Hieu Blog

An upcoming webinar hosted by InsideView and Aberdeen Group, entitled “Value Selling with Sales Intelligence: The Key to Sales Survival in a Downturn Economy,” will address the four key sales intelligence requirements necessary to spark sales productivity. The free webinar, scheduled for April 7, will provide end-users with an overview of Aberdeen’s report findings, as well as highlight the best practices and requirements for success that emerged in the research. The webinar content will touch on the following crucial areas:

• Quality: Data quality is at the heart of sales intelligence initiatives. In the end, the usefulness of prospect and account information is contingent upon the reliability of the source. Poor data quality can lead to a lot of wasted time and effort on the part of sales representatives. Seventy-four percent of survey respondents indicated that improving the quality of leads in the sales pipeline is a top-two strategic action for alleviating business challenges. By focusing resources on initiatives designed to improve lead quality, not quantity, organizations are putting their sales representatives in a position to succeed from the outset.
• Readiness: The success or failure of any sales initiative oftentimes depends on the readiness of the organization at the most fundamental level. Companies must ensure that the proper processes, procedures and organizational support are in place to minimize the number of bottlenecks that can stunt productivity. For instance, 81 percent of Best-in-Class companies, compared to 65 percent of all others, have formalized and documented sales processes in place. Formal and documented sales processes that mirror the organization’s sales methodology are essential to sales operations. Organizations that do not have formalized sales processes in place risk errors or inconsistencies on the part of sales representatives and ultimately reduce the amount of time reps spend actually selling.
• Relevance: Organizations as a whole, particularly within sales, are already burdened by information overload. The sheer number of emails alone can overwhelm representatives who are only concerned with the account and prospect information that matters to them. The ability to gather the information that pertains to key industries or company sizes, for instance, allows representatives to focus only on those things that enable their own success. As a result of this strategy, Best-in-Class companies are 1.6 times more likely than Laggards to effectively map their products and services to the prospect’s business challenges.
• Delivery: As long as email remains the top collaborative technology for sharing and dispersing information, sales representatives will be burdened with searching for relevant information. An added challenge for organizations is the fact that dispersing key information via email is a bad process that does not ensure repeatable success. After all, the information shared between employees via email is not visible to others within the organization. The key to the success of any sales intelligence initiative is ensuring that representatives get the information they need in a way that is unobtrusive and within their daily workflow.