By Ramon Nuñez, Founder & CEO, LiveHive, Inc.
No matter what you’re selling in today’s online, connected world, if you haven’t adjusted your selling approach, you risk not only longer sales cycles but also missed opportunities.
With instant access to information about products and services, the ability to quickly and easily compare pricing and to purchase goods anywhere and anytime via the Internet, today’s prospects are more informed than ever before. Dubbed by Forrester as the “Age of the Customer,” this shift of power away from sellers and moving toward customers has forced companies to rethink their selling methodology.
By Ramon Nuñez, Founder & CEO, LiveHive, Inc.
No matter what you’re selling in today’s online, connected world, if you haven’t adjusted your selling approach, you risk not only longer sales cycles but also missed opportunities.
With instant access to information about products and services, the ability to quickly and easily compare pricing and to purchase goods anywhere and anytime via the Internet, today’s prospects are more informed than ever before. Dubbed by Forrester as the “Age of the Customer,” this shift of power away from sellers and moving toward customers has forced companies to rethink their selling methodology.
Sales acceleration and sales automation technologies have rapidly emerged to fill the need and pioneer new processes. However, before businesses can reap the value of these solutions, they must first identify and address the top three criteria that will help them succeed in an online world.
#1. Fast, Accurate Prospect Ranking
To seize an opportunity, you first must know where it exists. You want to go where the fish are biting. Many solutions have become available that can track when you open your emails or view documents. While these are helpful, a sales engagement platform can provide even deeper and more comprehensive analytics that automatically rank prospects according to their level of engagement.
While it’s nice to know that a proposal has been opened, how valuable would it be to be instantly alerted when it is forwarded? And given the profile of the new recipient? Perhaps it’s your prospect’s boss, or someone else with purchasing power. By leveraging those real-time and actionable insights, guess what prospect immediately jumps to the head of your pipeline? Analytics will play a key role in obtaining and mining this data for the intelligence to best respond to a buyer’s needs and interests.
#2. A Seamless Mobile Experience
It is a given that you must be able to reach out to customers at their precise moment of interest to get the competitive edge, but you must also ensure the quality of the mobile experience. Any sales acceleration technology that you choose to improve customer engagement and shorten your sales cycle must be just as easily and as seamlessly accessible to you via mobile as it is sitting down at your desk. At any given time in any given place, you should be able to transparently and effortlessly access all of your key systems, so you and your sales team can create the best mobile culture.
#3. Works Easily With Existing, Everyday Tools
According to SiriusDecisions, the average length of the sales cycle has increased 24% over the past two years. Why are sales cycles getting longer? Sales reps are spending too much time on non-core selling activities. Sales reps are always searching for ways to improve their productivity.
When you consider sales acceleration tools to help you work better in an online world, ease of integration within your existing workplace tools — such as email and CRM — must be a priority. Otherwise, you are adding technology that takes energy away from your core selling activities. Without seamless integration, you add to your non-core selling workload, lengthen the cycle, and lower your chance of closing the deal.
The sales process has gone through a monumental metamorphosis. Self-informed buyers have transformed the sales process, and an increase in inside sales has made face-to-face selling less and less common, making it critical to understand a prospect’s engagement with shared materials and communications.
All of these changes are driving the sales acceleration market, which is projected to reach more than $30 billion by 2017, and spurring a plethora of new tools for customer engagement.
However, to spend time most effectively within this new selling environment — and shorten the sales cycle — sales professionals must first ensure that they have addressed the above three criteria when evaluating sales acceleration technologies.
Ramon Nuñez is CEO and co-founder of LiveHive, Inc., a software startup whose cloud-based sales engagement platform provides real-time intelligence based on customer engagement with digital content. Nuñez’s career has spanned multiple sectors of the technology industry, including 15 years in sales. For nearly two decades he has served as CEO or Chairman of both private and publicly traded companies. Prior to founding LiveHive in 2011, Ramon held positions as CEO, MetaLINCS; and CEO, IKOS Systems.
