Sales is arguably the single most important department in any company, given that fact it has the most direct and immediate impact on a business’s top line. Moreover, in B2B sales, where order values are typically much higher, the stakes are elevated further. So, in order to maximize your company’s efficiency, it is essential that you equip your sales team appropriately for the job at hand. Here are the 5 top tools that every B2B sales team should have in 2022.
- A Good CPQ Tool
- An Easy-to-use CRM
- A Calendar Sharing Tool
- Call Recording Tools
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator
A Good CPQ Tool
When dealing with complex orders that are made in high volumes, a CPQ tool is an invaluable asset for a sales team to have access to. Research indicates that in 60% of cases the first seller to deliver an accurate quote to a prospect is the one who wins their business. That means that cutting out small inefficiencies in sales procedures can make all the difference to how your company performs in its market. CPQ solutions automate administrative tasks that sales personnel would otherwise have to complete manually, allowing companies to streamline the configure-price-quote process and improve their chances of being first across the finish line. It’s safe to say that this is an essential tool that every B2B sales team needs.
An Easy-to-use CRM
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a vital part of how companies do business with one another these days, and studies show that it represents a significant return on investment. In B2B sales, maintaining a strong connection with clients is especially significant, and CRMs make this work by helping your company to gather and keep track of important customer information. More importantly, they enable sales teams to manage accounts, monitor interactions, and keep an eye on the ever-evolving needs of their clients. For this reason, choosing the right CRM is key, and user-friendliness should be a priority. An unwieldy, overly-complex CRM simply will not do. Though it might seem counterintuitive, in many cases it may actually be worth trading some functionality for increased ease of use in your chosen CRM, so that your sales team can avoid technical hitches and focus on building and maintaining B2B relationships.
A Calendar-Sharing Tool
Working in sales is all about teamwork and coordination, so it stands to reason that you’re going to want your team to be on the same page, both literally and figuratively. A calendar-sharing tool might not sound like anything revolutionary at first, but it can make an enormous difference to the productivity of your company, and it is certainly something that every good B2B sales team should be using. Good calendar apps are simple to use but loaded with under-the-hood functionality, such as automatic syncing that transfers updates on a scheduled event from one person’s account to everyone involved. These kinds of features greatly promote efficiency by cutting out time that colleagues would ordinarily have to spend getting one another up to speed after a meeting is rescheduled.
Call-Recording Tools
Call-recording tools are extremely important because they can play a key role in the evolution of your sales team in the long term. As sales interactions generally come down to binary decisions – to buy or not to buy – recorded conversations always provide a wealth of valuable data that can be used for coaching and development. Having the ability to analyze customer behavior and responses cannot be undervalued because it enables sales teams to weed out mistakes and realize previously unseen opportunities. That way, your sales team will focus on learning from their errors rather than lamenting the prospects who got away.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
For those working in B2B sales, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a very worthwhile investment. This subscription-based selling platform provides users with access to an enormous B2B database and helps to dramatically streamline the process of finding new prospects. Sales Navigator uses automation for lead generation based on user preferences, allowing sales teams to find more quickly find the most relevant leads. It also features targeted search filters and gives users updates on people they’re linked to, allowing them to identify new leads as soon as they appear. If that weren’t enough, LinkedIn Sales Navigator also integrates with a wide variety of popular CRMs, allowing users to further increase their productivity.
Conclusion
Working B2B sales requires employees to process enormous amounts of information while also maintaining close connections with clients. Needless to say, this can be extremely taxing, which is why it is so important for B2B sales teams to have the best efficiency tools available to them. In a competitive market, companies need to ensure that every resource they have available is used as effectively as possible. Embracing efficiency-boosting tools like these is a surefire way to do that.