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Did you hit your sales targets in 2019?
If you did, congratulations!
If you didn’t, you are probably looking back at what went wrong and searching for opportunities to do better in 2020.
There’s as much to learn from what went right, as from what went wrong. It’s likely that the areas where you met your goals involved streamlining and building efficiency into your sales processes.
Where are these opportunities for improved efficiency? Automated sales processes, accurate price quoting, and streamlined communications help organizations become more productive and close deals faster.
As a Sales Operations leader, you have a lot on your plate. You are responsible for leading a successful and profitable sales team. You need to be able to connect, measure, and optimize the sales process. Let’s look at the opportunities to optimize sales operations.
How to Optimize Sales Operations
Keep it simple – and automated
One of the biggest mistakes companies make is continuing to use manual processes for configuring price quotes, managing contracts, and generating sales proposals. Complex manual processes like configuring a quote or entering information into proposal documents can lead to mistakes, miscalculations, and missed opportunities to meet the customer’s needs via upselling. The risk of human error can be detrimental to a sale and the time and effort involved wastes sales reps’ time.
To improve sales, businesses should replace manual processes with automated, simplified solutions. Investing in technology to streamline specific tasks can boost the time available for sales team members to find new customers and close deals.
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Become more efficient with CPQ
It’s common for salespeople to run into an obstacle during the proposal phase of the buyer’s journey. This phase is critical to a successful sale, yet it’s where things tend to go awry. For example, when sales reps have to calculate pricing from complex formulas, outdated spreadsheets, or lengthy price lists their time and energy are wasted and it affects the sales rep’s responsiveness to the customer. This time would be better spent nurturing relationships with customers and moving deals forward.
Businesses looking to increase productivity and reduce the number of errors in the proposal phase should opt for a CPQ solution. CPQ software, integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales, provides a professional, accurate, and pre-approved quote to clients – every time. Through a guided selling workflow, this simple tool configures the product or service at an optimized price and suggests possible items to upsell. CPQ also reduces the number of conversations required to close a sale, thus saving time and improving the buying experience.
Research by Aberdeen shows that CPQ users outperform non-CPQ users on several sales effectiveness metrics:
Communicate clearly with customers
A salesperson’s worst nightmare is contacting a customer to tell them the quote you’ve provided is not right or that the quote was not approved and needs to be rescinded. Not only does this slow down the process, but you’ve also dismantled the relationship and trust that you spent so much time cultivating. Thankfully, a CPQ solution prevents pricing errors and approval issues so customers enjoy a better experience while moving seamlessly toward signing off on the deal.
Efficiency and Productivity are Key to Sales Operations Improvement
It’s 2020 and your sales team must be top-notch. There should be no faults or gaps in sales operations that could lead to the competition getting a leg up. To ensure your sales processes are ideal, you must make every available effort to streamline and automate them. Efficiency is key. Improving efficiency increases productivity.
Invest in a CPQ solution and lead your sales team to success with a more intuitive, automated sales quote process that yields a better customer experience. Learn more about CPQ integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales at DealHub.io.
