3 Ways To Supercharge Your Sales Strategy

Featured article by Tiffani Bova, Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist, Salesforce

The modern buyer, who has radically different expectations, is creating an increasingly complex sales process that presents new challenges for sales teams on a daily basis. In order to remain competitive and hit revenue targets, it is critical that companies put the same level of rigor behind the way they define the future of selling as they do within other parts of their organizations.

Not all companies are created equal, and the tools and apps they will need to maximize their sales productivity may be very different based on their industry, geography or current go-to-market requirements. The ability to deliver the flexibility of services needed to be responsive to a customer’s demands can provide tremendous competitive differentiation. These apps not only empower your direct sales force, but can augment your channel strategy as well.

The most successful and forward-thinking sales teams today are all seeking out innovative tools and apps to help maximize their sales productivity and help them get a leg up on their competition. If you’re organization is seeking such an edge, the good news is that thanks to the mobile revolution and introduction of enterprise cloud applications, these tools are easy to deploy, cost-effective and can quickly create value for you and your customer’s organization.

The Salesforce AppExchange makes it easy to find the right applications that fit your business very easily. Here are three apps that you can start using today to help exceed your sales goals:

1. Connect Voice to Your Sales Process

Calls are the lifeblood of any sales organization, and if your team is making thousands of sales calls each week, any increased efficiencies means big improvements in cost savings and potential new business.

Click-to-dial phone system solutions from NewVoiceMedia integrate phone calls directly in the daily sales process to create one seamless view of the customer. In fact, one company found their salespeople went from an average of 80 calls per day to more than 250 calls per day simply by making the calling process more efficient. Voice is often overlooked as a way to increase sales productivity, but it can be one of the most critical ways to get better results from your reps.

2. Personalized Customer Experiences for Documents

You want all your customers to feel like they are getting a special personal touch, but the reality is that — outside of emails and marketing automation — you don’t always have time to customize other customer-facing documents such as contracts, invoices and reports. Yet, customers want to feel like you are speaking directly to them throughout the entire sales process.

Apps like Conga Composer help you deliver truly personalized documents to every customer at scale, so you get the efficiency you need and every customer feels like you are speaking directly to them. Conga makes this possible by creating and delivering personalized and custom documents, presentations, quotes, invoices and reports directly from the data that lives in Salesforce. In addition, you get the increased productivity (and reduced errors!) by generating all your documents from a single CRM system of truth.

One company that started using Conga Composer said, “We’ve created a real-time information system and we’ve grown 100x in terms of productivity.”

3. Prioritizing the Best Leads

Maximizing revenue comes down to getting the most leverage from every hour of a rep’s day, which often means making sure they are spending time with the leads that are most likely to close, and putting other leads — those that aren’t yet ready to buy — into the right nurture campaigns.

VelocifyPulse is another great app that helps optimizes every stage of the sales cycle – from prospecting to conversion. This app increases conversion rates by removing the “guesswork” out of selling and automates the prioritization of accounts, contacts, leads and opportunities.

All of these apps (and many more) are part of the Salesforce partner ecosystem. With so many apps that integrate directly with your core Salesforce instance, it’s easy to customize your sales processes to what works for your business.

Sales is one of the toughest but also one of the more rewarding jobs. These tools and apps can make day-to-day tasks easier, maximize your time and help you concentrate on the most meaningful customer conversations in your busy day. Happy supercharged selling.