Category: Blog

Sales Technology has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry in the past decade. With so many tools out there, it’s hard to work out the essentials from the nice-to-haves. The phrase ‘building your sales tech stack’ implies you should be using layer upon layer of technology to enable your sales processes. We can tell you right now; it’s utterly dependent on your goals and your setup. Even the most tech-savvy sales leaders find it impossible to stay at the leading edge of sales technology; it’s a vast marketplace, and the options can be overwhelming. Who has time to review and analyse thousands of tools?

In our view, sales technology is there to empower salespeople, enhance their skills and make their lives easier. If you can automate a sales process and reduce administrative burden, therefore freeing up time for the vital relationship building that’s key to successful prospecting, then go for it! If you’ve heard from your network that you must buy this new market insight tool, even if your gut feel is you have a pretty good handle on your market research already, it’ll be three months before anyone in your team has time to own it, trust your instincts and park it for the time being.

How do we make the most of the sales technology available? How does a business decide what they need to adopt and when? Here’s our steer on the options available.

Understanding the options

CRM: Your CRM is the foundation of your tech stack, whether you choose a market leader like Salesforce or MS Dynamics or something more bespoke and focused on your specific industry. It’s ideal if you use a platform that supports collaboration with third-party apps, so your technology works together and delivers better overall visibility. Even the smaller providers offer integration across apps, supporting a better sales ecosystem.

Ideal for: everyone!

Sales and marketing automation: With systems like Marketo and HubSpot, you can drive a more valuable inbound experience and target campaigns at the right audiences, nurturing customer and prospect relationships in the right way, maximising your interactions and ensuring a better experience for everyone who interacts with your brand.

Ideal for: businesses that need to optimise their inbound efforts and drive better customer experience.

Sales engagement platforms: Products like Outreach, SalesLoft and Mailshake fall under this umbrella. Their value lies in automating sales processes and consolidating conversation intelligence from your CRM and Marketing Automation systems – streamlining processes, bridging gaps and ultimately saving your salespeople time.

Mailshake and SalesLoft support time-saving integrated dialers. Outreach allows users to manage all prospecting activities from one interface. And VanillaSoft offers queue-based lead routing saving, so your salespeople call the warmest lead next.

Ideal for: businesses with multiple campaigns who want to boost collaboration, improve productivity and hit rate.

Communication tools: If your sales strategy is outbound calling, there are many tools to support your agents, save time and some platforms, like Dialpad, provide feedback and learning as they go. Tools such as Aircall automate post-call processes and build better insights for teams directly from your CRM – reducing time spent on admin.

Ideal for: teams that make a high volume of calls, need to improve conversion rates, improve contact rates or want real-time feedback to support training.

Email management and integration: Suppose your sales teams preferred method of contact is email. In that case, there are thousands of tools available, from those that deliver and integrate insights from your CRM to your sales teams’ inboxes to those that measure email success rates and response times and even those that import email addresses from LinkedIn activity (like Contactout and Lusha). The aim is to bring intelligence and measurement to the familiar workflow of email.

Ideal for: sales teams that rely on email for outreach and need to optimise email engagement and data accuracy.

Lead generation and prospecting: There is a new wave of tools that help you identify and reach your ideal buyers. Powered by AI and machine learning, platforms such as Cognism and Growbots promise to automate the tedious and time-consuming parts of prospecting, leaving your teams to focus on closing warm leads that are more likely to buy.

Ideal for: sales teams stretched thin between premium accounts, managing existing relationships and pipeline building activities.

Sales insight and market intelligence: In a competitive marketplace bombarding decision-makers with broad sales messages won’t achieve cut-through. These tools arm salespeople with actionable insights that support intelligent sales conversations and provide accurate prospect info for your sales teams. Some tools can prioritise prospects who are ready to buy; others like UpLead act like enriched, searchable databases.

Ideal for: organisations looking to break new markets or struggling to get traction in their target market.

Never underestimate the human element of sales

Relationship building and making genuine connections is the key to successful outbound sales. No technology can replace the skills and experience of a talented and resilient sales expert. Still, it can bring you closer to your customers and help create an authentic experience that supports the excellent service you already deliver at every point in the sales cycle. Your sales tech stack has to reflect that and add value to your current setup. You can buy a billion tools, but with no process development or proper integration, there’s a fair chance you’ll create more work and unwanted distractions for your team. Equally, without an overarching sales strategy or direction, the tools won’t be worth the investment. They’ll undoubtedly connect you to more prospects, but it’s up to you to nail the qualification criteria and create value from those new audiences.

Weighing up the cost

Consider a new sales hire’s salary costs and the additional cost when you load them with sales technology that runs into thousands a month. Are they delivering higher productivity in line with the extra costs? This is all down to personal experience; some sales leaders believe the investment is worthwhile, provided you train the new hires on the technology, and the profitability will come. Others think it’s an overcomplication, and you need to give salespeople greater autonomy in this area, letting them adopt the tools they prefer, such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

In conclusion, sales technology can be incredible and often well worth the investment, but they’re not a cure-all for sales challenges. Any new tools you adopt must become a seamless part of your workflow, save time or deliver inherent value for your team. Trust your instincts. You know if a tool is likely to be welcomed and deemed valuable based on your culture.

If you need advice navigating the sales technology landscape, we can help; get in touch today.

Selecting your channels and designing your sales approach: the key to achieving cut-through in your market

We live in such a connected and always-on world, increasingly enriched with digital experiences, it’s hard to conceive that not everyone is just at the end of an email, phone, or WhatsApp message. Yet there are still people out there who don’t spend the highest proportion of their working day in a digital space. In other professions the lines are blurring, and research shows the pandemic has given rise to different channels and ways of connecting, even disrupting the sales cycles in some industries. In recent months, video and live chat have been the breakout stars. And research shows that 70% of B2B decision-makers say they are open to making new, fully self-serve or remote purchases over $50,000, and 27% would spend more than $500,000. That’s a significant shift from the perception of e-commerce as high volume, low-value sales.

Why is this important?

Choosing the right channels and tools is crucial to improving your sales numbers. In fact, understanding what your prospective buyer requires to make a decision about your products and services, empowers you to invest your time where it matters.

Keep your customers’ needs at the centre of your decisions

Imagine your primary buyers are busy hospitality professionals who spend minimal time at their desks and don’t have a wealth of time to peruse content online, they might really need the cut-through of a conversation to kick off any discussion around their buying decisions. Your plan will therefore look very different from one targeting CIOs in Fintech companies shopping for accounting software, or HR leaders procuring performance management software systems. For the latter examples, you may need to invest more time in your inbound strategy. For the former, a well-crafted script for an initial phone conversation, followed by links to engaging product information and an easy way to book a demo, might be just the ticket.

Find the parts of your sales cycle that need attention

This part can be tricky because it requires an honest assessment of how well your current strategy performs and forces you to examine undiscovered territory. Say you are limited to one or two channels, and there’s no formal funnel for your prospects; this leaves little room for optimisation and doesn’t give you much data visibility.

Where do you close most of your deals? And where do you find yourself fighting to stay in the game? If you’ve never diverged from the tried and tested phone call, how’s it working for you?

If your preferred outreach method is a phone call, are your sales team spending a lot of time aggregating follow-up content for the prospect before the conversation can proceed to the next stage? Do you find it difficult to get hold of senior decision-makers? Is it a challenge to articulate your offer over the phone?

The answers to these questions provide the insight you need to optimise and design your contact sequences. If the conversation with the key decision-maker is happening too early in the cycle, you could be squandering the opportunity to close the deal because you need to spend time generating awareness. It’s far more efficient to educate your prospects through outreach emails that give greater context to the problem you solve, or pose a challenge that sparks a conversation. Similarly, signposting to relevant video content could expedite your process, allowing your discussions to begin from a position of shared understanding.

Assess which channels and tools meet your needs:

There are numerous ways to integrate your user’s experience, from website transactions, payments processing, cross-selling, coupon codes, tracking, and maintenance, to name but a few. Whether your business sells products, services, or your sale is a more consultative, longer burn, you can create an experience that adds value at every stage of the pipeline.

Sales and Marketing integration is so important to your success in this area. When you work with your marketing department, you can use the content they create as a sales tool to attract potential buyers into the sales funnel. They can proactively help you find channels where potential customers search for answers your service provides, whether that’s through a more targeted social strategy or integrated live chat into your website. All of the above strengthens the quality of leads in the funnel, enabling you to establish strong business relationships with your buyers and gain their trust.

While this list isn’t exhaustive, it gives you an insight into which strategy might best serve your audience:

Social selling: through leveraging your networks and building relationships on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, you can start conversations, respond to comments and engage with broader discussions about the challenges affecting your prospects. On LinkedIn especially, dialogues can easily migrate from the comments sections into a more formal approach. It also makes sense to talk shop where your competitors are hanging out, conversations are already in-flight, and people expect a sales approach. Here, the relationship is central to the sale, so this channel is best-suited to longer sales cycles that require more nurturing and time investment. You can complete your entire sales cycle via social selling, but it works best when used in conjunction with other channels and you migrate to a video call or meeting.

Email: Email works best when it’s personal but not presumptuous; a well-written email with an attention-grabbing subject line can pique interest. Generic, catch-all email blasts will never have the desired effect. Still, if you can segment your audiences and trigger relevant email content based on their buyer behaviours, you boost your chances of conversion. Even innovative templates that allow for some degree of personalisation and offer a gift such as a guide or a download can nudge your prospect in the right direction and helps you earn the right to a more in-depth conversation.

Phone call or video chat: Conversation is undeniable; even the most introverted amongst us get value from human connection. Where the phone call punctuates the sales cycle is entirely up to you. For some organisations, it’s their only strategy. Without a vast pool of potential buyers or a killer elevator pitch, it’s easy to burn through a database without getting real traction. Sales are about persistence, but it’s also advisable to align your sales approach with your buyer’s needs. If your buyers prefer to research online, amp up your inbound and digital outreach ahead of making calls. If your audience is tech-savvy, deliver innovative video content and let their response drive the conversation forward.

Live chat:  Live chat is one of the most potent sales tools out there. It enables direct real-time interaction with visitors to your website, capturing their immediate needs. It’s a valuable touch-point, but it works best where there are definitive answers, or you have a mechanism to book a demo.

Every business can benefit from a solid inbound strategy: Ample opportunities for prospective customers to research marketing content, participate in live webinars to see how your products solve their problems and lead to better quality, which means more qualified leads for your sales team.

Build an integrated tech stack that supports your prospect’s journey: A data-driven sales culture means that your sales representatives and managers monitor essential information that drives your business, such as sales dates, sales cycles, customer satisfaction and outbound activities. Business intelligence tools that centralise and combine data from your CRM, LMS, telephony and VoIP systems (and integrate with marketing automation systems) offer the best opportunity to examine where you’re experiencing drop-offs in engagement. You can therefore fail fast and fix things quickly, so your approach evolves with your market.

Getting started:

Armed with a plethora of tools and insight, you can continually optimise your sales approach. But this is the real world, not everything happens in the correct order, and we understand that not every business has the resources or the time to invest in systems and software. Optimising your prospect’s experience and driving better data visibility starts with setting up some joined-up internal processes. Even simple things like well-crafted follow-up emails, customer surveys and regular communications can drive better retention and increase sales success.

If you need guidance designing your sales approach, we can help. Contact us…

Onboarding your sales team represents a real opportunity to engage and educate your new employees about your business and shape how they speak to your market. If you get it right, your new hires will be productive sooner than you think and feel raring to go. Conversely, an ineffective or unclear onboarding experience will do little to inspire confidence in their ability to deliver their targets; or, worse, cause them to lose faith in your business resulting in a hasty departure. And this is why so many organisations experience high churn: they invest time and effort in communicating their culture throughout the interview process, but it all falls off a cliff swiftly after. You easily bridge this gap with some reflection on your onboarding experience. Think about what your employees need to know to do their jobs, e.g. product knowledge, playbooks, call scripts and training materials. Now think about what they need to be genuinely successful, training, support, mentoring and a culture where they can ask questions and seek knowledge without fear of knockbacks or reprisals.

Now you may be thinking, yeah, but salespeople will sink or swim, and they’ll be thick-skinned enough to weather anything we throw at them. That’s true for some salespeople but by no means all. As we covered in our previous blog, Planning and Hiring and Outbound Sales Function, all salespeople are different and will have a range of needs. If you take the ‘sink or swim approach’, you will experience high churn, and that’s demoralising for everyone in your team because it creates a powerful barrier to building team rapport and a high-performance culture.

Don’t overwhelm new hires

There are a few schools of thought around sales training. I believe you need to upskill and arm your new hires with the product training; they’ll need to sell your services and products effectively. You don’t need to block in two or three solid weeks of intensive training, and doing that could be counterintuitive. Research reveals 84% of sales training is forgotten within the first three months. It’s a lot for people to retain and remember, and it’s the antithesis of the in-role learning that people find so helpful once they’re taking calls. It’s worth thinking about how you can break up product training, where appropriate, with other equally valuable elements of the onboarding experience.

Train outside the classroom because exposure to the entire business matters

Draw on the experiences of everyone in the business to give your new hires a real sense of your culture, your operating model and the way you conduct business. Shadowing can provide compelling insight for recruits, so invite them to marketing meetings to see the messaging and methods you use to talk to your market, which will help them when they’re talking to prospects. Expose them to account management calls and meetings so they can get a feel for how you collaborate with and support your clients. It’s also a brilliant insight into how you deal with challenges and objections in real life outside of a formal training environment. Peer-to-peer mentoring or ‘buddy systems’ can work well to support informal, on-the-job learning and give your new hire a go-to resource for questions they don’t want to bring to management or schedule meetings to discuss.

Set clear expectations and invite honest questions

As a founder and an experienced sales professional, it matters to me that new employees know that my door is open, and they can ask me questions about the business. I want to know their concerns, and I want to encourage them to be curious and seek knowledge from their managers and peers because it’s an organic and brilliant way to learn. Equally, it’s essential that I set clear expectations and communicate my vision for the business, so we start their journey on the same page.

Embrace ready to go attitudes (whilst providing support)

This might be deemed controversial, but I can only speak from my own experience. Early on in my career, I would have been very disappointed if I’d left a new sales role and hadn’t been allowed to speak to a customer on my first day. I fully understand that different organisations have different policies. Others aren’t comfortable allowing a new hire to have a customer or prospect until they’ve completed weeks, maybe even months of training.  Where possible, I would encourage you to embrace those enthusiastic types and give them all the support they need to get going as quickly as possible; it will instil confidence and achievement they cannot get from any amount of success in role-play or simulated training environments.

If you’d like to talk more about any of the topics discussed in this blog or discuss developing your sales strategy, get in touch call 0808 178 6606 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk.

Opinion Piece by Owen Richards, Founder & CEO

Over the next 12 months, we will be exploring different topics within our annual theme of ‘setting up an outbound sales team’. The first topic we will be exploring is ‘planning and hiring’ – the first step to creating an outbound sales function.

Whether you’re a Founder looking to make your first sales hire, or you’re a sales/revenue leader looking to grow your existing team, it’s important to have a robust plan in place that will help you hire the right person.

We understand recruiting sales professionals takes time and resources, looking through CVs, interviewing potential candidates and training successful candidates. Hiring a candidate without proper planning could put you back to square one, losing all the time and resources you had dedicated previously.

To help you make your first or next sales hire successful, we have developed the ‘Sales Planning & Hiring Checklist’ that consists of 23 questions you need to be asking yourself if you’re thinking about planning and hiring for your sales team.

If you’d like to talk more about any of the topics discussed in this blog or discuss developing your sales strategy, get in touch call 0808 178 6606 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk.

Asking the hard questions and avoiding the pitfalls

Ask anyone who has done it, and they’ll tell you honestly: building your sales team is not easy. The road to a high performing, well-oiled sales machine is a rocky one, filled with challenges that you might have overlooked or ones that you knew you’d have to overcome. As someone who has been through this process with my own company and helped hundreds of clients shape their sales functions, I’m confident I can help you find an easier way through it. In this series, I’m going to show you the sharp end of sales success, taking stock of what you need to think about at every stage and hopefully saving you some time (and exasperation) while providing some inspiration.

Planning is essential to success

In my experience, there are two familiar scenarios: those businesses that want to build a sales function because the business Founder has been doing most of the selling. They’re at the point where to see serious growth; they need more sales resource. Primarily resource focused on selling rather than wearing many different hats. And there are those businesses that have recently secured funding and need to nail their go-to-market strategy and get out there and sell. To do that, they’ll need a team. They are looking for a repeatable and scalable sales model that will deliver against their financial forecast and demonstrate their viability to investors.

This is where it all begins. You know you need sales resource, so what do you do next? At this point, some businesses dive right into hiring their first dedicated salesperson. It might seem logical, but without a plan, the processes, the data, researched target profiles and the right messaging, how can you give your new hire the tools they need to succeed?

Developing your Sales Playbook

It’s why your Sales Playbook is so essential; this is your blueprint for how you define and reach your market, the message you use and the processes you follow to close business. And even the most tenacious and experienced salesperson will benefit from a sales playbook that brings together the best practice you’ve developed so far. I’ve seen less experienced SDRs ramp up their productivity much more rapidly when armed with the right messages, data strategy, technology, and objection handling practices.

Failing to put in the groundwork and thinking about who you are targeting and the key benefit statements around your service is a missed opportunity and will make it far more difficult for your salesperson to sell. This is especially true if they’ve not been part of the Founder and the technical developers’ product development journey. And even if you have a very niche or defined market, where are you sourcing your data, and what channels do you plan to use to contact these people? Will you focus on speed and quantity or quality of engagement? And what will the sales process look like beyond that first engagement or conversation? Maybe you’ll decide LinkedIn outreach is the best plan, or perhaps you’d rather go for a cold calling approach. Wherever you land, you need a plan to make your chosen method work well. For example, if a customer asks about pricing reasonably early on in your conversation, what’s your stance? Do you readily share this with them? Or does it require a more in-depth consultative discussion bringing in other teams in the business? What’s the qualification criteria for passing over to, say, Business Development to advance the lead to an opportunity? And what collateral and process docs do you need to support their efforts? These are questions worth knowing the answer to because they allow for a smoother sale and a more seamless customer experience.

Not all sales professionals are made alike

Without a plan in place or a clear data strategy, you could hire an experienced salesperson and a more junior salesperson, give them each a LinkedIn Sales Navigator account and send them on their merry way. How do you know they’ll use consistent messaging? You can’t account for how much time they’ll need to spend researching ahead of a call or meeting. With no plan or foundation level messaging, they may need to spend more time tailoring more personalised approaches, with no certainty or assurance they’re going in the right direction. By which point, you’ll have to cycle back and rethink your targets and your plan.

And this neatly brings me to my next point; not all sales professionals are made alike. And how you plan to interact with your target audience hugely influences the type of person you need to hire. Suppose you’re planning high volume, top of the funnel activity. In that case, you need a very different type of sales professional than if you are expecting your hire to navigate large organisations as part of an account-based marketing approach and close a complex technical deal. It would help if you also thought about what matters most to you as a business. Do you care most about cultural fit, industry experience or sales track record? Do you need someone who is not afraid of the phone or someone who has finesse with their copywriting?

Furthermore, do you need someone who will grow a team and build your sales function out, or will they likely not get this opportunity. Each of these scenarios requires a very different kind of person.

If you’ve never hired a salesperson before, it can be tricky to match experience with what your organisation most needs to grow. It might be tempting to opt for somebody senior, but can they replicate their success in a lean startup without the resource and budget they may be accustomed to? It might be that they would prefer to spend more time on strategy and less time on delivery when you need both.

Realism can help you plan better

I’m sorry to say this, but you will fail before you succeed. Fail fast, and you will move on to bigger and better things, armed with lessons learnt.

And if/when you realise that you made the wrong call, do you know how to fix it? I’ve seen this quite a lot, where an organisation’s attempt at building out sales just isn’t working. Sometimes, it’s due to a misjudged hire, potentially poor cultural fit, or lack of experience. Sometimes it’s simply due to not enough clarity around the organisation’s sales cycle. If you haven’t accurately judged when your sales investment is likely to deliver a return on investment, you could be working blind and failing to produce enough leads to convert sales months down the line. Or you could have set the wrong expectations entirely along with other stakeholders in the business (including yourself).

Often a Founder or CEO who has brought in all the business to date unfairly expects a salesperson to replicate their success and deliver the same numbers. Without the Founder’s autonomy, experience, and depth of product knowledge, this is almost impossible. And however hard an employee tries, they cannot replicate the passion of a Founder. I know this myself, and while I expect my team to be enthusiastic and care, I don’t expect the vision for the business to take up permanent residence in their daily thoughts; that’s on me.

It’s also worth noting that a new sales hire doesn’t have anywhere near that amount of flexibility and creative control and is unlikely to be as warmly received as a CEO, which, as we all know, can open doors.

When it comes down to it, building a successful sales team requires serious reflection before you even begin. It’s my firm belief that with a realistic plan, a sensible approach to achieving your targets based on accurate sales forecasting and numbers, a well-developed playbook and a clear view of the type of salespeople you need to hire, you have every chance of success.

Oh, and one more thing; you’ll need some patience and understanding, too. Because (sorry) you’re far more likely to get it wrong before you get it right!

If you’d like to talk more about any of the topics discussed in this blog or discuss developing your sales strategy, get in touch call 0808 178 6606 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk.

Opinion Piece by Owen Richards, Founder & CEO