Success with B2B sales has become more complex than ever, due to shifting buyer expectations and preferences. Buyers have come to expect self-service as standard, whether that’s in the form of demos or compiling product research. They are also more likely to trust recommendations from their peer community, instead of information provided directly by vendors.
These trends have left salespeople with less control than before, making every interaction more important than ever. The news isn’t all bad, though. Sales enablement tech is helping sellers to implement winning playbooks and standardize processes for higher win rates.
Guided selling software, in particular, is making an impact. Here’s how this emerging software category is easing complexities in the B2B sales cycle and helping sales teams connect with their prospects more effectively.
Standardizes Sales Processes
B2B sales teams could afford a certain amount of improvisation in their processes before buyer attitudes changed. Companies could also spend months ramping up new sales team members as they learned the ropes and tested different tactics.
The picture today is decidedly different. In an efficiency-driven environment, companies cannot afford to chase losing tactics, and sales workflow standardization drives ROI. However, replicating successful playbooks is challenging. After all, how can a sales tool replicate a successful seller’s ability to read the room?
Guided selling software solves this issue by removing significant cognitive workload from a seller. By offering them helpful resources and dynamic playbook pointers throughout the customer interaction, sellers have more cognitive space to identify customer issues and offer solutions that match what the buyer wants.
Ramping up new hires is also easier with these platforms. By replicating successful team members’ tactics, guided selling software helps new team members hit the ground running, giving them the satisfaction of hitting quotas quickly and customizing winning plays to suit their style.
The result is a shorter sales cycle that leaves a positive impact on a prospect, making them more likely to convert to a customer.
Centralizes Data
Sales teams rely on mountains of data to get their jobs done. However, processing these data for insights is challenging. While analytics platforms powerful enough to offer insights surely exist, organizing data and loading it onto these platforms can pose challenges.
For instance, a lot of sales interaction data is unstructured. A traditional analytics or BI platform will struggle to process these formats, leading to tedious hours spent formatting data for processing. Guided selling software houses prior customer interaction data with product specifications, giving sales teams a single source of truth.
This feature also removes any need for sales and product to communicate back and forth, something that stresses both teams since they often lack context. Indeed, product team members generally have little context or patience to process a salesperson’s question about a prospect’s issues.
Guided selling software helps product teams upload the latest product functionality information and specs, giving sales reps all the information they need to do their jobs. The few back-and-forths that do occur automatically align both teams, even if they involve complex questions that need product input.
The result is less scrambling to find information and a consistent customer experience. Prospects receive information quickly from sales, building trust and the likelihood of a closed deal. The alignment between product and sales ensures these important teams understand customer issues, informing future offerings.
Easy Pipeline Analysis
Easy pipeline analysis is another consequence of the centralization features highlighted in the previous section. Sales managers seek accurate data that can assist team member evaluations. However, analyzing performance is challenging.
For example, a salesperson targeting high-ticket accounts might have a lower quota-fill ratio than a team member targeting smaller accounts. Their dollar impact on the organization is different, as are their sales tactics. How can a manager objectively decide whether these team members are performing to their potential?
Guided selling software standardizes large portions of the sales process, bringing a consistent context to each salesperson’s performance. Using winning playbooks, for example, all team members can receive the same proportion of account sizes targeted, instead of segregating them as previously highlighted.
As a result, sales managers receive an accurate picture of pipeline health and can identify weaknesses before they turn into lost revenue.
Accounts for Complexity
B2B products are complex and involve several stakeholders on the buyer’s side. Guided selling software offers sellers proven ways of appealing to every stakeholder in the buying decision, reducing their cognitive load and boosting the chances of a closed deal.
For example, without guided selling software, a salesperson would have to constantly monitor prospects for potentially significant variables while answering questions about the product and dealing with objections. With guided selling software, the seller can anticipate potential objections and dispatch responses instantly.
This leaves them free to read the room and exercise their creativity when closing a deal.
Since all product data and quote combinations are integrated into the software, the seller can answer questions quickly, without leaving the prospect waiting for a response from the product team.
Guided Selling Is the Future
B2B selling has constantly evolved over the years, and guided selling software is the latest solution to boost sellers’ ability to close deals.
Thanks to innovative features, companies stand to benefit massively from this technological advance, giving their sellers all the tools they need to boost revenue.
