SalesReps aren’t selling 64% of the time.

What are they doing?

Salespeople end up spending the majority of their time on non-revenue generating activities. Most sales reps spend the majority of their time utilizing sales enablement tools and responding to emails. Even though companies spend billions of dollars on their sales team, only half of them succeed in generating revenue. Anyone in sales knows that failing to adequately immerse yourself in the industry, buyer, or problem set of their prospects leads to nowhere.

The key to closing a deal is to understand your target account and the individual buyers inside the buying committee. Sales agents, regardless of company size, rely on data to make better decisions and understand their prospects’ actions. Sales professionals rely on self-reported data from CRM software for all of their information. It’s possible that relying solely on those statistics won’t be adequate to achieve broader goals. Sales reps require knowledge that will assist them in becoming more aligned. When chasing high-value accounts, knowing about their industry, their target account, and the decision-maker who pulls the trigger provides a lot of value.

How can the revenue generation team perform better?

Start by building an account plan

The account plan is the blueprint of the sale; the strongest armor for any sales rep. A well-designed account plan combines all the important information, including financials, competitors, strategic priorities, and newer developments in the account and industry. For closing the purchase, you’ll need a solid account plan that highlights unique details about each account. The sales team must research on their ideal customer profile to create an account plan. Data from CRM combined with a thorough research approach can yield amazing results.

While researching, sales reps can get valuable information from the company website, annual and quarterly filing, press releases, and executive interviews. Many companies now have started to build account plans because of the tangible results it brings. Since the account plan is an extensive document, it requires a lot of information to make it comprehensive.

Spend more time selling

Simply said, companies can perform better if salespeople are equipped with relevant information. Outsourcing research allows them to concentrate on what they do best: selling! To relieve salespeople’s time burden in terms of research time and effort would allow them to focus more on selling rather than merely acquiring information. Outsourcing the research process would save salespeople considerable time, with an estimated savings of 225-250 hours per year. Focusing more on selling rather than researching leads to beneficial business outcomes such as increased revenue and the acquisition of key accounts.

Align sales and marketing

Sales and marketing are no longer two separate disciplines. Salespeople aren’t limited to selling, and marketing professionals aren’t either. The need of simplifying both sales and marketing has become even more critical as these two professions continue to merge. When sales and marketing are in sync, they can target and win high-value accounts in tandem. When sales and marketing are on the same page, they can target and win high-value accounts together.

Sales reps frequently work in silos, forgetting that they are supported by a team of marketers in their prospecting efforts. Targeted campaigns, product videos, case studies, blogs, demo webinar sessions, and other types of customised content may help sales professionals stay top of mind with their prospects.

Understand your prospects needs

Understanding your target prospect’s industry, difficulties, and pain points will help you speak their language more effectively. B2B sales staff might use research to determine which compelling content to promote. It’s critical to be aware of and understand where the target audience is headed. Instead of trying to hard pitch, sales reps should be more empathic and focused on creating relationships with their prospects.

By placing prospects needs, strategic priorities and challenges at the centre, sales reps will be able to overcome the fear of being unable to personalise and resonate with their target accounts. Deep research into target clients can often reveal ‘opportunities for dialogue’ for sales staff, which can be a game-changer in terms of marketing and sales alignment. Sales reps will have to make the most of each interaction they have with their prospects along with using data to track relevant activities and outcomes.

Conclusion

To increase sales capacity, companies do not need to hire more salespeople; instead, they must free up time spent on research by their current sales staff. Outsourcing sales efforts saves time as well as helps to build an understanding of target accounts at scale. Having an intelligence unit that serves your global marketing and sales teams means you have a partner who is exclusively focused on assisting you in meeting your data and insight needs. Letting sales reps do what they are best at will not only make them more productive but also contributes towards increased revenue.

While there is no doubt about the abundance on information available, what is not abundant is actionable insight. Actionable insight can be sourced through different ways, one of them being simple desk based research. Strategic research companies like Business Brainz support your data and insight requirements to power your sales and marketing campaigns so you can sit back and focus on having intelligent and meaningful conversations with your prospects. Let our analysts help you with winning insight for your next big marketing campaign.