Modern sales operations revolve around data. McKinsey recently reported that companies which adopt data-driven B2B sales strategies generally see revenue lift of 15 to 25 percent.
Access to information, however, won’t close more deals on its own. While data can give you insights into your prospects and others operating in your space, the key is to make your data work for you. This can be a challenge, especially when different members of your sales team have different approaches to adopting tech.
CRM platforms serve as ground zero for information surrounding sales prospects. In this sense, CRMs are powerful unto themselves, but value-adding integrations have introduced new features impacting sales significantly. Here are three such integrations that simplify sales workflows and automate tasks to create efficient pipelines.
Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ)
Modern price quotes can get complex in a hurry. With physical products, factors like order size, supply chain considerations and customization options can make for a tricky matrix.
Even SaaS pricing models have made quoting a tough task, due to the numerous parameters that sales must account for. For instance, some companies combine usage-based pricing with seat licenses to create complex quoting scenarios. Prospects, meanwhile, demand fast quotes.
CPQ software helps sales teams overcome these challenges by plugging into CRMs and extracting product, pipeline, and deal-specific information. The result is a smooth quoting process that circumvents the need to wait for approvals. More importantly, sales executives can standardize the quoting process, ensuring their teams do not leave money on the table. All deal data is therefore centralized and standardized, with CPQ plugging seamlessly into deal flows.
DealHub reports a case where its CPQ platform grew Sendoso’s average deal size by 15% and reduced errors by 95%, while accelerating sales cycles. DealHub plugged into Sendoso’s CRM and other software to reduce quoting time and boost CX. The result is greater confidence among mid-market and enterprise buyers, giving Sendoso the results it wants from its targets.
Video-based Nurture
Video platforms have been around for ages, and you might think there isn’t much to be improved. Turns out, video has evolved to play a significant role in the sales pipeline, and several platforms are merely scratching at the surface. While there aren’t many advances waiting to be unlocked in video formatting, the abilities to personalize and measure engagement offer interesting use cases.
Modern video platforms for sales teams are plugging into CRMs, giving teams the data they need and boosting conversions with action-oriented performance tracking. For instance, most video platforms allow sales teams to insert a call-to-action (CTA) within their videos and track conversion rates by automatically measuring clicks on those buttons.
Personalization is a necessity in modern sales, and video platforms are taking this to the next level. By augmenting CRM data with video creation, sales reps can record videos within their CRM or sales dashboard in a few clicks. You can even use analytics data over time to create effective conversion templates.
For instance, you can create templates specifying where your reps must add their videos to boost conversions. Popular video creation platform Vidyard cites a few statistics as proof of video’s power to boost sales. Vidyard plugs into Salesforce, allowing reps to create videos and track engagement from their dashboards. The company reports that among reps who use this integration, some 40% of all sales conversations can be directly attributed to video.
The travel management company Corporate Traveler realized $42 million in new business in six months after adopting video in its pipeline. These results were driven not just by the engagement factor video brings, but also by the analytics Vidyard offers users.
Lead Enrichment
How can you get to know your leads better? To what extent does each fit your ideal customer profiles? What’s the best way to decide which prospects deserve the most attention at any given moment?
Few salespeople would say no to additional data about their leads that could help them prioritize opportunities and close more deals. Given the rise of data privacy concerns, though, teams have to be extra careful about where they source their data from. This is where alternative data providers enter the picture. By scraping publicly available data about your prospects and enriching it with further demographic and technographic data, you gain a well-rounded picture of your prospects.
For instance, what if you could view comments and ratings that a company’s employees left on product review platforms? You could use any pain points mentioned in these posts to propose a solution. Elsewhere, social media platforms such as LinkedIn are invaluable to B2B sales, thanks to the wealth of data they offer. However, these datasets are tough to parse manually. Lead enrichment tools are making this task much easier for sales teams, giving them all the insights they need.
While most enrichment platforms cater to a wider audience than sales (investment managers, for example), sales teams are finding these alternative datasets invaluable when augmenting them with existing CRM data.
Lead enrichment platform Coresignal is a good example. The platform offers several sets of alternative data, from funding and headcount trends to product reviews and technographic data. While you may not close a deal solely based on these datasets, plugging them into your CRM will give you a healthier pipeline and better ways to close your deals.
Analytics, Automation and Augmentation Are the Way Forward
Data exists aplenty in sales. The trick is to use it wisely to boost lead conversion rates. The solutions highlighted in this article go a long way towards helping you achieve this goal by plugging into your CRM to give you a better picture of your prospect. Back these up with effective sales playbooks, and you’ll realize higher conversions.
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