Categories: Sales Coaching Tools | Sales Leadership | Sales Enablement Technology | Sales Productivity
With a new year comes a clean slate – our once-annual fresh start. For revenue team leaders, today’s decisions will help define where the company ends up in twelve months. As budgets get approved and your annual kickoff approaches, give your organization an edge by making sure your plan for the coming year incorporates digital tools and technology that drive results and power today’s top teams.
Recent survey research examined the mindsets of B2B technology sales professionals, collecting data from across diverse roles, ages, and company sizes. One question asked respondents, “What would help you and your organization have greater sales success?”
The number one answer: Sales Tools, Platforms & Software (44%).
Keep this reality top-of-mind as you identify and gather the building blocks for executing your strategy. Revenue team members are hungry for sales technology and platforms that can be harnessed for success. They’re eager to reach professional goals, determined to help their organization meet this year’s goals, and confident that the right digital tools will support these efforts in their everyday selling activities. Help your team step up their game by providing them with tech tools built to boost performance, keep morale high, and sustain long-term success.
Here are three tools elite leaders are leveraging to gain a competitive edge in the new year:
1. Integrated Deal Management Tools
The components of your selling motion are vitally important: your buyer-focused message, consistent qualification approach, framework for negotiating value – each is intentionally constructed and refined with careful consideration. Ensure each critical piece of your desired selling method is incorporated at the opportunity level and where reps spend most of their time: in the CRM.
Integrated technology like Opportunity Manager offers revenue teams a powerful new tool for accelerating adoption and achieving consistency. Applying your key sales methodologies in Salesforce allows sellers to capture the outputs of key conversations, map complex buying committees, and use guided assessments to determine the best strategy for deal progression.
Technology that integrates your desired selling method helps create desirable outcomes at every level of your organization. Sales reps benefit from clear, actionable directives that fit into their existing sales rhythm. Managers gain coachable metrics and visibility that frame one-on-ones and opportunity review sessions. Leaders are offered a unique line of sight into sales activities and their ROI.
Learn more about how Opportunity Manager can help you drive and prove clear results from your sales strategy.
2. Continuous Learning Platforms
Cognitive research shows that people forget an average of 90% of new information within one week of learning it. Without reinforcement, the skills and concepts you address in your yearly kickoff training are most likely to fade, eventually evaporating altogether. This forgetting phenomenon is a common reason why sales initiatives run out of steam.
Get out in front of this dynamic with a plan to drive and reinforce learned behaviors all year long. Tap into a continuous learning platform that harnesses new best practices in education by delivering content aligned with how today’s revenue team members want to learn: on demand, in diverse digital formats, and in bite-sized chunks that allow for daily refreshers – even within a salesperson’s daily schedule.
Whether you have an established enablement team or not, your sales force can benefit from a digital learning curriculum. For start-ups or smaller teams without enablement, the goal may be centered on establishing consistent processes and selling standards. For mid-sized or larger enterprise teams, learning goals can be tailored to driving productivity and enablement objectives at scale.
Learn more about Force Management’s Ascender learning platform offerings for small teams and enterprise teams.
3. Community Engagement Platforms
Hybrid and remote workforce patterns are now etched as norms. People still want to connect and convene, but many networking events and professional groups have migrated into virtual spaces.
No one understands the grind of pushing towards a quota like other salespeople. Help your team stay connected by providing access to development opportunities with like-minded professionals and experts like the ones provided in the Ascender Community. Interaction and engagement through workshops, discussion forums, and chats with experts can provide opportunities to explore ideas in depth with other career-driven professionals.
Investing in professional development for your workforce can help them to feel more supported, driving great efficacy, improving morale, and renewing commitment to the shared goals of your team. Learn more about the live events, peer learning, and community forums provided by Ascender.
Hit the Ground Running
Driving success in the new year starts now. Shape the coming year by setting your team up with tools that accelerate the adoption of your initiative, reinforce the skills and learning most critical for performance, and codify the behaviors that will lead to success. Consistency is the name of the game; harness the power of technology to drive a consistent approach that fuels repeatable revenue this year and beyond.
We’ve outlined more information for leaders on current trends in the selling environment and the actions they can take to grow revenue this year in our latest eBook, Command What’s Next: A Guide to Sales Evolution for Leaders. Download your free copy today.
