In order for brands and wholesale distributors to be successful, it’s vital to provide your sales team with the right data, sales tools, and relevant content for them to communicate effectively and sell efficiently. This sales enablement process ensures your sales team will generate better results and customers receive better service.
A sales force automation app is one of the most important tools that companies should provide their sales reps, supporting sales enablement as follows:
It supports data-driven selling
Sales enablement relies on creating a data-driven process and relevant content to enhance the selling process.
This means every sales rep needs a way to accumulate data regarding sales activities, store visits, customer interactions and more. This needs to be stored in one place so it’s easily accessible for your team members.
For most brands and wholesalers their data is scattered across multiple platforms, making it harder to access and analyze. A sales app solves this issue by unifying the data on one platform and creates valuable insights into your customers.
Expanding on this idea is the opportunity to use AI algorithms to analyze customer data, to support your sales and marketing efforts - read their buying signals, show you their buying patterns and habits and even predict their next moves.
It enables account-based up-selling and cross-selling
Selling to existing customers, including up-selling and cross-selling, is one of the most effective, and easiest, ways to increase your revenue and profitability.
But nothing will turn them away quicker than offering them irrelevant products or services. To be successful, any trade promotion must be personalized to each customers’ need, specifically demonstrating the value it will bring to their business.
A sales force automation app empowers your reps by providing them with comprehensive knowledge of customer activity, order history, available promotions, bestselling products in similar accounts and much more, so they can offer their business customers (retailers, forecourt stores, hospitality/HORECA businesses etc.) the products that will be the most relevant for them.
It allows managers to guide their reps in real-time
A sales force automation tool allows managers to create workflows to guide a rep whenever or wherever they may be in the field. This is especially important when coaching new hires, but also helpful in establishing best practice processes for engaging with customers in the field.
It will also capture timestamped and geotagged activities to help managers monitor how the team is preforming sales activities out in the field.
It improves internal communications
A sales tool holds data that can support marketing teams in the work they do. There can sometimes be a problem sharing content the marketeers have created with the sales department. A trade promotion may be over before the rep even knows about it.
A sales automation app provides marketing teams (and other internal stakeholders) with valuable data they can use as part of their sales enablement efforts. It also provides the means to share tools, content, messages with sales reps, so they can put them to good use.
A B2B sales platform will also empower the marketing team to align their multiple marketing campaigns with the sales rep in a way that allows them to target the right customers at the right time in their buyer journey.
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