Sales has changed in many sectors. Solutions are becoming more complex and so is the Decision Making Unit (DMU). This may mean even longer decision-making trajectories, longer sales cycles, greater advance preparation and more discussion. This can definitely impact your sales results.
A particular motivation for sales managers to get started with HubSpot CRM is therefore the ability to gain better insight into their target market.
What are the key pitfalls?
- It’s not easy for sales people to identify who the stakeholders are within customer organisations and to source information on the deal’s impact on their goals and challenges. Influencing the whole DMU demands a thorough understanding of each individual stakeholder, plus the tools to reach these people with the right message. Unfortunately, this is often well out of the sales team’s reach.
- In addition, sales people spend on average of around 30 hours a month hunting down the right content to share, despite the fact that approximately two-thirds of brochures and presentations tend to hang around gathering dust.
Which success factors play a role in improving this at your organisation?
Harness the combined power of sales and marketing in a Sales Enablement strategy. Set goals together and use automation (Marketing Automation), content and marketing data to accelerate the closure of deals.
- Develop content to reach stakeholders within the customer organisation
One essential component of a Sales Enablement strategy is content. No content, no insight. Marketing content helps your sales people influence your prospect’s stakeholders, even without direct access to budget holders and decision-makers. 78% of the people in a procurement role indicate that sales people have no relevant examples or case studies to share with them – clearly a major omission. If marketing can facilitate up-to-date information for sales, it’s quicker and easier for the latter to use content within the sales process. - Identify interesting leads who are accessing your content
Using Marketing Automation, you can then automatically open up the right leads to your sales team at the right time, improving the timing of your follow-up. - Develop insight into prospect behaviour
Marketing data offers insight into the behaviour of prospects, such as who visited your online channels, or who downloaded that case study. These insights lead to better understanding of your customer’s stakeholders and why they would ‘bring in’ your product or service to solve a problem. This helps you develop your value propositions for continuous improvement. Sales colleagues spend less than 18% of their time in your CRM system. But as soon as they recognise that such insights are available and can help them meet targets, this will have a positive impact on adoption of the CRM.
