Achieve Your B2B Sales Goals in Record Time with These Tools

Amazon QuickSight Delivers Enhanced Sales Order Analytics

It’s the end of a challenging year, and you’re beyond busy. That’s why we’re going to save you a lot of time by reading your mind: you need to achieve your B2B sales goals fast.

And since time is money, you can’t afford to waste a second on unproven tools. After all, you have a quota to hit. So, here’s a quick overview of a half dozen tools your organization needs to maximize your sales performance.

The right tools for boosting B2B sales

Simply put, a sales tool is any device that can help identify prospects, convert them into potential clients, and enable you to interact with them in a timely manner that’s beneficial to you both.

A multitude of products fit this description, but the handful we’d like to focus on are ones we feel can benefit you the most in the categories of:

  • CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
  • CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote)
  • Sales Automation
  • Sales Intelligence
  • Sales Analytics
  • Collaboration

CRM

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform is the central hub for all of your sales interactions, and in this role, Salesforce is a definite frontrunner. To sum it up, Salesforce consolidates all of your prospect and customer data, enabling you to cross-sell and upsell as needed to effectively win customers and grow your business. You can integrate your website, email, chat, social media, phone calls, marketing materials—virtually every point of customer engagement you have.

Nearly 70% of business buyers expect an “Amazon-like” buying experience from their business vendors. —salesforce.com

Sales teams that are succeeding already have a CRM tool in place. According to research, top sales teams 1) use a single view of the customer, 2) deploy self-service and automation to free up time for selling, 3) trade intuition for data-driven insights, and 4) adopt artificial intelligence to bolster performance.

But that’s only the beginning. With Salesforce at the core, you can benefit even further by integrating modern Cloud-based platforms and legacy on-premise ERP systems using technologies such as Cast Iron, MuleSoft, Informatica, and Oracle SOA.

CPQ

CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) simplifies and expedites the sales process by helping reps sell the right product combinations, gain control over discounting, and automate approvals. Products with complex options – product customizations (sizes, styles, colors), bundling options, tiered pricing, etc. – require a sophisticated tool, like CPQ, to clearly present those options to the end user.

Oracle CPQ and Salesforce Revenue Cloud (which includes CPQ) are top CPQ options that keep sales teams from being bogged down in spreadsheets and emails as they attempt to price products or chase down contract approvals. CPQ gives your team complete visibility into what’s being offered and what’s being sold—with real-time software assistance that suggests ways to increase profits and boost sales volume. And thanks to the ability to track, analyze, and forecast, your company can introduce all-new revenue models. Reps are given everything they need to make the deal and move on to the next sale. Meanwhile, buyers get the best-in-class service and product expertise they expect.

Sales Automation

Sales automation is exactly what it sounds like—a way to streamline manual, time-consuming sales tasks so that your entire sales team can be more responsive and consistent while ensuring nothing slips through the cracks.

79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for three or more years. —Pardot.com

Tools like Oracle Sales Automation are designed to eliminate friction by bringing your tools and data into one intuitive interface. Through AI-guided selling, your team can view sales win probability scores based on customer attributes, pipeline stage, sales history, and more.

Sales Intelligence

Sales intelligence helps your sales team know who to contact, what they should focus on, and when they should reach out.

A key sales tool in this space comes from none other than the social network for all-things-business, LinkedIn, with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Whereas with the free version of LinkedIn, users can’t directly message anyone outside of their network, with Sales Navigator you can. And, no surprise, it integrates with popular tools such as Salesforce.

You can find ideal prospects using Advanced Lead and Company Search, discover the right people with Lead Recommendations, save the leads and accounts you’re selling to and log Sales Navigator activity to CRM with CRM Integration, and more.

Sales Analytics

Sales analytics software enables teams to access reports for tracking and evaluating sales productivity, and thereby forecast sales based on the most up-to-date learnings.

For instance, Tableau makes it possible for team members to share these reports in the form of customized dashboards, and gain insight into what is and isn’t working using clean and validated data.

Sales teams can get answers to relevant questions such as:

  • How much of our pipeline is at risk due to the pandemic?
  • Which segments are particularly impacted?

Dashboards can be organized using information relevant to the audience—as quarterly forecasts, by sales territories, as overview information targeted to executives, and more.

Collaboration

When reviewing and trading information is a key component of the job, it’s helpful to have access to the information you need—securely, and in real time.

Conga Collaborate lets you easily create, share, and store documents online. And since every business and customer is unique, a wizard-based tool enables you to customize according to your unique needs.

Status updates and in-depth analytics let you know who is viewing your document instantly so you can see what content is vital to them and personalize your response for a timely follow-up.

Once again, you can easily integrate with the platforms you already have, so you can auto-generate content in a document based on data in your CRM.

With the challenges you face every day in B2B sales, give yourself every advantage possible to achieve digital commerce success. Contact ArganoKeste to start using the right sales tools for your organization.