How B2B SMEs Can Increase Sales Without Employing More Salespeople

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The opinions and views expressed in the

Foreword

John Hancock, Editor

The Role of CRM Solutions that are Designed

Specifically for SMBs

Camilla Slade, Staff Writer

Spoiled for Choice The Role of CRM Sales Engagements

Beyond CRM – CRM With

Sales Engagement and Automation

Peter Dunwell, Staff Writer

Salespeople Are Lazy at Administration Becoming the Top Salesperson The Secret Sauce

Problems Associated with Employing

New Salespeople to Increase Sales

John Hancock, Editor

The Cost of Recruitment Onboarding and Training Costs Time and Money Continuing

The Costs of Getting Recruitment

Benefits of Increasing Your

Existing Sales Team’s Productivity

Peter Dunwell, Staff Writer

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The Importance of Sales Team’s Productivity Improving Sales Team’s Productivity

The Benefits of Improved Sales Team

The Future of Sales

Jimmi Jakobsen, Founder and CEO, Carbon & Finch Limited

Understanding Sales Engaging with

The Way Forward is Digital

Carbon and Finch, through their subsidiary, JeffreyAI, provided consultancy services to IDGO

Foreword

Some fear the march of technology into their work life, but technology built with the sector it serves in mind is a help not a threat. Sales engagement solutions with automation for CRM are a case in point. This Report looks into what the latest developments can do for your business and how they will enhance the work of a successful sales team.

Readers will have become familiar with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and sales engagement over decades; but how often, if at all, have they looked beyond CRM? The Report looks at how technology can support sales today and help to understand the mechanics of success.

SMEs/SMBs have quite specific needs for systems and technology applications. In-house solutions and Excel-based record keeping are no longer up to the job. Therefore, it is better for SMEs/SMBs to consider CRM solutions designed with the small and medium business in mind.

Turnover in sales teams was once the norm when salesforce numbers were everything but, in these days of professional sales teams, quality is definitely more important than quantity. The Report looks at the

problems, the pitfalls and costs, of employing new salespeople to increase sales volumes and how, far from increasing sales, it can divert resources from what matters.

Productivity is very much a business word of our times and no more so than for sales teams. The Report considers the value of productivity not only in improving sales from the sales team but also in ensuring retention of salespeople in a virtuous circle of success.

Looking at the future of sales, you’ll see what are the social and technology drivers that are propelling changes, what sort of changes are happening, what are the solutions that will be making the future and how all of that will fit together.

The Report ends with a Case Study of a project that Carbon & Finch implemented on behalf of Vodafone in Oman This involved Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, which provided significant benefits, including fully automated solutions from receiving orders to collecting receipts.

John Hancock Editor

John Hancock an editor of CEO Reports, has reported on Business processes, including sales and marketing, for many years. A journalist for more than 30 years, John works in a range of business areas from engineering to IT to management and has profiled CEOs across the business sectors in the UK and internationally. As long ago as 1995, he was voted British and European Sales and Marketing Awards (BESMA) Journalist of the Year and has continued to work with the sector ever since.

The Role of CRM Solutions that are Designed Specifically for SMBs

Camilla Slade, Staff Writer

Being an SME is difficult; you are required to invest in solutions that can help you keep growing your business. There is no more keeping the information needed to run the business in spreadsheets or in-house solutions.

While investing in CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and sales engagements can have a big impact on your business it also can be expensive and require considerable training of employees to use these systems efficiently. In today’s market there exist a number of CRM and sales engagement solutions built for the SME market. Some of these will allow a company to start fairly cheaply with a system and grow with it over time. However, the question is, which one do you choose?

Keeping on top of your sales and your sales engagements is becoming increasingly, and at a fast pace, a competitive advantage. Most companies have experienced keeping on top of their sales in Excel or via in-house solutions. However, as you grow, you can’t keep pace with the investment into the latest technology, and that’s why you should be looking for solutions built to cover your requirements and assist your future growth.

Spoiled for Choice

Selecting the right CRM and sales engagement solution can be a bit of a challenge. You will see solutions that have been in the market for some time and can offer everything your heart desires as well as allowing you to do everything you could ever imagine. However, as an SMB you might want to take it step by step and ensure that you benefit fully from what you want before moving forward with more than you can manage.

Using websites such as G2 or Capterra to compare solutions can help you choose the right solution and allow you to read the reviews. However, using comparison websites such as Capterra or G2 is all about using mainstream solutions and will not give you the new and upcoming solutions that eventually could make the difference.

For example, MarketWatch lists a number of companies as top competitors and leading key players when it comes to innovation and future trends. Most of these companies rank well in G2 or Capterra. So do your research properly when choosing.

https://on.mktw.net/3BlFq61

As you grow, you can’t keep pace with the investment into the latest technology, and that’s why you should be looking for solutions built to cover your requirements and assist your future growth

The Role of CRM

The role of a CRM is fairly straightforward. It’s about keeping a record of all your existing customers and your new potential customers. That’s it in a nutshell. Obviously, there are different types of information we want to keep records for. Most of that is to ensure you understand who you are speaking to, a history of what has happened with the customer and details of any new potential opportunities. All this could possibly be managed in Excel.

However, that’s where the simplicity stops. Having just an overview of your customers is no longer enough. Companies now integrate a number of 3rd party systems into their CRM system in order to utilise the data in one or other system. Usually, these requirements can be summarised in a fairly common list.

Typical integrated systems:

• Sending out quotations to your customer

• Managing the pipeline of where the customer is in their sales cycle

• Sending out email campaigns

• Sending out questionnaires

• Ensuring your sales team understands the sales process

• Integration with chat bots

• Integration with website and ecommerce platforms

• Integration with ERP

• Utilising Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

• Collecting information about your customer

The cost of integrating these systems is not cheap and therefore some of the CRM and sales engagement providers have invested in having these prebuilt so that it’s more a matter of subscribing to another license and it’s plug and play. As you can imagine, over time, integrating to more and more solutions will attract a higher license cost. So, while it all seems well and good starting with a low entry fee solution, it could very well end up later being the most expensive solution.

How, then, do you select the right one? You need to consider what is your sales process today, and how you can systemise that and possibly automate it so that your salespeople can focus on higher value tasks.

This is where doing your research is important. Producing a Request for Proposal with clear overview of your requirements is essential. BUT do you know if you are asking for the correct requirements? Are the requirements all based on historical ways of doing business?

Imagine that you are used to sending out

newsletters once a month which is driving your sales. This has worked well for you for many years. It’s an obvious reason to expect that this will be enough in your future solution; however, it’s not. This is no longer enough to keep you competitive. Automation is coming at a fast pace, including Artificial Intelligence. You might hear about AI writing its own content, or AI posting on social media, all with the aim at influencing at the right time to the right person.

So be careful when selecting your new solution requirements, it might be a solution that is not focusing enough on new technologies especially AI and Machine Learning.

Now that you have made your choice, expect your solution to help your sales team manage your leads and customers. There is, however, more to it than just that. While CRM is good, there is a big movement in sales engagement automation. Customers are moving from being sold to, to choosing what to buy and when. You have all experienced the increasing amount of email spam and will often also get a cold call from another salesperson trying to sell you a mobile upgrade or a switch of utility provider. This approach with humans selling will start to produce too low an outcome compared to more informed selling tactics.

In our article the Future of Sales we describe how we see sales being in the future and how you can ensure you are part of it from the start. Falling behind everyone else can have critical impact on your competitiveness and future growth.

Sales Engagements

With your CRM In place and your sales team now being able to update your CRM system to reflect the latest update on your customer engagement, you will now start to get an idea of what’s happening and when, with attractive big graphical dashboards such as sales team efficiency and comparisons, and what’s likely to be sold in the next coming period.

In most CRM solutions today, you will be allowed to log an activity such as a call, meeting or email. Keeping track of how you engage is valuable as this can help you to understand how many activities you need to get a new customer to buy your product or service.

Every salesperson is different and has a different way of selling, so understanding from the best is something that really can make a difference. That’s why sales engagements are becoming the next wave of sales technology where much investment is happening right now.

Sales engagements can be stand-alone solutions, so if you have chosen a CRM without a good enough sales engagement, you can still benefit from using a 3rd party sales engagement

While CRM is good, there is a big movement in sales engagement automation. Customers are moving from being sold to, to choosing what to buy and when

platform that will add multiple times the value of working with your CRM data. So, choosing a solution without a sales engagement platform is not the end of world. It’s just another integration at a later point in time. Most important is to have a strategy for it.

Using sales engagements can be very useful where you need to work in volumes to get a sale or where the sales process can be rather complex. Understanding your sales engagement will help you understand your touch points and the types of touch points, and provide you with statistical information on how your sales engagement is performing.

Being able to take decisions based on analysis means that you are more likely to invest and spend time where it matters. As an SME, you should avoid making your CRM and Sales engagement too complex: start with easy-tounderstand KPIs and ensure that the solution is easy and simple to use. Over complicating it will see you fail early; salespeople will forget and suddenly your KPIs are no longer valid.

There is a sales engagement platform where entering an activity is done for you based on a proven sales process captured by your most successful salesperson. Now that’s interesting.

Being able to take decisions based on analysis means that you are more likely to invest and spend time where it matters

With sales engagements

you track all touch points with a customer, anything from a phone call and social media interaction to meeting plus email and documents shared

Beyond CRM – CRM With Sales Engagement and Automation

Peter Dunwell, Staff Writer

You have got your CRM, your sales team has been trained, things are looking great. Right?

Or, do you see nothing much has changed with the same sales volume plus some uncertainty as to whether you are doing things right and if you can trust your data?

Something I hear often is: “We bought this solution and it is causing us more pain than it is doing us good. Sales staff does not seem to benefit from it; in fact, they are now complaining about why they need to fill in A, B and C when they could just fill in A before.”

If this is you, you are not alone. This is what happens for most companies just having implemented a new system. However, there is one way to avoid all of this. It’s called sales engagement and automation.

So, what is sales engagement and automation?

The idea of leaning on a salesperson to fill in system forms to provide a certain data point to result in management reports is not effective. It’s rather ineffective. It requires the time of the salesperson, and it requires the right point in time reporting. We all know that human errors are these days the cause of most problems.

With sales engagements you track all touch points with a customer, anything from a phone

call and social media interaction to meeting plus email and documents shared. So why is this important? In a perfect world it’s not important at all if we know exactly what we need to do to sell to our customer and know what types of engagements we would need to complete. But we don’t know this.

You can compare two exact businesses selling the same service or product and one will be successful while the other not so much. Why is that? You could blame the salesperson for not being as good as salespeople in the other company. That would seem like a pretty clear reason. Or you could start to analyse what is happening, and what works and what does not work; trying to keep improving how you do things for the better.

This is where automation comes into play. You can now speed up this learning process and do more of the same with less time spent doing it; effectively increasing your capability to more quickly improve your sales process. It’s not just about going from step 1 to step 2 and then waiting two days. It’s about understanding this information and analysing if this is better than step 1 then waiting two days and then step 2.

Imagine taking your top salesperson and asking him or her to draw on a piece of paper what it is that they do when they are selling, what are the branches of paths along which you go based on your engagement with your customer. Then take that information, put it into a solution and let your junior salesperson repeat. Would that add value?

It could possibly make your business very successful in a short time if you did it right.

Salespeople Are Lazy at Administration

A salesperson’s highest priority is to sell. Not being good friends with a customer or making their production team feel great. It’s all about the numbers he or she can produce. An intelligent salesperson will find ways to minimise their effort to produce the biggest outcomes. Some will have unique closing techniques while others will have ice cold careless pre-qualification skills.

Having a salesperson to keep their CRM up to date can be a bit of a challenge. This is where sales engagement automation can assist. Instead of adding activities into the solution, the solution will produce the activities to do next. Anything from booking a meeting to making a call. It could possibly send out an email automatically on behalf of the salesperson and automatically store all activities with the customer.

In fact, we believe that, within a matter of a few years, salespeople will no longer need to enter any values into a CRM system. It will all be done by sales engagement automation platforms. Our article describing the “Future of Sales” will explain some of the things happening around sales automation technology.

Becoming the Top Salesperson

You have purchased your CRM with sales engagement and automation platform, have spent some valuable time loading your customers in, and have detailed your sales and marketing strategy and plans. Now, you are ready to kick off. Marketing sends out a press release of your new product and excitement awaits. You expect hundreds of calls inbound, but nothing happens. I’m sure you have been there and done that. Unfortunately, nothing will happen, until you start to engage, influence, and show how cool or great your product is.

So how do you engage in the right way? Well, as the way of selling is changing, you would want to expand the way you are selling. Some customers are using old traditional ways of buying while

others are moving to automated engagements with their potential customer. The most important part is that you recognise that, just having a system does not make the magic happen. Most importantly your sales need to become a lot more proactive at the right time.

I’m sure you have experienced talking about some product in a conversation with your friend and suddenly all the advertising around you is about this product. That’s selling at the right time to the right person. Finding that way will make you a top salesperson. However, you cannot do it alone; you are dependent on a number of systems to help you with the engagement.

So how do you recruit one of those ‘selling at the right time to the right person’ salespeople? I knew you would ask that, and the answer is that you automate your engagements and ensure that they are integrated with the right systems: it’s that simple.

So why is everyone not doing this already? I’ll tell you why. It is because they are not willing to invest in technology. For all of you who think, “I want to make a difference”, then here you go; it’s all there just look for it.

The Secret Sauce

So, cut to the chase, you say; I have heard enough, and I want this system right now. Yes, you can have this system; however, you need to acquire a system and you need some advice. It will mean you will need to part with some of your money to make some more money.

If you’re ready for that. Then what’s stopping you? You can probably already imagine where finding the right person at the right time might come from. Your phone? Maybe, Alexa? Sounds plausible. Your iWatch? Seems likely. Perhaps you post on social media or chat on your phone? In any case every time you want something, someone will know. Unless of course you have no new phone near your or other listening device in which case you are likely to be not reading this.

Once the data has been captured, it can be collected for a fee by different providers. With that information you can now also start to purchase marketing and influence the messages on social media. But you can’t do it manually it’s simply too much data and too many touch points. You need a sales engagement platform to help you.

You need a sales engagement platform to help you move your opportunities around for you, so that you end up only spending time where it matters - looking your client in the eyes and agreeing to the sale and both being happy with the transaction.

You can’t do it manually it’s simply too much data and too many touch points. You need a sales engagement platform to help you

… it can cost six to nine months’ worth of salary to get your new salespeople up to speed

Problems Associated with Employing New Salespeople to Increase Sales

John Hancock, Editor

Selling has come a long way in the past few decades and that progress is apparent not only in the way that salespeople work but also in the whole sales team environment. In past decades, newspaper jobs pages were full of adverts for sales jobs because, at the time, people thought that the more salespeople were in a team, the better and, if they didn’t succeed, there was always a large pool from which to recruit. But times have changed; selling is a much better structured profession than in the past and, far from being the panacea to cure any sales problems, simply recruiting is now understood to be not only unprofessional but, as importantly, more of a burden than a boon to a modern, sales driven organisation.

The Cost of Recruitment

As with any business activity, there is cost associated with recruiting new salespeople, a cost that has been quantified by Cloud Task in ‘The Hidden Costs of Recruiting Sales Teams’1

as, “… it can cost six to nine months’ worth of salary to get your new salespeople up to speed.”

That’s a hefty consideration by any measure but might be acceptable if the new recruit is eventually successful. However, what if that is not the case?

According to BMS Performance, ‘What is the real cost of hiring the wrong salesperson’, “In the UK, 27% of companies say a bad hire costs more than £50,000, with the impact of a wrong decision seeping into everything from overall employee productivity through to lost sales revenue.”2 Far from recruiting your way out of a problem or into more sales, a simple reliance on new recruits could add to any existing problems and, moreover, also be costly.

Also, if a bad hiring can be costly, while the organisation is spending time on that, the right people will be snapped up by competitors. The Peak Blog explains that, “Top salespeople only spend an average of ten days on the market before being recruited for their next role. With organisations averaging a time to hire of

Not only can the costs outweigh the benefits but also turnover will have a negative effect on the business

57.5 days, talent shortages are fuelling hiring managers to make bad hiring decisions.”3 Such bad decisions will simply complete a circle of cost and failure, the opposite of what the organisation needs. The monetary costs and risks of hiring your way to more sales is very clear then, but there are other costs to consider.

Onboarding and Training Costs Time and Money

People don’t just walk into the office and start work on day one. Any well-run business will have its own processes and procedures, and ways of working. Any newly recruited salesperson will need to understand the business in which they are working, understand the market in which they are competing and understand what will differentiate their product or service from the competition. In short, it will usually be necessary to ensure that a new salesperson has a thorough knowledge of what is being sold and has the necessary skills to lead meetings and interact with the market in order to effectively deal with customers.

Onboarding with training is a lengthy and support heavy pre-requisite to establishing a successful salesperson. “It takes an average of three months for a new seller to be ready to interact with buyers, nine months for them to be competent to perform, and 15 months for them to become a top performer.” That was the finding when Rain Group asked 423 sales leaders how long it takes to onboard a new salesperson and for them to reach top performance?4

A good salesperson is a lot more than just someone at a desk or in the field taking orders. They are a critical component in the business’s success and a key link in the relationship between the business and the customer. The onboarding and training processes and, more importantly in the long run, the continuing support of a valuable salesperson is an investment for long-term success. The ISFA doesn’t just treat the costs as an investment but has calculated the return on investment (ROI) of a salesperson5. “Put most simply, calculating ROI involves measuring the gains minus the cost, and dividing the resulting number by the cost, and multiplying by 100 to get [an ROI] percentage: (Gain on investment - Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment x 100)”

References:

Continuing Costs

When you recruit new salespeople to grow sales, i.e., create additional headcount in the hope of commensurate increases in sales volumes and value, then there are other costs to consider. First, as with any employee, they will require a desk and space, increasingly expensive commodities, possibly a car and a PC or possibly two (desk-top and lap-top) if they work in and out of the office. Also, in addition to their income, they’ll need pension provision, possibly private health insurance plus their share of the whole paraphernalia of employment with its attendant costs.

But as a salesperson, there will be other costs including the cost of the tools to make them as effective as possible. Solomon Timothy, writing in Forbes Magazine identified four supports for sales success in ‘Equipping your sales team for growth’6

Offer them the right tools. Allow them to attend industry conferences and events.

Institute ongoing training. Create a good coaching and mentoring programme.

The Costs of Getting Recruitment Wrong

We have covered the monetary and time costs of any recruitment but what about the costs of getting it wrong? A good sign that recruitment is not working will be a high turnover of sales staff. “Staff turnover refers to how many employees leave your organisation and need replacing within a given time period.” is how My Hr Toolkit7 explains it. High turnover means more of those expensive recruiting, onboarding and training costs plus it will have a corrosive effect on staff morale which, in turn, will drive further turnover. It’s a vicious circle and not just inside the business; there will also be reputational damage if different salespeople meet customers at every interaction but never get the time to build any relationships with them.

There are many problems associated with simply recruiting new salespeople to increase sales.

1 The Hidden Costs of Recruiting Sales Teams – 5 clicks down https://bit.ly/3x3F15V.

2 BMS Performance, What is the real cost of hiring the wrong salesperson? https://bmsperformance.com/blog/sales/real-cost-hiring-wrong-sales-person/

3 Peak Sales Recruiting – 4 clicks down https://bit.ly/3RrxMg3

4 Rain Group, Sales Rep Onboarding: How Long Does it Really Take? 1 click down https://www.rainsalestraining.com/blog/sales-rep-onboarding-how-long-does-it-really-take

5 ISFA, Calculating the ROI of a Salesperson https://www.isfanow.org/calculating-the-roi-of-a-salesperson

6 Forbes, Equipping Your Sales Team For Growth https://bit.ly/3evNvwa

7 My HR Toolkit, The effects of high staff turnover on business https://www.myhrtoolkit.com/blog/effects-of-high-employee-turnover

It takes an average of three months for a new seller to be ready to interact with buyers, nine months for them to be competent to perform, and 15 months for them to become a top performer

Sales productivity is the measurement of how your organization uses tools, resources, and processes to achieve key business goals while reducing the time and costs associated with winning new business

Benefits of Increasing Your Existing Sales Team’s Productivity

Peter Dunwell, Staff Writer

There is something unique about selling. It is heavily reliant on direct human interactions between customers and prospective customers, and a human salesperson. Like any business process, the values of outputs need to exceed the cost of inputs, but how that be measured? In a process of several critical ratios, productivity is the most important. “Sales productivity is the measurement of how your organization uses tools, resources, and processes to achieve key business goals while reducing the time and costs associated with winning new business.” That’s how Seismic defines productivity in the article ‘5 strategies to drive sales productivity’1

In that light, it makes sense to do whatever is necessary to increase productivity. Outfunnel2 defines that increase as, “Closing more deals per the hours your sales force puts in.” One key factor in increased productivity is the salesperson themselves and the length and depth of their service. Long-standing sales people will not only have a larger universe of regular and repeat customers but they will also be constantly building their relationship with and knowledge of those customers to ensure the optimum commitment of those customers to the business. Given that the highest cost in sales is the cost of finding and bringing in new clients, then anything that will support the retention of those clients and doing further business with them will be good. In fact, According to The European Business Review3, ‘Is Acquiring New Customers More Expensive Than Keeping Them?’ “Studies have shown that acquiring new clients is five times more expensive than keeping an existing customer.” The reasons for this are simple enough. People would rather buy from an organisation and someone they trust. Moreover, the same article adds that, people will spend up to 57% more with a brand that has their loyalty.

The Importance of Sales Team’s Productivity

Seismic again, tells us that, “sales productivity is a challenge in every organisation. In fact, sales productivity is a top business challenge for 65% of B2B organisations.” Sales organisations want to know how they can increase productivity, i.e., get more sales from the same cost base. There are a few ways by which productivity can be increased but first it has to be measured. The People.ai article ‘11+ sales Metrics That Highly Productive Teams Track’4 suggests that, “While you may know who’s a consistent performer time and time again, that knowledge can’t be passed on to the rest of the team until you understand why they perform well. Improving sales productivity comes from understanding how and why to monitor your sales metrics. What you can gain from this information helps you make proactive decisions to elevate your business.” The article continues to list eleven sales metrics that need to be measured in order to understand a sales team’s productivity.

Improving Sales Team’s Productivity

There is a term ‘going for the low-hanging fruit’ which roughly means, take the easy to achieve things first. But that can sometimes lead to people avoiding the more challenging and pertinent jobs in favour of easy tasks. Spotio5 warns against this, “focus your attention only on the time spent completing sales activities. Exclude anything that doesn’t actively work toward converting deals, like time spent preparing, company meetings, and administrative tasks.” Once the various metrics are understood then those processes can be worked on to improve each step in the overall sales process. But it isn’t just process improvement that matters.

“By embracing technology such as lead intelligence, marketing automation, and effective

A more productive sales team will be more professional as well as improving profitability

use of a CRM, salespeople can waste less time doing data entry, understand more about their leads, and document all of this information so it’s shared across the organization.” This is from The Center for Sales Strategy, ‘3 Ways Technology Can Increase a Salesperson’s Productivity’6. We are used to technology improving our lives in all sorts of ways and that reality is also true for the sales process. Technology doesn’t take away the human interaction but does improve the richness of that interaction and eliminates time wasted on routine activities to improve the time available for sales activities. Salespanel7 sums it up, “Sales productivity is achieved when your sales representatives spend their time and effort in a way that’ll be good for your business’s bottom line by improving efficiency in operations and successfully closing sales.

The Benefits of Improved Sales Team Productivity

Productivity gives you a better idea of a salesperson’s capabilities than raw performance numbers can. Call Hub8 explains, “Sales productivity gives you a better picture of a sales representative’s potential and the challenges they face in making a sale.”

By now, the benefits of improved productivity should be pretty clear. Higher sales volumes from a stable sales team as salespeople learn to focus on productive activities while leaving

References:

routines to technology. Also, with more time to focus on customers, salespeople will be able to achieve a better understanding of the customer’s needs, which will lead to higher sales unit values. All of that will mean better returns for the business and better income for the salesperson leading to higher retention for salespeople to establish strong and fruitful relationships with customers.

A virtuous circle which will reduce the need to recruit with consequent cost savings that can be invested in yet further improvement in capabilities.

In practical terms, salespeople with high productivity and the understanding that comes with that, as cited by Gavel International9, identify better qualified leads, deliver a positive buying experience, understand how to work with clearly marked milestones, have improved sales forecasting accuracy and have sales methods perfected from knowledge-based understanding of their processes.

The overall benefit can be summed up as sales efficiency and sales effectiveness. Sales efficiency means that the business and the salesperson can achieve their goals with less work and can achieve greater return for the same level of input, effort and cost. It means the best use of man hours and they are the key resource that the business deploys. Sales effectiveness is related to efficiency inasmuch as it is about the use that salespeople make of all their resources, time, materials and technology.

1 Seismic, 5 strategies to drive sales productivity https://bit.ly/3Qrd4vm

2 Outfunnel, Sales Productivity: What is it? How to Increase sales Productivity? https://outfunnel.com/sales-productivity/

3 The European Business Review

https://www.europeanbusinessreview.com/is-acquiring-new-customers-more-expensive-than-keeping-them/ 4 people.ai, 11+ sales Metrics That Highly Productive Teams Track https://people.ai/blog/sales-productivity-metrics/

5 Spotio, 19 Proven Ways To Increase The Productivity Of Your Sales Team, 8 clicks down https://bit.ly/3x5kGNB

6 The Center for Sales Strategy, 3 Ways Technology Can Increase a Salesperson’s Productivity , 1 click down https://bit.ly/3qhBg98

7 Salespanel Blog, How To Improve Sales Productivity With Data And Technology, https://salespanel.io/blog/sales/sales-productivity-with-data-and-technology/

8 CallHub, How to improve sales productivity the right way!, 1 click down https://callhub.io/sales-productivity/

9 Gavel International https://www.gavelintl.com/5-reasons-why-sales-processes-improve-sales-performance/

Studies have shown that acquiring new clients is five times more expensive than keeping an existing customer

The Future of Sales

Jimmi Jakobsen, Founder and CEO, Carbon & Finch Limited

The future is bright for sales for those that embrace and adopt technology early. It’s clear that we are living in a world where technology is moving at a faster pace and can be difficult to keep on top of. The way of selling is changing, and new tools are being brought to market go beyond the conservative approach common in many larger companies.

Augmented reality, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are areas that today are becoming a reality in your day-to-day professional life. Everything is becoming digital and the everexpanding growth in the tools that incorporate these technologies means that you need to be on top of your game if you run a business or head up a department.

Within sales we see systems that are built to help you automate certain processes and help you engage more efficiently with your leads and customers. As a technology company owner, I am at the forefront of this evolution and in this article will take you through my view of what’s to come and how you can get involved and become part of the future of sales.

Understanding Sales

To understand what the future of sales looks like, we first must understand what every business is trying to achieve. For sales, that is more sales with less cost and being more competitive than the other guy.

We know that certain factors are the key to winning your sales and that, in most cases, it’s

the product or service fit, the quality, the cost and the speed of receiving it. It’s a fairly simple view and some businesses go very far to ensure they get exactly just that when spending millions.

There are several challenges to get to the point where you are able to give a price. As a very first step, you need to understand who is buying. This is where prospecting comes into play; you go through hundreds of leads until, eventually, you find the one that is looking to buy. This process can be automated today with several tools, and there exist a number of services that will get you that prospective customer. The main point is that, eventually, the majority of this prospecting will be fully autonomous.

We will see Artificial Intelligence posting content as a bait and analysing engagement; we will also see listening devices capturing interest and feed that back to marketing platforms; there will be Artificial Intelligence interacting with you via social media, email and on the phone, and there will be augmented reality that will draw you into a whole different world of opportunity.

The key is that prospecting your leads and your contacts will be automated and fed into your solution. Being a frontrunner in adopting AI, AR or ML will bring you competitive advantages and will allow you to better understand who is buying. The best thing is that this is already here. It’s not waiting until tomorrow or 5 years from now. This is here today and you also can get access to these options.

The key is that prospecting your leads and your contacts will be automated and fed into your solution

Engaging with Prospects

Having a prospect is only a small part of the sales process. You will likely have to speak to the other person, perhaps meet face to face and send a handful of emails before anything starts to happen. The prospect is qualifying you to check that you are the right business to buy from. They would not buy instantly unless, of course, they are forced to.

That means you need to start to engage with your prospect in a manner that requires you to increase your chances of selling over your competitor and, almost every time, there will be someone else.

Your product or service needs to be better, your price needs to be better and your quality needs to be better… and ideally you should have delivered it yesterday. Being in a crowded market this can be quite difficult and sometimes there is little difference in any of these parameters, making you dependent on customer reviews or recommendations.

This is where Artificial Intelligence can give you a hand - it will be able to analyse your conversation with your prospect to profile the person you are speaking to. This will allow you to better understand how you deal with this person. It will provide you statistical information based on analysing the person’s engagement on social media, so that you can know your chances of selling to this person. Again, with these types of KPIs it will allow you to understand who you are more likely to sell to.

According to Gartner, selling is moving from analogue selling to hyper automation engagements. It’s moving to digital first platforms and is becoming buyer centric – the younger generation are not interested in seeing a sales rep. In fact, 44% of millennials today prefer not to speak to a sales rep when taking their decision, even in a B2B purchase setting. This means you need to be digitally ready to sell your product and services and you need to be visible and digitally engaging.

The Way Forward is Digital

Augmented reality and virtual reality are both starting to take off and we will see a massive increase in digital content created in an augmented reality that will allow you to see

things before you buy or get the value information required to make the right choice.

So how does this all tie into sales and marketing automation? I think first of all we need to be realistic. A salesperson does not want a system to enter data into or try to extract data from: they want to know “Who do I need to speak with next to close my biggest possible deal so I can hit my sales target?” Anything else is a waste of their time.

What I see and what we are working with will completely change the way of selling and in a way that will help you sell more with less. You will be able to get a platform that will hold all of your customer data and your reports; you will be able to automate your lead generation; you will be able to work your leads, and you will be able to market your product and service at the right time to the right person. Moreover, while this all happens using AI and Automation, all you need to do is focus on making your product or service more competitive. This evolution will result in increasing R&D, and we will see innovation take a huge jump ahead.

Now it’s time to get ahead of everyone else. It’s time to ensure that you are there in front so you can maximise the potential there is today because tomorrow it might be too late, someone else will have already gone for it.

Sales and AI will go hand in hand. However, AI needs training and it needs the best training you can get. This part will, however, take years; AI will not autonomously be able to sell for you yet. You do not want an AI doing all the failing to finally finding a way that works. It would cost you more than you can afford. So, systems will start to learn from people who do sell and are successful.

Imagine taking your best salesperson and mapping what they do into the system to enable your junior staff to do the same. This is a little bit like AI being trained to help you sell more. As your business is unique, you will have a few ways that you would want your AI to do differently. So, while you can get AI to speak with you today, AI will not be able to understand your business efficiently. However, this will happen very soon and within this decade.

So here you go, the future of sales is bright for those that embrace and adopt technology early.

You need to start to engage with your prospect in a manner that requires you to increase your chances of selling over your competitor and, almost every time, there will be someone else

CASE STUDY

IDGO (pronounced I’d go) is the UK’s 1st

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The Case

IDGO is a new product to the market. Their CEO was looking for a CRM platform to assist with the management of their data whilst also launching their product through numerous email campaigns.

IDGO had previously used other CRM tools. However, they felt that these were limited in terms of what they provided. IDGO decided that the services offered by JeffreyAI, a subsidiary of Carbon and Finch, were what they were looking for. IDGO successfully launched their first email campaign with JeffreyAI in May 2022.

CASE STUDY

The Solution

JeffreyAI provided consultancy services which included: A centralised solution for all of IDGO’s data Segmenting their customer database Creating and launching their email campaigns Providing ongoing support and suggestions for future marketing ideas

The Benefits

When we first received IDGO’s original data, it was in various formats and had no structure. Our lead consultant had numerous meetings and recommended the best way to move forward. This resulted in the data being cleansed, enabling IDGO to better identify future customers.

JeffreyAI provided a centralised solution to manage IDGO’s data - they can now see and document each customer’s journey.

JeffreyAI managed and streamlined IDGO’s marketing campaigns. Our lead consultant offered detailed channel and campaign analysis.

“you and the JeffreyAI team, all went above and beyond to assist our company and I didn’t know how to articulate the amazing service we received in testimony without causing others to “expect” the same service when joining” Danni CEO IDGO