Laggard organizations used them. Such dashboards allow reps and sales managers to visually identify high-probability selling opportunities.
Laggard organizations also trailed greatly in the use of knowledge management solutions such as CRM, which allow sales teams to collect and share internal best practices, external intelligence sources, and account-specific data. Seventy-four percent of Best-in-Class companies used it, while only 56% of Laggard organizations did.
David Taber, author of Salesforce.com Secrets of Success: Best Practices for Growth and Profitability, agrees that CRM tools are key to a sales organization’s success. When I interviewed him on How a CRM System Can Improve Your Sales Efforts, he said CRMs enable partners and associates to better communicate information about clients and prospects. The result is better sales conversations and better handling of clients.
While there’s no single silver bullet technology for effective sales, it’s clear that organizations must use some technology and ideally a combination of a few.
What do you think this means for those of us in the world of services?
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