3 Most Important Questions Faced by Sales Teams Answered

How do sales teams deal with poor sales performance?

What steps are essential in solving the age-old problem of struggling sales reps?

Sales is a high-pressure, fast-moving area of business. Working with an ideal buyer persona in order to identify your target audience and creating a great landing page for your outbound marketing efforts is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the lead generation process. It’s no surprise that sales teams have to deal with multiple challenges during their hunt for a qualified lead in the lead generation process. Sales reps today must adapt to a multichannel approach and build value for a prospective customer before they can transition a sales lead to a customer. With inbound sales and marketing strategies going mainstream in acquiring B2B leads, it is important to recognize opportunities to re-engineer processes around sales best practices. Here are three key questions which sales teams have to face in their continuous inbound lead generation efforts to evolve and develop a smooth sales operation.

Are Sales and Marketing Aligned?

MarketingProfs highlighted that companies with aligned sales and marketing departments saw 38% higher sales win rates. Implementing a collaborative and cooperative approach to align your marketing team and sales efforts can make all the difference to the success of an enterprise. According to HubSpot, organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing teams experience 36% higher customer retention rates. The traditional sales and marketing tactics no longer work for the modern B2B marketer, it is essential for sales teams to collaborate with marketing to be able to effectively strategize for different segments of the target audience. To align both teams when generating leads, it's critical for both to consider, first and foremost, the customer journey.

Is There Enough Online Engagement to Support Sales Efforts?

Web traffic and online visibility, in general, is seen as the job of the marketing team but plays a massive role in the overall success of the business. This means that sales of many businesses will be greatly impacted based on how many people your advertisements are able to reach. Sales need qualified lead after qualified lead i.e., a steady stream and thus website traffic, social media clicks, shares and e-book downloads are vital content marketing assets to enable lead generation marketing. Sales teams need to be in touch with the social media lead generation and content marketing strategy and align it with their overall demand generation and lead generation strategy to see things from the perspective of potential customers. A B2C or B2B lead generation technique can also include email marketing, content syndication, a lead ad or Facebook ad and various other inbound marketing and outbound lead generation efforts. Online engagement between businesses and clients through media platforms is what helps sales teams to build trust and form a long-lasting relationship with customers or a new lead to enable lead nurturing. Make the most of your next thought leadership blog post with advanced lead management tools or get help from an agency that provides lead generation services.

How Are Sales Teams Incorporating Data Analytics and Technology into Their Strategy?

The sales process requires qualifying each potential lead into a sales lead. Sales enablement CRMs and technology play a vital role in determining if a potential lead is truly interested in the offered product. Sales technology gives a better understanding of a prospect’s engagement with the advertised material. Predictive analytics is the mainstream as sales reps simply can’t afford to waste time on non-essential sales activities or catering to prospects that are not ideal. Salesforce’s State of Marketing report found that 79% of high-performing teams currently use predictive analytics. Well-designed analytics programs deliver significant top-line and margin growth by guiding sales teams to better decisions, the next quality lead, and an improved conversion rate.

The next generation of sales teams are using the growth of data analytics and artificial intelligence to get a significant edge in their B2B lead gen and sales efforts with the latest lead generation tool. Once slow-moving and driven by intuition, data and new analytical techniques have introduced greater rigor, efficiency, and insight from lead generation software. Keep these questions in mind while developing the sales training plan for your team and make sure you don’t forget to test and try out new strategies for your next lead generation campaign to create a robust lead generation funnel.