The modern sales team of today is hardly recognizable from the one ten years ago. While the successful salesperson may still be characterized by their profound ambition, amiable perseverance, and a firm handshake, their sales toolbox has evolved significantly.

With a wide array of daily responsibilities ranging from lead discovery to closing deals, the modern salesperson is relying increasingly on digital processes and software applications to find success at every point along the sales cycle.

In the highly-competitive, high-volume sales landscape, automation is the secret recipe to success. It helps your business streamline sales & update data, and frees up time to spend on more valuable tasks.

By reducing the time spent on manual tasks, businesses can truly focus on their main aim – making sales.

Businesses and potential customers are expecting today’s sales professionals to understand their needs and connect with them on a more meaningful level.

Digital tools can help with this by providing automated solutions to pull together your people, your processes, and data all in one place.

A key tool for today’s sales team is a customer relationship management (CRM) system, which can completely streamline the whole sales cycle.

A CRM system such as Salesforce, allows a sales team to better manage information. The system allows you to store customer and prospect contact information, identify sales opportunities, manage marketing campaigns, and more – all from one central location.

So how can empowering your sales team with one of the latest CRMs lead to selling-success?

Increased performance and efficiency

According to research, some sales development teams now have an average of five technologies in their stack, so personnel can be overwhelmed with various different tasks to complete on competing systems. But with the help of the right digital tools, many of these tasks can be automated, freeing up valuable time to be spent on more meaningful tasks such as building better connections with clients and selling to qualified leads.

Sales personnel need to be on the phone, out meeting potential clients, and making meaningful and productive contact – not clicking through endless screens in order to complete trivial data entry tasks.

Traditionally time-consuming tasks such as the generation of contracts and account plans can now be automated. Automation solutions take the manual effort, guesswork, potential errors, and wasted time out of the equation.

The sales industry can be incredibly challenging as of itself, with changing customer demands, an abundance of new competitors entering the market, and a large volume of communication needed to attract and retain customers. Add to that internal pressures to perform and a constant eye on commission levels – it’s a recipe for stress and career burnout.

But by automating manual tasks, you can ensure a faster, agile, compliant, and more efficiently-run business, and a happier, more productive sales force.

Increased profitability

Digital analysis tools are driving performance and growth in companies by offering sales teams the ability to see for themselves just how well their strategies are doing. And if it’s not going so well, they can tweak and adjust their strategy as trends become apparent.

Customers’ activities tied to sales efforts give the ability to predict the behaviours of new clients – a valuable tool to drive growth in sales development.

Predictive analytics offers a valuable way for businesses to hone in on their customers, focusing on buyers that are most likely to convert into opportunities, based on their past purchasing behaviours.

But providing insight doesn’t yield results per se; sales teams need time in the day to convert potential buyers into valued customers.

Top administrative pitfalls are a time drain, and for sales functions, dirty data, manual entry (producing human errors) and dull, repetitive processes will all take teams off their core focuses. By automating as much as possible up and down the sales funnel’s processes, companies win time: and time can be turned into increased profits.

Accurate quotes, expeditiously produced drive positive bottom-line results; getting e-signatures rather than waiting for faxed contracts or even snail mail create new vigor in month-end figures; granular tracking and responses to negotiations make for a healthier income, month after month. And automating any (or preferably all) of these pushes profitability.

ANAPLAN

Anaplan offers businesses sales performance management (SPM) solutions designed to increase productivity and drive sales outcomes.

In a busy and dynamic sales environment, sales talent require visibility and accuracy in order to make the right decisions.

Sales planning: Ensuring you get your quota planning, account segmentation, and sales capacity correct is crucial for success. Anaplan’s cloud-based platform enables your sales team to effectively plan in the areas above. With this planning solution, attrition risks can also be identified and addressed ahead of time, allowing you to advance your sales goals.

Sales incentives: In the world of sales, incentives mean everything. They act as a strong motivator to yield the results your business wants. With Anaplan’s Incentive Compensation Planning and Optimization (ICPO), your business can manage and pay sales compensation with individual plans tailored to each sales rep.

Sales insights: A successful sales team is one that leverages data to drive decision-making throughout the entire organization. The Anaplan platform enables the visibility of organized and actionable data that enables predictive sales forecasting. This can help you sense changes in direction and plan accordingly.

CONGA

When it comes to intelligent business applications, Conga is a key player. Conga’s powerful enterprise applications, superior support, and industry expertise stretching over a decade have been leveraged by over 10,500 customers with 700,000 users in more than 80 countries.

Through the delivery of a highly intelligent suite of digital automated contract and document solutions, Conga helps teams across all industries move toward true digital transformation.

Using Conga’s solutions to streamline traditionally time-consuming manual tasks, while also eliminating friction points that can slow business, adds significantly to productivity and efficiency.

Among Conga’s extensive product catalogue are solutions for:

Contract automation: With Conga’s contracts solutions, organisations of all sizes can solve the key challenges which arise in the contract process. Some of Conga’s key contract automation capabilities include a robust repository to store, manage, and track all contracts, heightened security controls, the automatic generation and emailing of reports, and analytics which help identify areas of friction in your contract activities.

Document automation: Conga Composer is one of the most popular applications on the Salesforce AppExchange and helps sales teams automate document generation to improve efficiency and productivity. With this solution, businesses can build and distribute sophisticated documents directly from Salesforce in just a few clicks. The company also offers Conga Octiv for the ability to collaborate and work on documents online.

Conga’s suite of solutions enables companies to harness the power of AI. Conga Contracts is just one solution that uses this ground-breaking technology to help contract managers ensure better compliance and help to mitigate risks.

Conga also provides a range of other tools to automate documents and contracts, such as data management and eSignature.

To find out more about Conga, or to contact a representative, please click here.

XACTLY

For five years running, Xactly has been named a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Sales Performance Management.

This sales performance platform leverages AI and predictive analytics to power your sales planning and management.

The platform provides businesses with the data needed to monitor and assess your sales team’s performance. With this real-time data, companies can improve problem areas, reduce staff turnover, and ultimately make more sales. Some features from Xactly’s wide range of solutions include:

Live incentive compensation insights: In order to address the productivity problem of today, businesses must move away from the traditional salary economy to the performance economy. Xactly’s Insights solution uses big data to provide your business with live insights into incentive compensation. Through the platform, you can create competitive compensation plans by using empirical data and intuitive technology; increase sales performance by using benchmarking data to coach other team members; and attract and retain top performers by ensuring you are compensating competitively for your industry.

AI and machine learning to monitor sales reps: This year, Xactly announced new predictive intelligence capabilities to identify potential sales rep attrition. From their Xactly Insights dashboard, sales leaders can monitor the performance of each sales rep, receiving proactive notifications when a team member is at risk. This is especially valuable for enterprises with hundreds of reps who struggle to keep track of each individual’s performance.

NICE

This sales performance management platform provides businesses with a full range of tools to help manage sales compensation, administer quotas and territories, mobilize and coach sales reps, and analyze performance. Some features include:

Automation of your sales operations: NICE’s solution allows you to automate sales compensation such as managing quotas, handling disputes, and executing payroll. Through automation, a sales team can speed up processes and vastly improve operational efficiency.

Performance dashboards: NICE’s solution enables you to analyze performance based on near-real-time data to gain insights into how well your team is performing, and if your compensation plans align with your business goals. With such detailed insights, you can adjust your strategy, create smart plans, and continuously work on improving sales performance.

Sales coaching: To better manage your sales team and promote the desired behaviour, NICE enables the tracking of top performers. From this you can identify sales professionals who may require coaching, develop a best practices library, and assign improvements to be tracked and monitored. These coaching KPIs can also be linked to an incentive plan, ensuring the improvement of productivity and growth of selling success.

*Some of the companies featured in this article are commercial partners of Tech Wire Asia