In today’s competitive and over-saturated landscape, it has become increasingly challenging to meet B2B sales goals. Over 65% of sales reps reportedly did not meet their quota this year. But don’t let that statistic discourage you, as there is a way forward. Continue reading if you want to find out how to improve your B2B sales process.
In short, the 5 steps to improving your B2B sales performance are:
- Purchase the right database
- Invest in a CRM
- Create an SDR team
- Ensure sales-marketing alignment
- Dig into your current customer database
The Essential Guide to Sales Pipeline Management
Learn our strategic approach to tracking prospects throughout the pipeline, forecasting revenue, and closing more deals.
1. Purchase the right database
A sales prospect list is a database of potential prospects, their contact information, and other relevant details to qualify them — including their job title, company size, and industry sector.
Because it’s time-consuming to gather prospect data manually, many business leaders purchase a list from a data vendor. However, you need to be selective with which data vendor you partner with.
Did you know poor sales data wastes more than 25% of a salesperson’s time? That’s why we recommend partnering with a data vendor who will verify each data point manually to ensure utmost accuracy. That way, your salespeople can focus on closing deals instead of chasing dead leads.
EBQ Tip: We offer B2B data services, fueling sales pipelines with verified sales data. To ensure that your custom sales data is accurate, our data technicians search industry-leading databases, run results through our proprietary software, and manually verify your sales data.
2. Invest in a CRM
We’ve encountered many organizations struggling to align their entire system because they were working out of a magnitude of independent spreadsheets. This caused confusion and frustration, as no one could track their progress and results in real-time.
We recommend investing in customer relationship management (CRM), such as Salesforce. Not only can it keep track of every customer touchpoint, but it can also automatically create reports and dashboards for better visibility — which allows your sales leaders to make better data-driven decisions down the line.
Case Study: Service Dogs Alabama is a nonprofit that recently implemented Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud. After properly implementing the platform with an expert’s help, they now feel more confident in drilling down on data to uncover improvement opportunities.
3. Create an SDR team
Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) are responsible for the first half of the sales cycle. They need to cold call prospects and follow up on inbound leads to score sales appointments for their Account Executives.
We know what you’re thinking: How does creating a separate team improve my sales process?
Today, more than 50% of sales reps admit they do not take the time to research their prospects before reaching out. However, prospects expect you to leverage modern sales and marketing tools to craft personalized messages that speak directly to their pain points.
An SDR team alleviates that need by prospecting on their sales rep’s behalf; they have the time to qualify each lead, nurture them appropriately, and follow up on each prospect.
EBQ Tip: Can’t afford to build out an internal sales development team yourself? Consider partnering with an appointment-setting expert. In fact, studies show that you can lower customer acquisition costs using an SDR-as-a-service.
4. Ensure sales-marketing alignment
Organizations that lack sales and marketing alignment have reported a 4% decline in revenue year over year. In other words, companies that do not align their sales and marketing will slowly lose money over time.
Often, marketing leaders fail to realize that marketing is actually a sales function since the goal is generating leads that will lead to sales.
Therefore, it is pertinent that you take immediate steps to align your sales and marketing efforts sooner than later. Some actions you can take include:
- Aligning your buyer persona
- Facilitating better training
- Meeting regularly to discuss progress
- Utilizing customer feedback
Leading sales and marketing leaders who report better alignment saw:
- Their organization became 67% more effective at closing deals
- Their marketing department generated more than twice as much revenue
- Their organization achieved faster revenue and profit growth
5. Dig into your current customer database
Leading sales managers report that one-off sales only contribute to ⅓ of their top revenue source — trailing behind recurring sales, upsells, and cross-sells.
Translation? You need a dedicated customer service team that can dig deeper into your current customer database to uncover upsell opportunities. After all, it takes less money to keep a paying customer than to acquire a new one.
EBQ Tip: To see the upselling process in action, check out Cross-sell vs Upsell in SaaS: 5 Proven Tactics and More.
The Essential Guide to Sales Pipeline Management
Learn our strategic approach to tracking prospects throughout the pipeline, forecasting revenue, and closing more deals.
TLDR; How to improve sales performance
In short, you will improve your sales performance if you treat sales as an organization-wide effort.
The five recommended steps are:
- Purchase the right database
- Invest in a CRM
- Create an SDR team
- Ensure sales-marketing alignment
- Dig into your current customer database
Curious to see how you can improve your sales revenue cycle? We offer a dedicated part-time Revenue Cycle Consultant — no matter how big your program is. Contact us to find out how our Consultants can help improve your overall sales performance.
