How to Improve Sales Process Using SalesIntel

With this article, we want B2B businesses to learn how to improve the sales process. Implementing sales processes can streamline any task, whether simple or complex.

While your first goal should be to ask your sales team to understand and follow the sales process, a recurring goal should be to optimize and improve the sales process consistently. This can make sales reps more effective, reliable, and precise both in their roles and in their customer interactions.

So, how do you improve your sales process? What changes do you need to make in your existing sales process?

How to Streamline Sales Process

While a standard sales process has seven stages, your focus should be to master the following six crucial stages.

1. Prospecting
2. Start Sales Conversations
3. Setting Sales Sequences
4. Qualifying Leads
5. Closing
6. Client Retention, Cross-Selling, and Up-Selling

1. Prospecting

The sales process is built on the foundation of prospecting.

Prospecting is not easy. It is the most challenging and important part of your sales process – almost 40% of sales reps agree on this fact. Customers have more access to information than ever before, allowing them to study every potential characteristic and benefit before making a final decision. B2B sales prospecting is changing as a result. The buying process goes through several crucial phases from the initial approach to creating trust and providing the best client experience throughout the process.

Spend some time seeing yourself in the shoes of your customer. Make a buyer persona. What are the most typical issues that your buyers face? And what are your strategies for resolving these issues? Learn how your peers tackle pain points, resolve objections, close deals, and drive repeat business by brainstorming with your team.

To ensure highly targeted prospecting, you need to build your email list. Now, the goal of building a B2B list is to create a highly dependable and targeted lead list. You don’t want to waste weeks or even months emailing a lead on your list just to discover that this person isn’t a good fit for your product, or worse, that they’ve left the company.

In Comes SalesIntel:

SalesIntel takes the guesswork out of constructing B2B lists. Even for people with no prior experience with B2B list generation, SalesIntel is both accurate and simple to use.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you use SalesIntel to improve your B2B list-building efforts.

Step 1: Sign up for SalesIntel

When trying out a new tool, do it without spending any money. To get started, simply sign up for SalesIntel.

Step 2: Input Your Search Criteria Using the Left-Hand Panel

It’s time to start your first search after you’ve navigated to SalesIntel’s dashboard.

Fill up your search parameters on the left-hand panel. Let’s say you’re seeking leads in the SaaS space. Check SaaS after you’ve navigated to “Industry.”

Firmographic and technographic data sets can help you narrow down your search even more.

Step 3: Decide Which Prospects to Get in Touch With

You will get a list of prospects once you’ve applied all of the essential criteria to fit your ICP. To learn more about each prospect, tap on their name. This will send you to a page with information on the title, contact information, and other details such as the type of software they use, the size of their company, and so on.

And You Are Done!

2. Start Sales Conversations

According to research, fear is the human reaction to a call from a stranger, even an unfamiliar business. According to a study, 11-17 percent of business prospects were irritated by cold calls because they were afraid.
On your 1,000th call of the day, nothing turns a prospect off faster than feeling like you’re reading from a script. Before someone simply apologizes and hangs up the phone, you must somehow establish a connection, pique someone’s interest in your goods, and begin the sales process.

According to Judith E. Glazer, a conversational intelligence expert. You and your consumer must “co-create an environment where she perceives the benefit of your product without fear of suspicion in you.”

Suppose you are selling your SaaS product to Mr. Smith (who is a marketing manager at your potential account) on a call, and after a quick intro, you launch into your pitch, full of enthusiasm.

And the sales rep goes on throwing darts in the dark without any clear target.

SalesIntel Leads to Productive First Conversations:

SalesIntel helps you understand your prospects with included technographic and firmographic data. This helps you tailor your sales pitch to keep the conversation engaging and meaningful. Additionally, SalesIntel also helps you to identify the accounts that are actively looking for similar products or services like yours using buying intent data.

Want to know how Intent Data works for you?

3. Setting the Sales Sequences

Sales sequencing is a great approach to take the uncertainty out of the sales process and let your SDRs know exactly what to do next to move a prospect along. A sales sequence is a set of different sales touchpoints that are scheduled to be given at a predetermined time and interval. These touchpoints can include SMSs, social messages, phone calls, and other sales tasks in addition to emails.

The most effective sales sequences find the ideal balance between automation and personalization. Sales teams may use sequencing to improve their performance and execution while staying top of mind with their prospects.

Customization is crucial to the success of most sales sequences. Customized sequences can be added to your own best sales practices and shared across your sales staff if they work as planned.

You will need information on what your targeted prospects are doing, what they’re looking for, and whether they’re qualified or ready to buy to create tailored sequences.

SalesIntel Helps Grow Your List

You can create custom contact lists, locate prospects who suit your ICP, and get data human-verified quickly using SalesIntel’s Research on Demand.

You can request expedited human verification of current connections, check their progress, and configure them to auto-export to your systems upon completion – all from within the portal.

If you don’t locate who you’re looking for, you may request a specialized research study to find the connections who are the best fit for your target market. Our research team will work with you to determine your Ideal Customer Profile and provide a personalized list in those circumstances.

4. Qualifying Leads and Lead Scoring

The goal of lead qualifying is to sort through your list of leads and determine which ones are most likely to convert into paying clients. To guarantee that the focus is on the right leads, you must identify and recognize leads on three levels.

Organizational Level – Evaluate if they are the right fit
Objective: Identify if the company matches your Ideal Consumer Profile (ICP).

Opportunity Level – Identify if there is an opportunity for a deal
Objective: Prioritize the lead by identifying how soon the deal can be closed.

Stakeholder Level – Identify the key decision-maker(s)
Objective: Identify the key decision-maker(s) who will sign off on the deal.

Having said that, keeping website forms short is the new marketing trend for building lead lists as it improves the form submission rate. However, it is not a salespeople-friendly trend as it adds to their task of collecting other valuable data for qualification. Unless you have the complete and necessary information about your lead, you cannot be sure whether the lead fits in your ICP and the qualification criteria.

Additionally, you must identify the low-hanging fruit – the ready-to-buy leads. Lead scoring helps in streamlining this process. However, it is crucial how you give the score to the leads.

SalesIntel Fast-Tracks Lead Qualification

SalesIntel’s data enrichment feature helps you to achieve data completeness in a few clicks.

Provide your demand generation team with all of the information they require. You can schedule your database to be expanded automatically whenever a new contact or account is added or use filters to fill in the gaps manually. The functionality can be completely customized to meet your specific enrichment requirements.

• To have a deeper understanding of outreach or tailor your content, set up auto enrichment, such as adding details after a name and email form submission.
  Keep your contacts and accounts up to date with the most recent information to combat data deterioration.
• Add touch and firmographic information to event leads to enrich and attach them. SalesIntel includes historical match rate statistics going back ten years, as well as matching against a contact’s career history.
• Add a salesperson and more to every lead or communication you’ve added to your framework.

SalesIntel’s Intent Data kick starts the process of identifying the ready-to-buy leads who are at the decision stage. Buyer Intent Data data helps you to identify those prospects who are actively engaged in a buying decision based on the type of content they are consuming.

Here’s how Intent data looks in the SalesIntel portal.

SalesIntel has simplified intent data search in our B2B data portal. You can acquire the relevant data you need to enhance lead generation rapidly.

Want to reach the ready-to-buy leads and capitalize on the opportunity before they reach your competitors?

5. Closing

We all want to put our buyers at the heart of our marketing, sales, and customer service. To close more deals, you need to make sure you are on the right path to understanding them.

The first advantage of having a prospect’s direct mobile number is obvious: more opportunities to contact decision-makers.

Direct dials and mobile numbers play a crucial role, especially when you have shared the pricing and now want to close the deal. Follow-ups are crucial at this stage, and emails often get a slow response. Here’s when direct dials are needed. Reps are 46% more likely to connect when dialing a direct line at the director level, according to studies. Direct dialing increases the likelihood of your VPs connecting by 147%.

Using SalesIntel’s mobile numbers

ScaleX recently ran a controlled experiment in which they attempted to contact 100+ C-level executives using switchboards, direct calls, and SalesIntel’s mobile numbers to assess their effectiveness, and the results are eye-opening. But, before we get there, let’s go over their process for assessing effectiveness.

They chose 100 VP and C-level targets at random and phoned them using a switchboard, direct calls, and mobile numbers from SalesIntel, respectively. They kept track of how many calls were made and how many connections were created. This resulted in the Dial to Connect Ratio, which is one of the most important sales benchmarks for determining the quality and usefulness of contact data.

They dialed 49 numbers and had 5 conversations. That is, the Dial to Connect Ratio was 10:1.

With this experiment, it is clear that SalesIntel’s direct work mobile numbers are 5X to 7X more successful for connecting with prospects, especially at a time when a large percentage of employees work from home.

6. Client Retention, Cross-Selling, and Up-Selling

The more high-quality business data you have, the easier it will be to spot indicators that your customers are eager to expand into new product lines or renegotiate their current contracts. It is equally important to focus on customer experience (CX) to ensure that you not only retain customers but also create up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.

CX begins when potential customers conduct an internet search and continues during all subsequent interactions, including sales, after-sales conversations, demos, repurchases, and word-of-mouth recommendations.

Businesses are also waking up to the need to improve CX for customer retention and increased revenue.

A comprehensive B2B database will process enormous amounts of data, recognize key occurrences in your primary accounts, and notify you when any associated shifts in your customers’ companies suggest a probability of upselling or cross-selling have occurred.

The only challenge is collecting the right data in one place. Accessing separate data points from across various systems can be confusing and cause human error.

SalesIntel Helps You With Its Comprehensive B2B Data

The more you know about your customers, the more you’ll be able to provide a pleasant customer experience. You can accomplish this by utilizing firmographic and technographic data. Use your present customers’ experiences to guide product development. For example, can you imagine your customers implementing a new solution that you might offer?

Having an awareness of your existing clients’ revenue opportunities, the size of your organization, locations, new technology introduced, and other critical details enables your team to up-sell and cross-sell.

SalesIntel gathers all of the “must-have” data in one place to make data collection quick, easy, and secure. You can sort the data in SalesIntel based on firmographic, technographic, and Buyer Intent data. The intent data can reveal what your clients are searching for, and if you sense the opportunity, you can approach them like – “Hey, here’s our new product that you might be interested in.” Or if you see that the company has generated high revenue, you can approach them to go for a higher package to utilize more features.

Follow a Streamlined Sales Process and Sales will Follow You

Long story short – Including SalesIntel in your sales process can increase your chances of success by being more effective in three vital areas:

• First, you can have a better impact on clients and can find more potential customers and know-how to drive them towards a purchase decision.
• Second, you can grow skills that will reflect a higher closing rate.
• Third, you can develop time and task management techniques that will allow your team to invest more time in selling.