If you lead a sales team, it is critical that you make your workplace as efficient as possible. Every minute not spent pitching your product or sniffing out leads is a minute wasted. Unfortunately, far too many sales teams are reliant on outdated technology to get the job done. Rickety databases and overflowing email inboxes bog them down, sapping valuable time and energy that could be better spent elsewhere. A leading sales teams needs to adopt the latest technology to be successful. Below, we have listed three sure-fire ways to improve your workplace productivity using technology.
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Hop on the cloud
As much as technology has changed our world, there is nothing more powerful than the human voice when it comes to closing a deal. Sometimes, you just need to hop on the phone, but too many sales teams rely on call center tech that is not up to snuff. After all, customers have more opportunities to shop than ever, and you have more ways to contact customers than ever before. Furthermore, according to Forbes, most inbound customers prefer to text or chat before they get a call. This means you need a gentle escalation from texting or chatting online to a phone call, and if you text a customer in the morning, you want the information to carry over as you call them that afternoon. This level of integration calls for an omnichannel call center solution. Bright Pattern, for example, offers cloud call center solutions that track continuous omnichannel conversations, utilize natural language processing to identify contacts, and provide insights into your sales target’s behavior. You can then use all this information to recognize and take advantage of critical efficiencies.
Train smarter
Say you have new hire who needs training, or a mid-level performer who shows promise. They need training, but work is coming fast and furious, and your lean sales team does not have the resources to get them the training they need. How do you help them level up their game? Sales training platforms like Showpad or MindTickle allow you to coach your team members at scale. You can develop tests and mobile quizzes to assess your team’s knowledge and recognize areas they may need help on. You can create individualized learning pathways for your team members so that everybody is getting the training that is right for them. You can also create “micro-learning” segments so that your team members can brush up on their skills and learn new ones on their own time. You can even disseminate best practices, allowing your team members to study award-winning pitches from best performers, as well as workshop each other’s pitches using the training platform. Sales coaching is streamlined, and onboarding is easier than ever.
Get agile
The Agile methodology has expanded from the realm of software development to touch nearly every field in the modern business workplace, and sales and marketing is no exception. As Melanie Hankins writes over at Scrum Alliance, “an agile approach means letting go of centralized decision-making, leaving sales teams free and flexible to make decisions based on incoming consumer knowledge.” That means giving up a little bit of power as a sales team leader, but it helps you “get on your team’s level,” allowing you to guide your team through the nitty-gritty work of dropping the “prospective” from “prospective client.” Your team is generating data and reaching milestones every day, but it’s up to you to choose whether or not to integrate that information into an integrated system of learning. Using Agile methods gives you a framework in which you can.