These Are the Top Sales Skills According to 9 Sales Leaders

Rahul Mathew on November 14, 2024

On every sales team, there are high performers and low performers. Then, there are the folks who fall somewhere in between.

Often, revenue leaders resign themselves to the fact that a small group of top performers will always drive the lion’s share of sales. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Your top performers are those who have mastered the top sales skills they need for success. Once you identify those top sales skills, you can deliver training, coaching, and enablement that helps every rep build the competencies and behaviors needed to crush quota every quarter.

But what are the top sales skills for revenue teams?

Recently, we asked a group of revenue leaders what their teams’ top sales skills are. Based on their feedback, we’ve compiled a list of the seven top sales skills every rep needs for success.

1. Product knowledge

Sales reps need up-to-date product knowledge to answer prospects’ questions, address competitor comparisons, and run confident demos. David Bitton, co-founder at DoorLoop, explained it as: 

Customers will ask unexpected or difficult questions. Having a profound grasp of your product will reduce the likelihood of salespeople getting caught off-guard and stumbling over their answers.
David Bitton headshot
David Bitton
Co-founder, DoorLoop

The more your sellers know about your product, the better they’ll be able to tailor a demo or sales presentation to each prospect’s particular needs or challenges. “You must know your product inside and out,” said Freya Ward, global sales director at Headley Media. “You need to be able to deal with any questions a client may raise and handle any potential objections they may have with confidence. You also need to understand exactly how the product will help the customer and why it is they need it,” she added.

Run dedicated training sessions with your product team when you launch product updates or new features. These will allow your reps to get hands-on experience with your product and learn how to use it in a structured setting. Then run short quizzes to test their knowledge about your new features and virtual role-plays or practice demos to check that they are ready to present your new products to potential customers.

2. Active listening

Active listening helps sellers strengthen their rapport with customers. Cayla Thurman, business reputation consultant at Rize Reviews, explained, “Active listening is all about staying in the moment and making sure that you understand what the buyer is saying. You can rephrase what the buyer just said, verify if you got the message correctly, or slow the conversation down to ensure that you are perceived as an effective sales consultant.”

As well as helping build customer relationships, active listening is important for companies that take a more consultative approach to sales. This is the case for Frontify, and Stephanie McSwiney, their VP of sales, told us:

Our AEs really need to understand the process and drivers of our customers and match them with the different use cases for our product. It's often a very educational sell, so really understanding the client by active listening is key.
Stephanie McSwiney
VP of Sales

You can assess reps’ active listening skills by reviewing call recordings, listening back, or reading call transcripts. You want to see a good split in the talk time, with prospects talking more than your sellers. You can also look for key questions or phrases, such as, “Did I understand that correctly?” or “Have I got that right?” These questions demonstrate that a rep actively engages with what a prospect tells them.

3. Prospecting

Sales development reps (SDRs) need strong prospecting skills to find and reach out to good-fit potential customers, so they can maintain a healthy sales pipeline and hit quota. According to Salesforce , sales professionals spend about 9% of their time each week researching their prospects.

This might,” include seeking information about the company and looking up decision-makers on social media platforms like LinkedIn. Thurman explained: 

Active listening is all about staying in the moment and making sure that you understand what the buyer is saying. You can rephrase what the buyer just said, verify if you got the message correctly, or slow the conversation down to ensure that you are perceived as an effective sales consultant.
Cayla Thurman
Rize Reviews

Using a revenue enablement platform like Mindtickle helps you provide AI-powered training and coaching for your reps. We found that cold email intros are the top use case for written role-plays in the Mindtickle platform as reps work to develop their prospecting and outreach skills.

4. Negotiating

Negotiation is important for keeping deals moving forward and overcoming potential objections and blockers to closing deals. Tim Clarke, director of sales and marketing at SEOblog.com, explained, “A sales representative should have solid negotiation skills to create a tailored experience for their customers, helping [customers] get the products or services they want while also ensuring that their company benefits from their customers’ decisions.”

Nina Pączka, community manager at Zety, has a clear idea of what reps with strong negotiation skills look like. She believes that: 

A good negotiator takes customer objections and turns them to the company's advantage. They are assertive in finalizing the deal, showing different solutions that will appeal to the customer.
Nina Pączka
Zety

You can assess your reps’ negotiation skills by listening to their call recordings for later-stage sales conversations with prospects. Alternatively, your reps can run practice calls with their peers to see how their colleagues approach negotiation, learn from each other, and identify negotiation tactics that work in real selling scenarios.

5. Identifying and understanding customer needs

Reps need to identify the challenges customers face and understand what they want from a product like yours. Otherwise, they won’t be able to show how your product will meet customer needs and resolve their pain points. “A good salesperson has to be able to listen to clients and understand their needs rather than just jumping in with a sales pitch,” said Ward.

To understand customer needs, sellers need to ask thoughtful, relevant questions. Ng Jiong Han, CSO at Novocall, said, “The ability to ask the right questions is an essential skill. It’s important because SDRs understand and magnify prospects’ problems by asking the right questions. With this, they can easily position themselves to help prospects solve their problems without being pushy.”

Aneet Narang, Head of Global Revenue Enablement at PayPal, also understands the importance of identifying and understanding customer needs.

One piece of advice for those struggling to prove ROI is prioritizing fostering a customer-centric mindset, particularly by focusing on sales managers and implementing data-driven decision-making processes.
Aneet Narang
Paypal

Once a seller understands customer needs well, they’re better equipped to deliver solutions and experiences that align with those needs. “A seller needs to have attention to detail and be able to manipulate data and identify patterns from multiple data streams to translate it into a story for buyers,” said Derrell James, CRO at Juniper Networks.

This is another area where reviewing call recordings can pay off. A conversation intelligence tool like Mindtickle’s Call AI can identify the main themes and topics covered on a call. You can also track mentions of specific keywords, such as common challenges or competitors.

6. Written and verbal communication

Soft sales skills like effective communication are just as important for sellers to master as hard skills. Clarke explained, “Salespeople must know how to communicate effectively throughout the sales cycle and be confident in speaking or presenting, whether through video conference or in person.”

Your reps’ communication skills affect relationship building and their ability to confidently explain your product’s benefits. Many companies think that verbal communication skills are necessary for sales reps but don’t look so closely at written communication. But email and outreach messages are a core part of the sales process. Poor written communication can create an unprofessional first impression and lead to missed opportunities for your team.

Some revenue leaders predict that sales reps will start to take ownership of inbound lead-generation campaigns and work more closely with marketing departments in the future. With that in mind, we wanted to bring in the perspective of demand generation.

Tristan Harris, demand generation marketing manager at Thrive Agency, agrees that communication skills are essential.

You need to be comfortable communicating with your clients, customers, and peers in various situations. These instances include knowing how to ask clear and concise questions, effectively communicating and resolving customer complaints, and speaking confidently on the phone or in the video.
Tristan Harris
Thrive Agency

7. Coachability

Coachability is your reps’ ability to receive and act on feedback to develop and improve their skills. It can be the difference between a top-performing rep and a low-performing one.

Srikanth Pendyala, SDR team lead at Outplay, said, “Many sales leaders I talk to tell me how important it is for them to hire SDRs who are coachable. Yet there is no yardstick to measure that skill. So we bring an element of coaching into our interview process. No matter how good the rep is, if they are not ready to unlearn and learn new things, we do not make an offer.”

Krishna Saw, Director Digital Transformation & Adoption at Splunk also understands the importance of coachability.

We use coaching sessions to build a feedback model between our managers and our reps. The reps are coached by the managers, who can then better assess reps’ skills in order to prescribe extra studies or remediation.
Krishna Saw
Splunk

An AI-driven sales coaching program can improve performance levels across your team, combining deal-specific coaching with more general skills training. It helps you personalize your coaching and training to focus on the individual skills and behaviors that each rep is struggling with, so they can make targeted improvements.

Document your team’s top sales skills in an ideal rep profile

Which skills are frequently displayed by the most successful salespeople at your organization? Once you’ve identified the skills, behaviors, and competencies that matter most to your business, document them in an ideal rep profile (IRP). You can then use your IRP in your hiring process to bring on new team members with the skills that will set them up for success.

Ideal rep profile competencies

Empower your sellers to master the skills that matter

Hiring great-fit sales reps is a good starting point. But while many buy into the myth that great sellers are born, not made, that’s not the case. Instead, when you identify the right sales skills, you can work to create an entire team of top-performing sales reps.

Once you’ve identified the top sales skills at your organization, you can measure each seller against this gold standard. You’ll identify the weaknesses of each seller, and you can use that insight to deliver targeted training, coaching, and enablement to close gaps.

Every member of your team will master top sales skills and be well-equipped to engage buyers and close deals.

Build a Stronger Sales Team with Mindtickle

Ready to see how Mindtickle can help you deliver targeted training, coaching, and enablement that ensures each seller can master the top sales skills they need to succeed?

Request Your Demo

This blog was originally published in May 2022 and updated in November 2024. 

The Sales Cycle: What is it and How to Optimize it for a Better Sales Process

Rahul Mathew on November 8, 2024

In a perfect world, every prospect that reached out to your business would be ready to sign a contract on the spot. But we all know that’s not reality.

Instead, sellers must navigate the sales cycle – and work to keep buyers engaged every step of the way. This can be challenging, as research tells us the average B2B sales cycle lasts six months. For some industries, it’s even longer.

The average B2B sales cycle lasts

0 months

Defining your sales cycle is like providing a map for your sellers. You’re giving sellers a proven, repeatable framework they can follow to close more deals, faster. Plus, when you have an optimized sales cycle, you can more accurately predict revenue.

But what exactly is a sales cycle – and how can you optimize yours to drive better sales outcomes? We’ll answer those questions and more in this post.

What is a sales cycle?

At this point, you may be asking yourself, “What is a sales cycle?” So, let’s start by clarifying what it is. For this blog, we’re specifically focusing on the B2B sales cycle.

A sales cycle is the series of stages the sales team goes through when closing deals. The B2B sales cycle incorporates everything from initial contact to contract signature.

Sales cycle and sales process are two phrases that are used often. However, it’s important to note that these two things aren’t the same.

The sales cycle describes the steps a seller completes to close a deal. The sales process, on the other hand, describes how those steps are completed. Said another way, the sales cycle is the “what” and the sales process is the “how.”

The length of a sales cycle varies widely based on factors including industry, product, and price point – among others. For example, a B2C sales cycle is typically much shorter than a B2B SaaS sales cycle. That’s because B2B deals are often larger and involve more stakeholders.

Sales organizations need to define the sales cycle. But why?

Defining the sales cycle stages helps ensure sellers are following a repeatable framework every time. Sellers can visualize how the process should look – and what steps they need to take when.

Identifying sales cycle stages can also help sales leaders assess the pipeline and understand where deals are getting stuck. These insights can shed light on opportunities to improve sales processes – and sales outcomes.

In addition, a well-defined sales cycle makes it easier for sales leaders to more accurately predict future sales.

B2B vs. B2C sales cycles

Sales cycles are an element of both B2B and B2C sales. However, B2B and B2C don’t look the same.

The biggest differences between B2B and B2C sales cycles lies in their length and complexity.

The B2B cycle is typically much longer than the B2C cycle. While B2C can be completed in minutes, B2B sales can take months or even years.

Unsurprisingly, the B2B cycle is longer, as B2B sales are generally more complex than B2C sales.

For starters, B2C products are sold directly to individual consumers. On the other hand, B2B products are sold to entire businesses, and many people have a say in the decision. According to Gartner, the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution includes up to 10 decision-makers.

In addition, B2B purchases are typically much higher in value than B2C purchases. For example, purchasing an enterprise-wide software solution will be a much larger transaction than purchasing a personal computer.

What are the different sales cycle stages?

The sales cycle includes several different stages. What are they?

Cycle stages vary from company to company. However, most include the following stages.

Lead generation
Prospecting
Initial contact
Nurturing
Qualification + discovery
Demo
Objection handling
Closing

Lead generation

A lead is anyone who has taken action indicating interest in your company or your solutions. For example, they may have downloaded an eBook, signed up for your newsletter, or requested a demo on your website.

However, not all leads fit your products and services well. Sellers must determine which leads are qualified, which brings us to the next stage.

Prospecting stage

Prospecting is the sales stage focused on identifying potential customers who are a good fit for your products or services. Often, organizations develop ideal customer profiles (IRPs) to help sales teams understand which prospects may (or may not) be a good fit. That way, sellers can spend their time on prospects who are most likely to convert.

Initial contact stage

Once you’ve determined that a prospective customer is a good fit, it’s time to contact them. Common methods of contacting prospective customers include:

  • Phone calls and messages
  • Emails
  • LinkedIn messages

The goal of the initial contact phase is to successfully connect with the prospect and schedule an appointment to explore their key challenges and how your offerings can help them overcome those challenges.

Nurturing stage

Sometimes, a prospect is willing to schedule a meeting and make a purchase quickly. But in the world of B2B sales, that’s usually not the case. Instead, prospects need more time. But that doesn’t mean sellers should simply step away and wait. Instead, they must nurture their prospects.

During the nurturing stage, sales teams must deliver content that proves their value and expertise and keeps prospects engaged. This sales stage is a collaborative effort between sales and marketing. In collaboration with sales, marketing teams must develop content that resonates with sellers. This content can then be distributed via automated drip campaigns or directly from the sales rep.

The goal of the nurturing stage is to keep prospects engaged and interested so they eventually move forward to the next step.

Qualification and discovery stage

Qualification is determining whether or not the prospect is a good fit. During this stage, you must do your homework to identify a prospect’s challenges to assess if your product or service will address these challenges. In addition, you’ll need to gauge a prospect’s interest and timeline.

Reps can uncover this information by researching, conversing with prospects, and leveraging revenue intelligence tools.

During the qualification and discovery stage, you’ll also want to ensure you’re working with the right contact at the company with decision-making power. If not, you can find out how to contact the right contact.

Demo stage

This is the stage where you pitch your product or service offerings to the customer. This might happen in person or via a video call.

A generic, one-size-fits-all pitch isn’t enough to move a deal forward. Instead, you must take the information you gathered during the earlier stages to develop a personalized pitch. That pitch must show prospects that you understand their challenges – and know your solution will solve them.

Objection handling stage

In an ideal world, you’d pitch your solution to a customer, and they’d immediately decide. But in the world of B2B sales, that’s not reality. Prospective customers typically have questions and concerns. These are raised and addressed during the objection-handling stage.

Sales organizations must ensure their sellers have the tools, information, and content necessary to effectively overcome prospects’ objections.

Closing stage

The closing stage is the final phase cycle. It’s the moment of truth, where you either win a deal or lose it.

It’s important to remember that most prospects aren’t ready to sign on the dotted line after the first meeting. This is especially true in the world of B2B sales. Instead, it typically requires several touchpoints.

How to optimize your sales cycle

As we touched on earlier, sales cycles aren’t “one-size-fits-all.” Instead, the cycle at one company may look completely different from another.

It’s important to ensure your B2B cycle is optimized for your business. After all, an optimized sales cycle means your sellers can close deals more effectively and efficiently.

In theory, optimizing sounds simple enough. But in reality, it can be challenging.

However, there are some important steps you can take to optimize your sales cycle.

Determine your average sales cycle length

Cycle lengths vary from company to company. It’s important to pinpoint yours.

To calculate your average length, divide the total number of days spent for every deal closed by your team by the total number of deals. The result is the average length for the entire sales team.

Remember: this average cycle combines data from all of your sellers. That includes your top sellers who crush quota month after month and the worst sellers who “phone it in” every month.

As such, the average length across the whole team may not accurately reflect the length it should take.

For that reason, it’s a good idea also to calculate the average cycle of your top performers. This number is a more accurate indicator of how long it should take. What’s more, it can serve as a challenging, yet achievable goal for your entire sales team to aim for.

Track conversion for every stage 

Sales organizations should measure the percentage of deals that are closing. Most do this already.

However, it’s important to take things a step further.

If you’re not already, track conversion rates for every step of your cycle. In other words, determine the portion of prospects advancing to the next stage of the sales cycle – and the portion dropping off.

Once you identify where prospects are dropping off, you can determine ways to decrease drop-offs and improve outcomes.

For example, you may find that marketing-generated leads rarely advance to prospects. This is an opportunity for marketing and sales to align on what a good-fit lead looks like – and how the organization can more effectively target them via marketing channels.

Or, perhaps there you notice a big drop off at the objection handling stage of the sales cycle. This may indicate reps need more training and coaching on how to handle objections.

Adjust to the needs of your buyers

Each buyer has unique needs and challenges. It’s important to understand those needs and challenges – and adjust your sales cycle to reflect them.

In addition, be sure your sales cycle reflects any industry-specific needs. For example, imagine your company markets its products to banking and financial services professionals. This is a highly regulated industry. Any potential software products must undergo a process to ensure they are secure. This process is unavoidable for sellers and should be reflected in the sales cycle.

Automate or streamline non-selling activities

Sales reps only have so many hours in the day. Unfortunately, a small percentage of that time is actually spent selling. Research from Salesforce found that on average, reps spend a mere 28% of their week selling.

Reps spend only

of their time selling
0 %

When reps don’t have time to focus on selling, it slows down the sales cycle. So, look for opportunities to automate or streamline those tedious (but necessary) tasks that take up a lot of your reps’ time.

For example, your reps may spend a lot of time searching for content to use during the sales cycle. If they can’t find what they’re looking for, they may even create their own content. Housing your content in a sales content management solution makes it easier and faster for reps to find what they’re looking for.

Then, your reps can focus their time and attention on accelerating deals through the sales cycle.

Streamline onboarding and ongoing training

Every sales leader wants new reps onboarded yesterday. After all, the sooner reps finish their onboarding, the sooner they can focus on moving deals through the sales cycle as efficiently as possible.

Look for opportunities to streamline your onboarding process, without compromising quality. Then, your reps will be ready to hit the ground running faster.

Remember: rep training shouldn’t end at onboarding. Rather, ongoing training is key to ensuring reps understand things like sales cycle, sales methodology, and product offerings.

Analyze your reps’ performance

It’s essential to measure sales reps’ performance on an ongoing basis. Of course, sales metrics and training completion metrics are important. But they don’t tell the whole story.

It’s imperative to ensure each of your reps has the skills and competencies they need to be effective, efficient sellers. If they don’t have what it takes, deals will get lost or stalled – and your sales cycle will be unnecessarily long.

Each sales organization must determine what skills and competencies their customer-facing roles need for success. Increasingly, organizations define these skills and competencies in an ideal rep profile (IRP).

Then, reps should be measured against this “gold standard” on an ongoing basis. That way, sales managers and sales enablement teams can identify weaknesses. Then, they can deliver training, coaching, and tools to boost lagging skills – and improve reps’ abilities to effectively and efficiently close deals.

Centralize sales engagement

The road to a closed deal has many touchpoints. All too often, this road is full of friction.

For example, there may be 20 or more email strings related to a single deal – each with a different list of recipients. It’s easy for key information and content to get lost in the mix.

This is bad news for sellers as inefficiency can slow (or even kill) deals.

Today, some revenue productivity platforms incorporate digital sales rooms. Essentially, these are collaborative portals where all members of the buyer and seller team can communicate, share content, and move deals forward. Digital sales rooms drive efficiency – and decrease the length of the sales cycle. In addition, sellers can see how buyers engage with content and other information, which can help them determine what steps to take next.

Digital collaboration rooms

Is your sales cycle optimized for revenue growth?

Every revenue leader wants their teams to close more deals. But leaving them to reinvent the wheel each time isn’t an effective approach.

Instead, it’s essential to develop a well-defined sales cycle. It’ll serve as a roadmap, helping sellers determine what steps to take to engage buyers and close deals. Furthermore,
a well-defined sales cycle makes it easier to predict revenue and identify areas for optimization. With an optimized sales cycle, your teams can close more deals faster.

But defining your sales cycle isn’t enough to guarantee success. You must also ensure your sellers have what it takes to engage buyers throughout every step of the sales cycle. A revenue enablement platform like Mindtickle ensures sales teams have the content, training, tools, and information they need to successfully navigate every step of the sales cycle – all in one location.

Mindtickle in Action

Ready to see how Mindtickle enables sales teams to be ready for any deal at any stage of the sales cycle? 

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This post was originally published in January 2024 and updated in November 2024. 

10 Sales Closing Techniques That’ll Help You Meet Quota

Rahul Mathew on October 31, 2024

You’ve spent weeks (or even months) getting to know a prospect, understanding their pain points, and presenting a solution to help them overcome their challenges. Along the way, you’ve answered all of their most pressing questions. Now, all that’s left to do is close the deal.

Sales closing is a critical part of the sales journey. But often, it’s easier said than done.

Fortunately, sales closing skills can be taught. By using proven sales closing techniques and adopting best practices, you can win more business and reach your sales quota every quarter.

Read on to explore what sales closing is, why it’s important, and which sales closing techniques and best practices to keep at the ready.

What is sales closing, and why is it important?

Sales closing is the process of finalizing (or closing) the sales cycle. In other words, it’s the process of getting your prospect to (finally) say “yes” to your offer so you can officially call it a done deal.

Why does sales closing matter?

It’s a critical step in the sales cycle. If you don’t close a sale, you won’t earn a customer or hit your sales quota, and your previous efforts in engaging the customer throughout the sales cycle will be in vain.

The bottom line is that when some team sellers haven’t mastered the art of closing a sale, quota attainment will suffer.

Though closing a sale sounds simple enough, it often isn’t. Research tells us the average close rate for B2B businesses sits around 30%. Furthermore, over a third of sellers say that closing is the most difficult part of their job.

The average close rate for B2B businesses is

0 %

All sellers – from beginners to veterans – can face challenges when closing a sale.

Revenue organizations must ensure their sellers have the skills and competencies needed to successfully close more deals. It’s imperative to provide the right sales training and enablement to ensure your teams have what it takes to close deals. AI-powered role plays can also help your sellers practice their sales closing skills as much as necessary before money is on the line.

10 winning sales closing techniques

There’s not just one way to close a deal. And there’s not a single sales closing script that works for every situation, every time.

Instead, there are a variety of sales closing techniques. Each has its unique style and can be effective in different sales scenarios.

Let’s look at 10 of top sellers’ best closing strategies.

Sales closing technique #1: The assumptive close

What is it: When a seller employs the assumptive sales closing technique, they confidently discuss next steps – for example, implementation or delivery – while assuming it’s a done deal. This approach can be particularly effective for veteran sellers who are well versed on whether a buyer is a good fit and truly ready to move forward.

Why does it work: When the seller is confident in their assumption that the deal will close, the client may go right along with it and agree to the deal.

Example: “It looks like our team has time for an implementation kick off call next Thursday. Or, is there a day that works better with your schedule?”

Sales closing technique #2: The “try before you buy” close

What is it: In this sales closing strategy, the seller offers the buyer an opportunity to try the product out before making a purchase. Often, this involves a free trial period. This sales closing technique is often called the “puppy dog close.”

Why does it work: Making a purchase involves risk. A free trial gives prospects a risk-free way to try out your solution. Once they see the impact firsthand, they’re more likely to move forward with a purchase.

Example: “I understand you still have reservations. What if I allowed you to try out our solution for free for two weeks? That way, you can see firsthand how it works with your other technologies and drives productivity gains/time savings.”

Sales closing technique #3: The opportunity cost close

What is it: Failure to take action has consequences. This sales closing technique is focused on conveying what a buyer has to lose by not purchasing your solution.

Why does it work: This technique helps buyers understand the risk of not moving forward with your company. It creates a sense of urgency, which may help you accelerate the sales cycle and close the deal.

Example: “I know you said your team spends a lot of time on [pain point], costing your company a lot of money. Moving forward with this solution will solve that problem and save you money. Are you ready to take the next step?”

Sales closing technique #4: The “now or never” close

What is it: This sales closing technique creates a sense of urgency so buyers are more likely to act – now. Like the opportunity cost close, this technique can create urgency by conveying the cost of not taking action. Or, sellers may offer buyers a special deal that’s only available if the buyer acts now.

Why does it work: All people can experience a fear of missing out (AKA FOMO). B2B buyers are no exception. When you create a sense of urgency by leveraging a limited time deal or communicating the cost of not taking action, they may be more willing to take prompt action.

Example: “I should mention that we’re offering a special deal right now. New customers who sign up during the month of November receive a 10% discount. We don’t run deals like this often. I don’t want you to miss out!”

Sales closing technique #5: The sharp angle close

What is it: This sales closing technique is all about addressing a prospect’s question or objection with another question that moves the deal closer to being closed.

Why does it work: This sales closing strategy helps buyers overcome their objections and come to a agreeable resolution for the buyer and seller alike.

Example: Let’s say a buyer asks for a 10% discount. The seller can say, “I can provide you that discount if you can sign by the end of the week. Does that work for you?”

Sales closing technique #6: The question close

What is it: This approach involves asking questions to uncover additional sales objections. Then, you can address those objections and close the deal.

Why does it work: By asking the right questions, you can get insight into your buyers objections. You’ll be more likely to close the deal by successfully overcoming those objections.

Example: “What’s your biggest hesitation about choosing this solution?”

Let’s say the buyer says, “I’m not sure my team will know how to use it.” You can respond by saying, “I understand. It’s typically easy for teams to get up and running on the solution. But we do offer onboarding and training to ensure every member knows how to use it. Can I tell you more about that?”

Sales closing technique #7: The commitment close

What is it: As the name suggests, this sales closing technique is all about getting a commitment from your prospect. It involves recapping your conversations – and then asking for the deal.

Why it works: This simple approach is so straightforward that it can often get a prospect to say “yes.”

Example: “I’ll be sure to connect you with those references I mentioned. Pending those conversations, are you ready to move forward?”

Sales closing technique #8: The summary close

What is it: The typical B2B sales cycle involves a number of sales interactions. The summary close is focused on wrapping these conversations up in a bow, by summarizing the value your solution will deliver to your product.

Why does it work: By reiterating the value of your solution and how it’ll address your prospect’s challenges, you’ll increase their likelihood of moving forward.

Example: “We’ve covered a lot. Let’s recap. You said your biggest pain point right now is [example]. This is how our platform will solve that pain point and help your team save time and money.”

Sales closing technique #9: The empathy close

What is it: This sales closing technique is about empathizing with your prospect and letting them know you understand where they’re coming from. It involves asking the right sales closing questions to understand the prospect’s perspective and offering support.

Why does it work: When a prospect feels heard and understood, they’ll see you as a trusted advisor. Buyers are more likely to move forward when they trust the seller.

Example: “I can see that this pain point causes a lot of stress on your team, and you’re under a lot of pressure from your boss to solve it. Let’s discuss how our solution can alleviate that burden for you and your team.”

Sales closing technique #10: The visual aid close

What is it: When sellers use the visual aid close, they leverage tools like charts, videos, and demos to support their messages. That way, sellers can see firsthand the value your solution can deliver.

Why does it work: Often, showing is more effective than simply telling. When you have the right visual aids to reinforce your messages, the buyer is more likely to move forward.

Example: “I think one of the best ways to understand the value of our solution is to see real-life results from one of our customers. If you take a look at this graph, you’ll see how this company started saving 10 hours per week and reduced their costs by 25% by using our solution. I can send you a video so you can hear directly from the customer.”

Sales closing best practices

The sales closing techniques we discussed can help you get more deals across the finish line.

Now, we’ll take a look at some sales closing best practices you can use to improve outcomes – no matter which sales closing technique you use.

Focus on value

All too often, B2B sales reps recite a generic list of features to their prospects. This approach isn’t effective.

Instead, aim to understand your prospects’ pain points. Then, focus on articulating how your solution will solve their unique challenges.

This approach will pay off.

According to a LinkedIn report, over half of B2B buyers are more likely to do business with a company if the sales rep understands their needs.

Maintain clear communication throughout the sales cycle

When the buyer and seller are aligned, sales cycles are shorter and deals are more likely to go through. Sellers must be sure to clearly communicate with buyers throughout the purchase journey.

This can get difficult, as B2B sales cycles are often long, and buying committees are large. According to Gartner, a typical B2B buying group includes up to 10 stakeholders – each with their own needs, preferences, and expectations.

The typical B2B buying group includes

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Digital sales rooms can be a particularly effective way to communicate and collaborate with buyers throughout the purchase journey. Sellers can share relevant content and information that resonates with each buying group member. Sellers can also gauge how buyers are engaging so they can tailor their approach and increase their likelihood of closing a sale.

Digital collaboration rooms

Ask for the sale

Asking for the sale may seem obvious. But often, sellers hesitate to come out and do so.

Research tells us around two-thirds of sales reps fail to actively ask for the sale during their interactions with buyers.

You won’t close any deals unless you ask for them, so be sure to ask.

Automate time-consuming processes and procedures

Recent research shows buyers spend less than 30% of their time selling. There’s no doubt most want to spend more time on revenue-generating activities. But they can’t because they’re bogged down with tedious (but necessary) tasks.

Look for opportunities to simplify and automate time-consuming processes and procedures. That way, your sales reps can spend more time engaging with prospects, increasing their sales closing rate.

For example, if you sales reps spend a lot of time searching for the right sales content, start using an AI-powered sales content management system. That way, sales reps can surface content and get content suggestions based on past performance. They can also use generative AI to draft contextual messages to accompany the content.

Copilot - Just in Time Enablement (2)

Deliver sales closing training and coaching

You might think sales closing is a skill sales reps either have or they don’t. But that’s not the case. With the right sales closing training, your entire team can master the sales closing skills needed to get more deals across the finish line.

In addition to providing sales closing training, be sure to give your reps opportunities to practice their skills before they take them to the field. For example, AI-powered role plays allow sales reps to practice their sales closing techniques in realistic scenarios with an AI-powered bot. The seller gets feedback throughout the role-play experience, which they can use to fine-tune their sales closing questions and techniques before money is on the line.

AI-Roleplay

Get insight into what’s happening in the field

Providing sales closing training and coaching is important. But it’s only effective if sellers are actually putting their sales coaching skills into practice while in the field.

If you’re not already, consider leveraging a conversation intelligence solution, which records, transcribes, and analyzes sales conversations. Sales reps get a score at the end of each sales call, as well as feedback they can implement to improve their skills – and their likelihood of closing a sale. Sales managers can look for trends to identify which reps might need additional sales closing coaching.

mt-platform-conversation-intelligence-screen

Start closing more deals with Mindtickle

Sales closing is a critical stage in the sales process. Mindtickle helps leading revenue organizations ensure their sellers have the knowledge, skills, and tools to close more deals.

With Mindtickle, organizations across industries can deliver tailored training and enablement to empower teams to master sales closing skills. Organizations like Trimble Viewpoint consistently get positive feedback from sales reps on how Mindtickle enables them to adopt best practices that help them close more deals.

Sales teams also leverage AI role plays within Mindtickle, which provides sellers with opportunities to hone their sales closing skills.

With Mindtickle’s conversation intelligence capabilities, sales leaders can determine whether or not sellers are putting their sales closing skills into practice.

Conversation intelligence delivers real-time seller feedback and helps sales leaders identify which sellers might need additional sales closing coaching. Organizations like Data Axle rely on Mindtickle’s conversation intelligence feature to understand what’s happening in the field so they can deliver targeted coaching that improves their sales closing rate.

Mindtickle leverages AI throughout the platform to streamline and automate time-consuming, mundane tasks. That way, sellers can spend more time delighting customers and closing deals.

For example, sellers can use Mindtickle Copilot to surface insights from recent sales interactions – without having to listen to call recordings or decipher handwritten notes. These insights can help sellers tailor their follow up for better results.

Copilot also empowers sales reps to get easy, fast answers to prospects’ questions – rather than waiting on a subject matter expert. This can accelerate the sales cycle and makes closing a sale much easier.

Close More deals With Mindtickle

Ready to see firsthand why leading revenue organizations depend on Mindtickle to equip their sellers with the training, skills, and information they need to boost their sales closing rates?

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Sales Methodology: What is it and How to Choose One for Your Business

Rahul Mathew on October 31, 2024

Every sales leader wants to improve sales performance and grow revenue. But sending your sellers out to fend for themselves isn’t the right way to achieve these goals.

Instead, you must set the foundation for sales success. A critical part of this is identifying and institutionalizing a sales methodology.

A sales methodology acts as a framework, guiding reps through the various stages of the sales process. By adopting the right sales methodology, your sellers can more effectively engage buyers throughout the sales cycle.

But with so many sales methodologies, it can be difficult to determine the right fit for your organization.

In this post, we’ll explore sales methodology and why it’s important. We’ll also share examples of some of the most common sales methodologies and provide practical guidance for choosing the one that’s right for your business.

What is a sales methodology?

A sales methodology is like a thread uniting different sales cycle stages. When your reps follow this thread, they know exactly what to say and when to say it, what buyers think at different times, and how to build better relationships. While the customers, products, and teams may change, the best sales methodologies can stay consistent because they’re based on best practices.

Of course, that’s not to say that a sales methodology is “one size fits all.” These frameworks can and should scale depending on new sales training materials, shifting buyer expectations, and what you learn in the ever-changing sales world.

Why is a sales methodology important for any business?

Sales reps might feel they have an instinct for making all the right moves in customer communication — and they could very well be right. The best sales methodologies don’t replace those instincts but rather build on them to create a shared, consistent approach that keeps every individual and team pushing in the same direction.

Here are a few more reasons you need a sales methodology:

Solid sales frameworks are flexible enough to enable accurate, personalized responses without changing your approach for every individual buyer.

Toggle ContentThese guidelines are informed by sales performance metrics and best practices, which means they’re based on what actually works instead of what should work.

A single sales methodology unites many sales processes to encompass every activity, interaction and stage for both buyers and sales reps.

Skip the guesswork and let your sales frameworks identify where and when a lead fits into your pipeline.

With the right set of guidelines, your reps will be better prepared to overcome sales objections, address hesitations and build trust — the first step toward more and better deals.

As your business and customers change, your sales methodology will too. You’ll have the insight, data and tools you need to identify what’s working, what isn’t and where improvements need to be made.

What’s the difference between a sales process and a sales methodology?

“Sales process” and “sales methodology” are often used interchangeably. Though the two concepts are certainly related, a sales process and methodology aren’t the same.

What’s the difference?

A sales process is a set of steps that sellers take when guiding a prospect through the purchase journey. That includes everything from initial contact to closing the sale. You can think of a sales process as the “what” of selling. In other words, what steps does a rep take to sell.

On the other hand, a sales methodology is the “how” of selling. It’s a philosophy or set of guiding principles behind how a seller completes the steps of the sales process.

Sales methodologies are widely adopted. In other words, many different companies use the same sales methodology. We’ll look closely at some of the most common sales methodologies shortly.

Conversely, sales processes are unique to each organization.

So, which is more important: a sales process or methodology?

The reality is that your sellers need both. By aligning on a sales methodology and developing the right sales processes, your sellers will be empowered to effectively engage with buyers and win (and retain) more of them as customers.

What are some common sales methodologies?

When choosing the best approaches for your teams, it’s often helpful to have sales methodology examples in front of you. Here are just a few to consider:

MEDICC

MEDDIC is an acronym that represents a comprehensive sales qualification framework. Each letter stands for a key element in the sales process.

  • Metrics refers to understanding the quantifiable goals and objectives of the customer.
  • Economic buyer refers to identifying the person with the authority and financial power to make purchasing decisions.
  • Decision criteria involve understanding the specific requirements and criteria that the customer uses to evaluate potential solutions.
  • Decision process refers to comprehending the steps and individuals involved in the customer’s decision-making process.
  • Identify pain involves discovering and understanding the customer’s challenges, problems, and pain points.
  • Champion refers to finding an internal advocate within the customer’s organization who supports and promotes your solution.

Takeaway: Use the MEDDIC framework to thoroughly understand customer needs and the decision-making process and leverage internal champions for successful sales.

BANT

BANT is a sales qualification methodology and assesses potential customers. It stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. Each element represents a crucial aspect of determining the viability of a sales opportunity.

  • Budget refers to understanding the prospect’s financial resources and whether they have the means to make a purchase.
  • Authority involves identifying the decision-makers and influencers involved in the buying process.
  • Need refers to assessing the prospect’s specific pain points and determining how well your product or service can address them.
  • Timeline involves understanding the prospect’s urgency and when they intend to make a decision or implement a solution.

Takeaway: Assess leads effectively using BANT: Determine budget, authority, need, and timeline to prioritize sales efforts and qualify potential opportunities.

Consultative selling

The most important part of consultative selling is right in its name: the consultation. Buyers come to you because they have unanswered questions, and they need your reps to act as guides. Key processes involve listening, communicating, and collaborating.

Takeaway: Consultative selling builds trust by being primarily informational instead of promotional. ​

Solution selling

Sometimes, customers already know exactly what their problem is — all you have to do is tell them what the solution can look like. Even before the first call, this sales methodology requires that your reps have a particularly solid understanding of:

  • The buyer
  • Their needs and challenges
  • The most targeted offerings for their situation

Takeaway: Solution selling is more focused on addressing a problem than selling a particular product or service.

Provocative selling

When you use this framework, your reps need to be able to identify pain points before buyers do and then provoke them to research solutions. In many ways, reps are “selling” problems first and products second.

Takeaway: Provocative selling is all about being proactive and giving customers what they didn’t even know they needed.

Challenger sales

Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson developed “The Challenger Sales Method.” In their book of the same name, they discuss various seller archetypes and identify the most successful: challengers, who represented 40% of high-performing sales reps in the authors’ study.

Takeaway: Challenger sales methodologies focus on empowering other rep archetypes to teach prospects, tailor their communications and take control of sales.

Inbound selling

In this sales methodology, you acknowledge that buyers are doing more work themselves and may not contact your reps until they’re well into the pipeline. That means sales might take a back seat for your reps as they educate and advise buyers.

Takeaway: With inbound selling, qualified leads come to you instead of the other way around — so while the sales processes might look different, they may be far more efficient.

SPIN selling

Neil Rackham’s book, “SPIN Selling,” builds a sales methodology around four key kinds of questions:

  • Situation: What is the customer’s current need or challenge
  • Problem: Where is the problem coming from?
  • Implication: What happens if nothing is done?
  • Need-payoff: What are the benefits of solving the problem?

Takeaway: When strung together, these kinds of questions allow reps to lead buyers on a kind of realization journey in which they connect their problems to specific solutions.

Target account selling

This sales methodology is all about research and automation. It’s an approach that emphasizes the importance of choosing the right accounts to focus on — those that will be most responsive and easiest to sell to.

Takeaway: Research is vital in all the best sales methodologies, but it’s at the heart of target account selling — so reps must fully understand personas, key decision-makers, in-depth challenge breakdowns, and more.

Sandler Selling Method

This approach is built on the concept that buyers and sellers must trust one another to have a successful relationship. That means there has to be communication, collaboration, and mutual respect. This methodology is similar to consultative selling but has a more prescriptive framework: building a relationship, quantifying the lead, and ultimately closing the deal.

Takeaway: The Sandler Selling Method works best when buyers want and need to be able to lean on reps as decision-making partners, not just sales experts.

How to identify and choose the right sales methodology for your business

Say you have a Software as a Service (SaaS) company. You do some research and find common approaches — but the best sales methodology for SaaS organizations isn’t the same as the best sales methodology for manufacturers, retailers, food sellers, or real estate agents.

So how do you choose the right one for you?

Most common sales methodologies, among organizations who have one

Source: 2022-2023 Sales Enablement Outlook Report. 

#1: Evaluate your business goals and objectives

Whether you’re trying to improve sales performance, boost revenue, grow your business, or achieve some other goal, it’s important to consider the future when deciding on a sales methodology. This helps align your sales team with your overall business objectives and makes sales activities much more efficient.

#2: Analyze target market and customers

To find out what works best for your customers, you must know who they are, how they think, and what markets they spend time in. With this analysis at your fingertips, you can choose methodologies that resonate with your audience instead of relying on an ill-fitting or “tone-deaf” approach.

#3: Consider business size and industry

Consider how many people and resources you can dedicate to a sales methodology. Is there too much to do, or do the tasks and approaches seem well-balanced? The size of your business will have a big influence on this, but so will your industry, which dictates much of what customers expect and how your sales processes need to work together.

#4: Experiment and evaluate

Remember that sales methodologies can be mixed, matched, and combined to make them work for you. Keep track of relevant data to see whether a certain approach is working or if you need to weave in concepts, processes or theories from other frameworks.

How to get started with implementing a sales methodology for your business

Once you’ve chosen a sales methodology, it’s time to jump in. Here’s how to get started:

Evaluate current skills

It’s important to know what your reps bring and what they’ll need to learn to adapt to a new sales methodology. This is also a chance to reflect on your sales training methodologies and fill in gaps.

Create new training material

As you train reps on the new sales methodology, make sure to cover:

  • Which of their former processes are sticking around
  • Which processes will be updated
  • Which processes will be completely changed
  • What your overall philosophy is
  • What your goals look like.
  • The benefits of the new methodology

Remember to make this sales training material consistent and easily accessible — not just to the sales teams but to all departments,

Assess and provide feedback

Track your reps’ learning curves and provide support, feedback, or coaching where they need it most. Remember to capture best practices and particularly helpful examples to build out your methodology going forward.

Putting your sales methodology to use

If you want to choose, implement, track, and improve a sales methodology, you can’t afford to do it in disparate systems. That’s not just bad news for your business outcomes; it also creates frustration for sales reps, other teams, and even customers.

Instead, unite your sales activities in a single revenue enablement platform. From onboarding and training to data capture, performance reviews, and ongoing learning, Mindtickle is your best bet for getting more out of sales methodologies.

Have you institutionalized a sales methodology?

Choosing a sales methodology is foundational to sales success. Yet, research shows that a significant portion of revenue organizations have yet to institutionalize a sales methodology.

If your teams aren’t aligned around a sales methodology, it’s time to change that. The guidance provided in this post can help you sift through your options and pinpoint the sales methodology that’ll work best for your business.

Ready to see how Mindtickle’s award-winning revenue enablement platform can help you deliver the training, coaching, and tools your sellers need to put your chosen sales methodology into practice? 

Mindtickle in action

From onboarding and training to data capture, performance reviews, and ongoing learning, Mindtickle is your best bet for getting more out of sales methodologies.

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This post was originally published in June 2023, updated in December 2023, and again in October 2024. 

12 of the Most Common Sales Objections (and How to Overcome Them)

Rahul Mathew on October 24, 2024

In a perfect world, every one of your sales interactions would go without a hitch. Your prospects would always be eager to move to the next stage of the sales process, and you’d never run into any sales objections.

But that’s not reality.

B2B buyers are more informed than ever. And often, they come into sales conversations with plenty of questions and sales objections in tow.

Sellers must become experts at overcoming sales objections to close more deals. The first step is to anticipate sales objections – and know which ones to expect.

In this post, we’ll explore:

  • What sales objections are
  • Why they matter
  • The different types of sales call objections
  • Examples of sales objections you’ll likely encounter in the field (and how to address them)
  • How AI-powered role-plays can ensure every seller knows how to overcome objections in sales

What is a sales objection and why is it important?

Later, we’ll examine the types and provide examples of each. But first, let’s lay the foundation by defining the phrase and exploring its role in the sales process.

Sales objections, defined

They are the reasons your prospect is hesitant to purchase your product. In other words, they’re the reasons a customer says “no” to taking the next step in the journey or making a purchase.

Of course, there may be any number of reasons why a prospect may have reservations about moving forward. Later on, we’ll take a closer look at some types of sales objections sellers are likely to encounter.

Why overcoming sales objections is critical

They’re inevitable. There’s no getting around that. Research tells us that 60% of customers say “no” four times before finally saying yes.

Customers say "no"

before saying "yes"
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Sure, encountering B2B sales objections can feel discouraging. But those “nos” don’t necessarily mean a deal is dead in the water.

If a sales rep has the right skills, they can effectively overcome sales objections and, ultimately, guide the prospect across the finish line. The best sales reps see them as an opportunity.

Many sellers throw in the towel when they encounter sales objections. According to statistics, a mere 44% of sales reps follow up after receiving a single “no” from a prospect. When a sales rep is persistent, they stand out from the competition – and it can pay off.

of reps don't follow up after hearing "no" from a prospect
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When a prospect raises objections, sales reps can ask the right questions to better understand their needs and motives. Then, sellers can use that intel to tailor how they present your solution’s value. Furthermore, while working to overcome them, sellers can build trust with the buyer, increasing their likelihood of purchasing.

It’s no wonder why 95% of companies say objection handling is a key competency for their customer-facing roles.

What are the types of sales objections?

There are endless reasons why a prospect isn’t ready to move forward in the purchase journey. But generally, they fall into one of a few different categories.

Let’s take a closer look at six of the most common types of sales objections.

Sales objection category #1: Pricing

Pricing is one of the biggest objections in sales. A prospect may say that your product is too expensive or they lack the budget.

It’s important to dig deeper into pricing-related sales call objections. Sometimes, a prospect truly can’t afford your product or service. In that case, they may not be a good fit.

However, these pricing objections often arise when a prospect struggles to see the value in your solution. This is an opportunity to reiterate the value the buyer will realize from your product. They’ll be more likely to purchase when they understand what they’ll get from the investment (for example, cost or time savings).

Sales objection category #2: Need

Prospects often raise sales objections because they don’t think they need the solution you’re offering. You might hear something like, “We don’t need that,” or “We’re already doing XYZ to address that.”

Overcoming these objections requires strong sales discovery skills. Sellers need to ask the right questions to understand the prospect’s challenges and determine if they have a solution to address them. If the prospect is a good fit, the seller must articulate why their solution fits the prospect’s needs.

Sales objection category #3: Timing

Prospects often raise sales objections related to timing. For example, they may say, “I’ll think about it” or “This isn’t a priority right now.”

Reps can overcome these B2B sales objections by digging deeper into the prospect’s priorities. There may be an opportunity to provide a solution to their more pressing priorities.

Timing-related sales objections also present an opportunity to create a sense of urgency. Sales reps can help prospects understand the cost of not moving forward, which may cause them to rethink their priorities and take action now.

At the very least, you can suggest scheduling a meeting in the future when they feel ready to move forward.

Sales objection category #4: Decision-making power

In some situations, a prospect will tell you they don’t have the power to decide on your solution. You may hear things like, “I’ll have to talk to my boss” or “I don’t make these kinds of decisions.”

You can use this as an opportunity to identify and contact the person who does have purchasing authority. However, continue building your relationship with the initial contact. If you earn their trust, they may end up championing your solution.

Sales objection category #5: Competition

A recent report found that 57% of all deals are competitive. So sellers should anticipate sales objections related to competitors and be prepared to overcome them.

For example, a prospect may ask why your solution lacks certain features and benefits, or why it’s priced higher than your competitors. Sales reps must become experts in their competitors’ offerings and how they stack up. It’s key to overcoming competitive sales objections.

Sales objection category #6: Lack of trust

Sometimes, sellers will encounter sales objections that indicate a lack of trust. For example, a prospect may say, “I’ve never heard of your company,” or “I don’t know anyone who uses your product.”

While the prospect may not say, “I don’t trust your company,” that’s the underlying meaning.

Sellers must work to build rapport and trust with prospects. This is important in every deal, but especially in those deals where prospects raise trust-related sales objections.

12 examples of sales objections (and how to respond)

Sales objections are extremely common. So sales reps should anticipate them and know how to overcome objections in sales.

A great starting point is to see some examples of sales objections and how to respond to them to maintain a healthy pipeline and close more deals.

Sales objection #1: “Your product is too expensive.”

How to respond: Empathize with the prospect by saying, “I understand you’re working within a budget. Then, remind the prospect how your solution solves their top challenges. By articulating value, you can convince your prospect that this investment is worth making.

Sales objection #2: “Your competitor is cheaper.”

How to respond: Acknowledge that your prospect is correct. Then, work to articulate how your product delivers more value than your competitors – thus worth the investment. Be sure to articulate that your solution is the better choice, but avoid criticizing the competition.

Sales objection #3: “We don’t have any more budget this year.”

How to respond: Say something like, “I understand. When do you expect funding to return? Let’s schedule a follow up meeting for then!”

Sales objection #4: “We’re already using your competitor.”

How to respond: Ask questions like, “What made you choose [company]?” and “How is [company’s solution] working out for you?”

This will help you understand what they like and dislike about your competitor. Then, you can use that information to communicate why your solution is better for addressing their key challenges.

Sales objection #5: “I’ve never heard of your company before.”

How to respond: Say something like, “I’m excited to introduce our company to you!” Then, provide a short and sweet overview of what your company does. You can also say, “Let’s chat more about your challenges and how we might be able to help.”

Offering to share testimonials and reviews from notable customers is also a great way to build trust.

Sales objection #6: “I don’t want to be locked into a year-long contract.”

How to respond: Empathize with them by saying, “I completely get it.” If there are other payment options, let the prospect know. Say something like, “We also offer some other payment terms. Let’s walk through them to see what would work better for you.”

Sales objection #7: “I’m already in a contract with your competitor.”

How to respond: Addressing this objection can be a great way to get insight into what a prospect likes and dislikes about the prospect and whether they’re willing to switch vendors. This information can help you tailor your approach.

In addition, consider offering a discount to offset the cost of switching. You can also convey how switching to your solution can deliver ROI that makes up for the cost of switching.

Sales objection #8: “I don’t have the authority to sign off on this.”

How to respond: Ask questions to get in touch with the right question. You can say something like, “Thanks for letting me know! Can you let me know who is authorized to make this decision and how I can get in contact with them?”

Keep in touch with your original point of contact. They may be able to make introductions and even serve as a champion for your company.

Sales objection #9: “This isn’t a priority right now.”

How to respond: Say something like, “Got it! What are your current priorities right now?”

If they’re unable to articulate those priorities, they’re likely just using it as an excuse to brush you off. This is an opportunity to articulate value and create a sense of urgency.

If they do share their current priorities, see if there are ways your solution can help. If not, set a follow-up meeting for when this is a priority. While you wait for the meeting, share helpful resources to keep the prospect engaged and earn their trust.

Sales objection #10: “Your product is too complicated.”

How to respond: Ask your prospect what features seem complicated. Then, work to provide clarity.

In addition, remind the prospect that they’ll have ongoing support to ensure they get the most value from your solution. You can say something like, “You’ll have a dedicated customer success manager who is an expert at helping businesses like yours solve [pain points] with our solution.”

Sales objection #11: “We don’t have the capacity to bring on a new product right now.”

How to respond: First, ensure your prospect has a clear idea of what it takes to implement your product and drive adoption. It may not be as complicated as they think.

In addition, ask questions like, “Can you tell me more about your day-to-day responsibilities?” Then, you can articulate how your solution will help streamline their day-to-day tasks so they can spend more time on strategic initiatives.

Sales objection #12: “I’m busy.”

How to respond: Let your prospect know you’re not looking to take up much of their time. You just want to have a quick chat to determine if it makes sense to have a longer discussion.

Say something like, “I hear you. I promise this won’t take up too much of your time. Can we have a five-minute chat now about [this challenge] and how I might be able to help?”

If they still say no, suggest scheduling a quick call for a better time.

How Mindtickle empowers sellers to overcome sales objections and close more deals

Sales call objections are inevitable. Every seller must master the art of overcoming B2B sales objections.

Delivering sales training and coaching focused on overcoming objections in sales is a great first step. Giving your sales reps plenty of opportunities to practice and perfect their skills is important before money is on the line.
Mindtickle now features AI-powered role-plays that enable sellers to practice their objection-handling skills as much as they’d like in a safe, scalable environment.

With Mindtickle, sales enablement teams can create realistic role-play scenarios and set the title of a realistic, artificial intelligence-powered bot. Enablement teams can even select levers to set the buyer’s personality – such as “budget conscious” or “extroverted.”

interactive role-play

Sales reps launch the role-play and have the opportunity to practice their key skills – including overcoming sales objections – in a dynamic, realistic scenario. The bot raises objections throughout the role-play, which the sales rep must work to overcome.

Throughout the role-play experience, AI delivers qualitative and quantitative feedback and suggestions for improvement around key factors, including objection handling. Sales reps can use this feedback to give it another go until they feel confident in their sales objection handling skills. Then, they can make real-life sales calls, confident in their ability to overcome different types of sales objections.

Practice objection handling

Pitch to Mindtickle Copilot in realistic selling scenarios to see if you can handle objections and seal the deal. 

 

Practice with Copilot

How to Analyze Sales Call Recordings to Uncover Valuable Customer Feedback

Rahul Mathew on October 7, 2024

In the past, a seller relied on their memory and their messily scrawled notes to recall what happened during a sales call and determine what steps to take next. Today, many organizations use conversation intelligence tools to record, analyze, and share sales calls.

Call recordings are an invaluable way to unlock insights from customers and prospects. Sharing these calls amongst the team encourages collaboration and promotes best practices.

Last year, nearly half a million sales calls were recorded using Mindtickle’s conversation intelligence feature. But how do winning revenue organizations use these sales calls to improve performance and close more deals?

Last year nearly

calls were recorded by Mindtickle customers
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In this post, we’ll discuss why sales call recordings are important and how you can start analyzing them to uncover valuable customer feedback and maximize sales performance across your entire team.

Call recordings reveal the “why” behind customer decisions

Knowing the “why” behind the customer’s decision is critical. Did sellers fail to articulate the value of your solution? Did the messaging miss the mark? Was another vendor’s pricing more competitive? Did the seller lack the competitive intelligence to address the customer’s questions or objections adequately?

Not understanding the wants, needs, concerns, and expectations of buyers and lacking insight into the customer experience during sales calls can have dire consequences for your business, including:

  • Deals are lost to better-prepared competitors
  • Key business initiatives – competitive and market strategies, sales methodologies, etc. – fail too frequently
  • Best practices are difficult to identify, share, or replicate
  • Outdated messaging affects deal outcomes
  • Fewer reps make quota
  • Churn increases
  • Your company misses revenue targets

Sales organizations can automatically capture and transcribe live sales conversations using conversation intelligence and call recording tools to reveal the “why” behind wins and losses. Your sales managers get access to invaluable insights about your customers and their interactions with your sales teams so you can better understand:

  • How customers perceive your brand
  • What they think about your solution and its value
  • How they view the competition
  • What objections they have
  • Why a deal may be in jeopardy
  • What more they expect from your company

Call recordings uncover sales training and coaching opportunities

AI-driven analysis of sales call recordings can reveal a seller’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as trends such as the talk-to-listen ratio, the frequency of objections or how often customers mention a specific competitor across all calls. Your sales managers can identify areas for improvement by digging into high points or shortcomings during conversations. They can understand the topics and themes discussed and the overall impact of the interaction.

Then, using these data-driven insights, your managers can diagnose conversations, identify personalized sales coaching opportunities, implement best practices across your teams, and ensure sales methodologies and training align with the needs and expectations of the buyers in your market.

How to create a customer feedback loop to improve your go-to-market strategy

Analyzing call recordings can deliver actionable insights that extend across the organization. To ensure ongoing alignment and to optimize your organization’s go-to-market strategy, you can use call recordings to establish a strong feedback loop across sales, customer success, and marketing.

Most sellers want feedback on their performance but are hesitant to ask for it. On top of that, most feedback from sales managers is anecdotal and not based on any objective assessment. An effective feedback loop incorporates insights from call recordings and enables managers to identify and close gaps in knowledge and skills.

Managers can provide direct feedback to individual sellers by commenting on specific recording snippets – offering critiques, comments, or advice. Using insights gleaned from call recordings, managers can recommend or request specific coaching and sales training opportunities to address competency or skill gaps and then continue to analyze future customer calls to gauge performance improvements. 

The majority of sellers want to know your top rep’s secret sauce. They’re seeking inspiration and guidance on creative ways to position and address questions. Using call recordings, managers can share best practices from key snippets to motivate sellers and inform ongoing training. For example, during sales onboarding, new hires can review recordings and snippets from the best sales conversations and then practice through role-play so managers or other team members can offer qualitative and quantitative feedback submitted by new sales reps.

Call recordings can ensure nothing gets lost in translation between sellers and customer success teams. Sellers can share account history, information, and updates to execute a seamless handoff. Customer success teams can share recordings, snippets, and information with sellers if they identify new issues or opportunities within an account.

Call recordings give marketing direct insight into the voice of the customer, providing an insider’s view of buyer pain points and challenges. Marketing teams can team create, campaigns and messaging that speak directly to customer needs. Call recordings may uncover that current positioning is not resonating with customers or differentiated enough from the competition.

Customers are telling you what they think; you just need to listen

Some leaders might be unsure about call recordings because they don’t want to come across as intrusive. The value of analyzing call recordings isn’t to spy on buyers or sellers, but to reveal direct, actionable insights into the buyers in your market – their wants, needs, perceptions, and objections.

It’s also important to remember that the most successful reps have a growth mindset. They don’t let embarrassment or insecurity get in the way of their professional growth. Call recordings help identify sellers’ strengths and weaknesses so managers can give them advice, feedback, training, and tools to help them succeed. 

Call recordings help pinpoint what’s working and what’s not, establishing a continuous feedback loop between sales, customer success, and marketing to ensure ongoing visibility and continuous improvement. Using insights gleaned from the voice of your customers gives your organization a significant competitive edge:

  • Sellers are empowered to win against more poorly prepared competitors
  • Key business initiatives are far more likely to succeed because they’re informed by critical field-based evidence
  • Best practices are easy to identify, share, and replicate
  • Marketing can craft messaging that aligns with buyer needs
  • More sellers will make or exceed quota
  • Your organization will meet or exceed revenue targets

Best practices for analyzing and using sales call recordings

Recording and analyzing sales calls can help teams uncover insights that can be used to improve customer experiences and sales performance. There are a few best practices to keep in mind.

Choose the right call recording tool

Several software solutions are available that offer the ability to record sales calls. Be sure to define your goals for recording sales calls – and then find a solution offering features and functionality to help you achieve those goals. Reading peer reviews on a site like G2 can provide insight into what customers like (and don’t like) about any solutions you’re considering.

Leverage AI to analyze sales calls

Recording your sales calls doesn’t provide much value if you don’t do anything with the recordings. But analyzing sales calls requires a lot of time and effort.

Look for ways to leverage AI like Mindtickle’s Copilot to effectively and efficiently analyze your sales calls. For example, AI can summarize call recordings and help you pinpoint key moments in a call. A sales rep can use AI to ask a question like, “Which competitors did my customer bring up on this call?” Then, the sales reps can use these insights to tailor their follow-up and combat objections.

Deliver instant feedback to sellers

Today, some conversation intelligence tools provide a score and feedback immediately after each sales call. For example, the tool might provide feedback on things like use of filler words, longest monologue, sentiment, and number of questions asked and answered. Sellers can use this real-time feedback to sharpen their skills and improve the outcome of a deal.

Share insights cross-functionally

Per our 2024 State of Revenue Productivity Report, 25% of calls are shared across the organization. That makes sense, as sales call insights can benefit many teams.

For example, sales managers can use call insights to understand where their sellers are (and aren’t) excelling. This can inform training and sales coaching opportunities. Marketing teams can use call recordings to access voice of the customer insights, which can help them develop more effective campaigns.

Be sure your call recording or conversation intelligence tools make it easy to share calls so different individuals and teams can benefit from the insights.

Provide proper training

When rolling out any new tool or technology, providing proper training is important. Rolling out a call recording tool is no exception.

Be sure your revenue teams know how you use your conversation intelligence tool and how to access and use insights to improve skills and sales outcomes.

Tap into your sales call recordings and start closing more deals

Sales call recordings provide insights for improving customer experiences and sales performance. But simply recording your sales calls isn’t enough.

Instead, you must analyze your sales calls to understand what’s really happening in the field and turn those insights into action. The right conversation intelligence tool is a must.

Conversation Intelligence in Mindtickle

Learn more about conversation intelligence and how Mindtickle's Call AI is helping other organizations get actionable data from customer calls.

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This post was originally published in May 2021, updated in July 2023, January 2024, and again in October 2024. 

15 Sales Discovery Questions to Help You Fill Your Sales Pipeline 

Rahul Mathew on October 2, 2024

Discovery calls are a critical part of the sales cycle. They allow you to build rapport with prospects, learn more about their challenges and priorities, and determine whether you have the right solution to address their problems.

When a sales discovery call goes well, you can guide a qualified prospect further down the funnel. But the deal may be doomed when a discovery call goes off the rails. No pressure, right?

The good news is that with plenty of preparation and the right sales discovery questions at the ready, you can knock your sales discovery calls out of the park every time.

But what sales discovery questions do you need to ask, and is there a certain discovery call template to follow?

In this post, we’ll discuss:

  • What sales discovery calls are
  • Why they’re important
  • 15 must-ask sales discovery questions
  • Best practices for more productive sales calls

What is a discovery call?

Every sales rep is responsible for conducting sales discovery calls. But what is a discovery call?

A sales discovery call is the initial conversation a B2B seller has with a buyer who has expressed interest in their offerings. During the call, the seller asks a series of sales discovery questions to quickly uncover the prospects’ pain points and determine whether the prospect is a good fit for the products or services the rep is offering.

Why are discovery calls important?

Discovery calls – when they’re done well – can help sellers achieve the following objectives:

This is foundational to delivering a solution that fits their needs. Recent research found 86% of B2B buyers are more likely to buy when their goals are understood.

It’s important to ensure you’re spending time with prospects that are a good fit for your products or services. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time.

You can do this by delivering value and fresh insight right from the start.

Discovery calls are an opportunity to build trust and pique prospects’ interest so they take the next step. Great sales discovery calls help build and maintain a healthy sales pipeline and accelerate deals.

What are the different types of sales discovery questions?

Productive sales calls are all about asking the right questions. Sales reps ask a wide variety of sales discovery questions. However, they typically fall into one of three categories:

  • Closed-ended questions: These are questions that elicit a quick, straightforward answer. For example, a seller may ask, “This is a problem many in your industry face. Does this challenge sound familiar?”
  • Open-ended questions: Typically, these sales discovery questions yield more detailed responses. These detailed responses are rich with insights you can use to guide your sales approach.
  • Probing questions: These are questions that invite a prospect to tell you more about something. For example, you might ask, “What else can you tell me about that?”

So, which of these three types of sales discovery questions is the best? The truth is, there’s no single type of sales discovery question that’s better than the others. The best approach is to combine the three types of questions to make the conversation natural, interactive, and engaging.

What is the sales discovery process?

Sales discovery calls are a key component of the larger sales discovery process. What exactly is the sales discovery process?

The sales discovery process describes all the steps involved in discovering all you can about a prospective customer. Some of those steps include:

  • Researching potential prospects. Modern sellers have plenty of information at their fingertips to learn as much as they can about a prospect before they’ve even made contact.
  • Prospect outreach. This could involve making a cold call or reaching out to a prospect who has signaled interest in your offerings.
  • Asking sales discovery questions. The right discovery questions for sales enable you to quickly understand a prospect’s needs and pain points and whether your products and services are a good fit for them.
  • Answering prospects’ questions. The discovery process is a time for both parties to determine whether it makes sense to move forward. So be ready for your prospects to ask questions.
  • Following up. If a prospect is a good fit, it’s important to follow up with them promptly to move the deal forward.

15 sales discovery questions to nail your next call

Asking the right sales discovery questions is key to maximizing the effectiveness and efficiency of your discovery calls.

But what discovery questions for sales do you need to ask?

The truth is, it depends. Your list of sales discovery questions must be personalized to each prospect. However, the following are some of the best sales discovery questions, so they’re a great place to start.

#1 Tell me more about your role at [company name].

The answer to this question can give you insight into what a “day in the life” of your prospect looks like. You’ll understand their day-to-day responsibilities, what types of decisions they make, and where they fit iton the larger organization. They may also share some of their job frustrations – which you may be able to help solve.

All of these insights can help you tailor your sales pitch.

#2 What challenges are you currently experiencing?

You can’t offer a solution if you’re unsure of your prospect’s problems. Your prospect’s response to this question can help you determine if they’re a good fit for your products or services. It can also help you start formulating a customized solution.

#3 Why is this challenge or pain point important to you?

You know your prospect’s challenges. This question can help you understand why this challenge matters.

For example, is there a directive from higher management to solve this challenge because it greatly impacts the entire business? Or is it something that personally impacts your point of contact?

#4 What solution or process are you currently using to address this challenge?

Your prospect may be using a competitor’s solution and looking to make a switch. Or, they may be doing nothing at all to address their problem. It’s important to know so you can adapt your pitch accordingly.

#5 What do you like/not like about your current solution?

Knowing what your prospect likes about their current solution can help you anticipate objections. For example, let’s say there’s a particular feature your prospect loves about their current solution – but your solution doesn’t offer it. This allows you to anticipate their objection and be prepared to overcome it.

On the other hand, understanding the downfalls of your prospects’ current solution can help you position your company as a better option.

#6 What would happen if you did nothing to address this challenge?

Asking this question forces your prospect to really consider the costs of maintaining the status quo. For example, if they don’t find a solution to a problem, they might lose time or money or slip behind the competition.

This question can also help you start to build urgency. In other words, it can help your prospect understand why now is the time to take action.

#7 Where does this rank on your list of priorities?

Is this a problem your prospect needs to address ASAP? Or is it something they can live with for a while – and they’re just starting to casually explore their options? Asking this question can help you understand where your prospect’s head is at in terms of timing and urgency.

#8 What would solving this problem mean for you?

This question can help you understand what success looks like for your prospect. Would solving this problem free up their teams’ time, allowing them to focus on more strategic work? Or would it help their brand stand out in a crowded marketplace—and therefore generate more revenue?

Or perhaps success is more personal. For example, solving this problem may elevate your prospects’ exposure within the company or score them a promotion.

Knowing what success looks like can help you understand how to frame your solution’s value.

#9 Who else wants to solve this problem?

According to Gartner, the typical B2B buying group includes six to 10 stakeholders. This question can shed light on who these stakeholders are and the roles they play in the buying group.

The typical B2B buying group includes up to

stakeholders
0

For example, you can determine who has the authority to make purchasing decisions and who will influence them.

#10 Why do these stakeholders care about this problem?

Each stakeholder in the buying group will have different needs, opinions, and requirements. This question can help you understand who cares about what. You can use this intel to deliver personalized experiences that resonate with every buying group member.

#11 Can you tell me about a time you faced a similar challenge and successfully addressed it?

This can give you an idea of your prospect’s thought process and their path to solving problems and making decisions. They may also mention roadblocks, which will help you anticipate them.

#12 If I propose a solution and you are on board, what would we need to do to make this happen?

Every business follows its own process for choosing and onboarding a new vendor. A prospect’s answer to this sales discovery question can give you an idea of the steps you can expect to take to get this deal across the finish line. Their answer can also help you anticipate any roadblocks you might encounter along the way.

#13 What is your budget?

Sometimes, there’s some wiggle room when it comes to pricing. But if your prospect’s budget is significantly lower than your solution’s price, it doesn’t make sense to move forward. You’re better off spending time on prospects who can afford your solutions.

#14 What else can you tell me about that?

Sometimes, a prospect will give a short answer to a question, but you want to dig deeper. A probing sales discovery question like this can encourage them to dig deeper.

#15 What questions do you have for me?

Ideally, a discovery call should be a two-way street. You and your prospect should both ask questions to explore whether it makes sense to move forward. If you find your prospect reluctant to ask questions, this prompt can help.

Top sales discovery call best practices

Now, you’ve got a good list of sales discovery questions to use in your next call. Let’s explore some additional best practices to help you nail your next sales discovery call.

Show up prepared to every discovery call

Research shows that 82% of B2B buyers feel sales reps are unprepared. Attending sales discovery calls is a great way to stand out from the crowd.

of B2B buyers feel reps are unprepared
0 %

You can use the internet and prospecting tools to do your research beforehand. That way, you can demonstrate your knowledge and deliver your prospect a new insight or perspective. In addition, you can use the discovery call to ask questions that yield answers beyond what you could uncover on your own.

Schedule enough time for your sales discovery calls

A recent Mindtickle analysis found that the average length of a discovery call is 36 minutes. Consider scheduling your sales discovery calls for 45 minutes. That way, you don’t have to worry about running over. If the call runs short, you can give some time back to the prospect.

The average discovery call is

minutes long
0

Ask the right number of sales discovery questions

If you don’t ask enough questions, you won’t walk away with the information you need to qualify the prospect and move the deal forward. If you ask too many discovery questions for sales, you risk overwhelming the prospect.

It’s important to strike the right balance. Our analysis found that on average, sales reps ask 20 questions during discovery calls. If you ask significantly more or less sales discovery questions, you may want to rethink your approach.

Answer prospects’ questions

Sales discovery calls should be a dialog, rather than a monologue. After all, your prospect is also deciding if it makes sense to move forward with learning more about your solution.

Be sure to give your prospects plenty of opportunities to ask their own questions. On average, sales reps answer 12 questions from prospects during sales discovery calls.

Limit yes/no questions

When a prospect answers a question with a simple “yes” or “no,” it can feel like you’re hitting a wall. Try to keep your yes/no sales discovery questions to a minimum. If a prospect does give a quick answer, use a probing sales discovery question like, “Tell me more about that,” to get them to talk more.

Leverage conversation intelligence

Often, sales reps are so focused on taking notes during sales discovery calls that they’re not truly present. This can be a big turnoff to prospects, and it makes it easy for a sales rep to miss an important insight.

Instead, use a conversation intelligence solution to record and analyze your sales discovery calls. That way, you can focus on the meeting itself, rather than taking notes.

Conversation intelligence software and AI make it easy to uncover insights you may have missed during a sales discovery call. For example, with Mindtickle Copilot (Mindtickle’s AI productivity assistant) you can ask a question like, “What competitors did my prospect mention on this call?” Then, you can use the insights to prepare for your next interaction.

A conversation intelligence solution also provides a score for each call with real-time feedback on tone, sentiment, and use of filler words. Sales reps can use this feedback to improve their sales discovery call skills, and managers can look for trends to inform sales coaching opportunities.

Follow up swiftly

Be sure to follow up with your prospects shortly after your sales discovery calls. Conversation intelligence software and AI can help you identify insights that can allow you to personalize your follow up. By following up quickly, you’re more likely to keep prospects engaged.

Deliver proper sales discovery training

Your sellers need to master certain skills to excel at sales discovery calls. Be sure to provide personalized sales discovery training and enablement so your entire sales team can master the necessary skills.

Certification

Provide sellers with AI role-plays

Role-plays are a great way for sales reps to practice their sales discovery questions before money is on the line. However, traditional role-plays often require sellers to wait for feedback from their sales managers.

Today, innovative revenue organizations leverage artificial intelligence to provide sellers with realistic, interactive role-play experiences that don’t require a sales manager’s time. With AI role-plays, sales enablement teams can easily spin up different sales scenarios. Then, sales reps can practice with an AI bot in realistic scenarios.

Take your sales discovery calls to the next level with Mindtickle

A sales discovery call can make or break a deal. It’s important to nail every sales discovery call, every time.

Mindtickle is an integrated revenue enablement platform that ensures your sellers have what it takes to lead engaging sales discovery calls that illuminate challenges and entice buyers to take the next step in the purchase journey.

With Mindtickle, you can provide personalized sales discovery training and enablement so your sellers can master the right skills. Mindtickle also features AI role plays, which empower your sales reps to practice their sales discovery skills with an AI-powered bot in realistic sales scenarios. These AI role plays deliver ongoing feedback so sellers can improve their skills before they take them into the field.

Mindtickle also integrates conversation intelligence, which records and analyzes every sales discovery call. Sales reps get immediate feedback they can use to improve outcomes. With Mindtickle Copilot, reps can easily identify insights they can use to appropriately follow up with prospects.

Better Sales Discovery With Mindtickle

Ready to see how Mindtickle can empower you to create an entire team of sales reps who are ready to master any sales discovery call that comes their way?

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Sales Operations (Sales Ops): The Definitive Guide 

Rahul Mathew on September 12, 2024

Sales reps are responsible for engaging buyers and closing deals every day. Meanwhile, the sales operations team works behind the scenes to ensure that those sellers can be as effective and efficient as possible.

While sales operations teams were once the unsung heroes of the sales organization, they’re finally getting the recognition they deserve. A recent report found that 82% of sales professionals feel “sales ops plays a critical role in growing the business.”

Salesforce research found that

of reps feel sales ops plays a critical role in growing the business
0 %

That’s not surprising, as research shows that companies that strategically invest in sales operations can significantly impact sales productivity and performance.

But if you’re still not sure what sales operations is, you’re not alone. In this guide, we’ll explore everything you need to know about sales operations, including:

  • What it is and why it’s important
  • What sales ops teams do and how they measure success
  • How sales operations differ from sales enablement
  • Best practices for developing a winning sales ops strategy
  • The role technology plays in a winning sales operations strategy

What is sales operations (Sales Ops)?

First things first: what is sales operations?

As the name suggests, optimized sales operations (or sales ops, for short) ensure the sales team can work faster and smarter.

But what exactly does this mean?

It’s a term that describes the activities and processes that support the sales organization. Sales operations teams handle the myriad “behind the scenes” administrative tasks to ensure the sales organization runs smoothly. We’ll take a closer look at some of the specific tasks the sales operations team handles later on.

Why is sales operations (Sales Ops) important?

Sales reps only have so many hours in a day. Yet, they often spend the bulk of their time on tasks that don’t drive revenue. The same Salesforce report cited earlier found that during the average week, sales reps spend a mere 28% of their time on selling activities, such as:

  • In-person meetings with prospective customers
  • Virtual meetings with prospective customer
  • Prospecting

Sales reps spend just

of their time each week selling
0 %

Sales operations frees up these reps from a lot of the non-selling tasks that take up so much of their time. That means sales reps have more time to do what they do best: engage with sellers and close deals.

It also drives efficiency for sales managers. With optimized sales operations, sales managers can focus less time on administrative tasks – and more time coaching their reps to improve individual and team performance.

Optimized sales operations mean sales reps can close more deals – faster. It empowers sales managers to devote more time to ensuring sellers have what it takes to be successful.

What are sales operations responsibilities?

The ultimate goal of the sales operations team is to support the success of the sales team. The team handles the “behind the scenes” work so sales reps effectively and efficiently sell and sales managers can spend their time coaching and improving team performance.

But what exactly does the sales operations team do daily?

Responsibilities look different at every organization. However, some common responsibilities include:

  • Creating sales forecasts
  • Contributing to revenue strategies
  • Developing and continuously evaluating sales rep compensation plans and sales incentives
  • Collaborating with other teams on go-to-market plans
  • Developing pricing structure for products and services
  • Optimizing the sales process and lead generation initiatives
  • Analyzing sales metrics on an ongoing basis

Another key sales operations responsibility is to implement and administer tools and technology that make sellers’ lives easier. Some such technologies might include:

  • Customer relationship management (CRM) platform
  • Sales enablement platform
  • Revenue productivity platform
  • Business intelligence platform
  • Content management system

Sales enablement vs. sales operations

In the world of sales, sales enablement and sales operations are two terms that are used often. Both of these teams are focused on supporting the sales team. In addition, both sales enablement and operations teams typically report up to the head of sales.

However, they’re not the same thing.

Sales enablement teams are focused on ensuring sales reps have what it takes to be successful in the field. First, sales enablement teams work with sales leadership to determine what a great rep looks like. Some sales organizations develop an ideal rep profile (IRP) to define the skills and competencies needed for sales success. Then, sales enablement teams create and deliver onboarding, sales training, sales content, sales coaching, and other programs to ensure each seller can master the skills and competencies they need to close more deals.

Ideal rep profile competencies

On the other hand, sales operations planning is focused on ensuring the right tools and processes are in place to support the sales cycle. That way, sellers can more easily close deals – faster.

Both these teams are focused on improving the productivity of the sales organization. As such, sales operations and sales enablement need to be aligned.

Best practices for building an effective sales operations strategy

A solid strategy helps boost the effectiveness and efficiency of sellers. If you haven’t already, now’s the time to develop a sales operation strategy.

But what exactly does a good strategy look like?

It depends on a number of factors, including size, market, and maturity – among others. A sales operations strategy that works well for one organization may fall flat for another.

That said, there are certain best practices any sales organization can leverage to guide their planning.

Before developing a strategy, it’s important to take a step back to determine the mission of your team. In other words, spell out the reason the sales operations team exists. The mission of the sales ops team should be in alignment with the goals of the sales team as a whole.

Socialize this mission statement throughout the organization to ensure teams understand the role of sales operations.

Without goals, it’s impossible to know whether or not you’ve been successful. Be sure to set goals that are clear, specific, and based on data, rather than hunches. Sales ops goals should be challenging, yet achievable.

The sales ops strategy shouldn’t be created in a vacuum. Instead, it should be a collaborative effort with input from teams including sales leadership, sales enablement, and marketing. After all, each of these teams brings important insight into the sales process.

Once the sales ops strategy has been created, it’s important to maintain alignment with key teams. This ensures priorities are aligned and everyone is working towards the same goals.

Consider scheduling recurring meetings (for example, weekly) with representatives from each team. Representatives can share progress on initiatives and share challenges. This is an important way to ensure the sales ops strategy continues to meet the needs and goals of the sales organization.

As we’ve already covered, sales operations teams need to collaborate with the marketing team when developing the sales ops strategy. These teams must also maintain close alignment to develop an effective funnel structure.

Marketing teams can leverage the data collected by sales ops teams to understand better the quality of the leads generated by their efforts. Then, they can optimize their efforts accordingly.

In addition, tight alignment between marketing and sales ops teams helps maintain the quality of account data and lead management. High-quality data is key to an effective sales ops strategy.

A solid sales ops strategy can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the sales team. The right technology is an essential component of a sales ops strategy.

Sales ops teams are often charged with building and maintaining a tech stack that increases sales productivity. There are a number of different sales operations tools that may be part of the tech stack.

One key tool is the customer relationship management (CRM) platform. A CRM enables the sales team to more effectively manage their relationships with customers and prospects.

Another key tool is the revenue enablement platform. A revenue productivity platform like Mindtickle empowers revenue organizations to improve team performance with sales training, sales enablement, and call insights.

Other common sales ops technologies include:

  • Business intelligence platform
  • Marketing automation platform
  • Sales intelligence platform
  • Content management system
  • Performance management platform
  • Contract management platform

The right technology is key to sales ops success. However, more tools isn’t always better. The key is to find the right software for the needs and goals of your organization.

In addition, look for opportunities to streamline and consolidate your sales ops tech stack. Often, organizations purchase myriad tools – each of which addresses a single challenge. The result is an unnecessarily bloated tech stack. 

Instead, look for integrated solutions that address multiple areas. For example, Mindtickle’s revenue enablement solution incorporates training, content management, conversation intelligence, sales analytics and dashboards, and sales forecasting – all into a single, comprehensive platform.

Ongoing measurement is key. Otherwise, it’s impossible to know whether or not the sales operations team is achieving its goals.

Continuous measurement allows sales operations teams to understand where things are going well – and where there are opportunities to improve. Then, sales optimization teams can optimize their strategies and tactics accordingly to improve results.

 

In the next section, we’ll cover some of the key sales operations metrics teams should measure regularly.

What are the key metrics for sales operations to track for success?

It’s important to set clear metrics right from the start. But what should they include?

Of course, sales operations teams should track the performance of the sales team. However, they should also track sales team efficiency. In other words, how efficiently are sellers able to shepherd a deal from initial contact to close?

There’s not a “one-size-fits-all” set of metrics. Instead, these metrics vary from organization to organization. However, there are some common, core sales operations metrics tracked by most organizations. Here are a few.

The percentage of sales reps that hit their quota during a given time period. Sales operations teams can measure quota attainment across the entire sales organization, as well as quota attainment for certain teams, territories, or regions.

The percentage of deals that were won – as well as the portion that were lost – in a given time period.

The dollar value of deals closed, on average

How close a forecast was to what was actually achieved in a given period of time.

How long it takes sales reps to close deals.

How much of a rep’s time is actually spent on revenue-generating activities, as opposed to administrative tasks and meetings.

The number of meetings a seller has set up with prospects in relation to their prospecting activity.

 

It’s important to measure your chosen sales operations metrics on a regular basis. At the very minimum, these metrics should be tracked quarterly. Ideally, these metrics should be tracked more regularly so challenges can be identified early on – and then addressed accordingly.

Typically, sales operations teams own the systems where this key data lives. As such, sales operations can create user-friendly dashboards and reports that can easily be accessed. That way, teams can track performance regularly and adjust their strategies as needed – rather than waiting until the end of the quarter when it’s probably too late.

Improve sales productivity and streamline your tech stack with Mindtickle

The sales operations team plays a pivotal role in the sales team’s success. Their work ensures sellers have more time to engage with buyers and close deals – and managers have more time to deliver personalized coaching that addresses the needs of each seller.

A key responsibility of sales ops is to ensure sellers have the tools they need to be as productive as possible. But adding more tools isn’t always the answer. A recent survey found 70% of revenue organizations have 10 or more tools in their tech stack. Yet, 66% of sales reps are overwhelmed by the number of tools they’re expected to use.

Sales ops teams must manage the tech stack while ensuring sellers have the necessary tools. Many teams are striking the right balance by trading point solutions for an integrated revenue enablement platform that delivers multiple solutions.

Today, leading sales ops teams depend on Mindtickle’s integrated platform to boost sales productivity and drive better outcomes. Mindtickle incorporates key functionality, including sales enablement, conversation intelligence, content management, and coaching – all in a single, integrated platform. Your sellers have everything they need to be successful – right in one spot. That means they can spend less time switching between tools, hunting down what they need, and more time engaging buyers and closing deals.

See Mindtickle in Action

Ready to see how Mindtickle empowers sales ops teams to streamline their tech stack while empowering sales reps with the tools, content, and information they need for success in the field?

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This post was originally published in December 2023 and was updated in September 2024. 

Sales Cadence 101: Why You Need One and How to Build One

Rahul Mathew on September 5, 2024

Let’s face it: B2B buyers are a tough bunch. Day in and day out, these buyers get calls and emails from sales reps. But they’ll only engage with those who meet (or exceed) their high expectations.

If a sales rep expects to get a buyer’s attention (and hold it), they must consistently engage with them at the right time through the right channels. A sales cadence is an important tool that helps sellers do just that.

In fact, with a solid sales cadence (and the right sales enablement to support it), sales reps can improve their outreach, engage more buyers, and ultimately, close more deals.

But what is it?

In this post, we’ll explore everything you need to know on the topic, including:

  • What it is, and why it’s important to have one
  • How to create one
  • Sales cadence examples
  • Best practices for driving great results

What is a sales cadence?

One of a sales rep’s primary responsibilities is engaging with prospective customers. However, determining how best to engage with each prospect can be difficult and time-consuming. That’s where a sales cadence comes in.

A sales cadence is a defined series of touchpoints a sales rep uses when engaging with a prospect. With the right one, a sales rep knows when and how to reach out to a prospect. It’s like a roadmap for effective sales engagement and outreach.

Typically, it includes a variety of different types of touchpoints, including:

  • Emails
  • Phone calls
  • Videos
  • Social media engagement
  • In-person meetings

Sales cadences vary based on several different factors, including industry, product or service offering, and company size – among others. Developing one that fits your business’s unique needs and yields the best results is important. Later on, we’ll share some tips for developing your own sales cadence and an example to get the ideas flowing.

Why is a sales cadence important?

Engaging with customers and delivering great experiences is key to closing more deals. But many sellers don’t have the time to do so effectively. Consider the fact that, on average, sellers spend less than 30% of their time selling.

Sellers spend less than

of their time selling
0 %

A sales cadence gives reps a framework for effective sales engagement. Sellers don’t have to sink time into reinventing the wheel for each prospect that comes their way. Instead, they can use a cadence to understand how and when to engage with prospective customers.

When sellers use a data-driven cadence, they’re better able to move prospects through the funnel – and eventually convert them to customers. Sales reps can spend less time developing outreach strategies and more time engaging with buyers.

In addition, it can help new sales reps get ramped up faster. Sales reps don’t have to figure out what type of outreach to use (and when). Instead, they can leverage a sales cadence – and close their first deal faster.

Finally, it helps ensure a consistent customer experience. Every prospect gets the same level of attention, regardless of who their sales rep is.

How to build an effective sales cadence

There’s no one-size-fits-all cadence that works for every organization. Instead, you must develop one that works for your organization and yields great results.

But great sales cadences don’t happen by chance. Instead, there are certain steps any organization must take to build an effective one that empowers sellers to improve sales engagement and close more deals.

Understand your target audience

Before determining how to engage with your audience, you must take a step back to understand who your audience is. After all, different people have different needs and preferences. You wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) engage with the founder of a startup in the same way you’d engage with a marketing manager at a Fortune 100 company.

Consult your buyer personas to ensure you understand key things about your target audience, including (but not limited to):

  • Industry
  • Company size
  • Job title
  • Opportunities
  • Pain points
  • Communication preferences

If you haven’t already created buyer personas, now’s a good time. They’re foundational for any sales and marketing strategy.

Develop a schedule of touchpoints

Once you understand who you’re trying to reach, it’s time to develop a list of outreach touchpoints. This will include initial contact and a series of follow-up touchpoints.

Use what you know about your target audience when creating this schedule. In addition, be sure to leverage data. For example, analyze the touchpoints in closed won deals to see what works. In addition, look at what your top sales reps are doing differently regarding outreach.

Be sure to incorporate a mix of different channels to increase your chances of getting the prospect’s attention. Some channels might include email, phone, LinkedIn messages, and videos.

Determine timing and frequency

If you reach out too often, you risk overwhelming prospects. If you don’t reach out enough, buyers may forget about you and take their search elsewhere.

What’s the best frequency for your sales cadence? There’s no easy answer.

Start with best practices for your industry. In addition, leverage data to understand the timing and frequency of touchpoints that led to closed won deals.

Develop consistent messaging

Prospects should experience consistent, on-brand experiences and messaging, no matter which sales rep they engage with.

Be sure to develop messaging sales reps can use throughout the sales cycle. This might include:

  • Email templates
  • Phone and voicemail scripts
  • LinkedIn message templates

However, it’s important to empower sellers to personalize messaging as appropriate. After all, modern B2B buyers have come to expect tailored communication and experiences.

Measure sales cadence performance and optimize accordingly

It’s not enough to create a sales cadence and hope for the best. Instead, you must continuously measure your sales cadence to determine what’s working and what isn’t.

Be sure to track key metrics related to sales cadence performance and engagement. Some examples include:

This includes metrics like email opens, click-through rates, and response rates. If a touchpoint is generating low sales engagement, you may want to replace it, change the timing, or eliminate it altogether.

 This measures how many leads take the desired action at each step of the sales cadence. Examples of these actions might be booking a call, watching a video, or purchasing. If the conversion rate is particularly low on one sales cadence touchpoint, there may be an opportunity to optimize it.

Churn rate can help you understand where you’re losing prospects during the sales cadence. For example, they might unsubscribe to your email or ask that you stop reaching out.

This is the average amount of time it takes for a buyer to complete the entire sales process—from initial contact to closed deal. If you notice customers stalling at a specific point in the sales cycle, there may be an opportunity to optimize the sales cadence.

 ROI is calculated by comparing the costs of running the sales cadence with its revenue. The goal is to ensure revenue far exceeds costs.

Be sure to examine these metrics across the entire sales team – as well as for specific teams and even individual sales reps. For example, if a particular metric for one sales rep is far lower than average, there may be an opportunity to provide additional training and coaching.

Also, be open to feedback from your sales reps. They’re engaging with prospects and have good insight into what’s working and what isn’t.

You can use metrics and feedback to optimize your cadence for better results.

Sales cadence example

As we’ve mentioned before, there’s no single sales cadence that’ll work for every business. Instead, it’s important to analyze what works (and doesn’t) for your company and what resonates with your target audience. Then, you can build one that works for your revenue organization.

But creating a cadence from scratch can feel overwhelming. Starting with a template or seeing some examples can be helpful.

With that in mind, let’s look at an example:

In today’s world, many ways exist to engage with prospects. But phone calls are still a great way to reach people.

Kick off your sales cadence by picking up the phone to briefly introduce yourself and your business. If there’s no answer, leave a brief voicemail.

 

You may not receive a response to your initial call. If that’s the case, follow up with a personalized email.

Don’t go hard on your sales pitch. Instead, use this as an opportunity to introduce yourself and gauge your prospect’s interest in continuing the conversation.

LinkedIn is a popular social media channel for professionals. At this point in the cadence, contact your prospect via LinkedIn. Send a personalized connection request if you’re not already connected to them.

Make another attempt to get your prospect on the phone. If they answer, you can use this as an opportunity to discover. If they don’t answer, leave them a message telling them you plan to follow up via email.

Send a follow-up email to the prospect. Consider including a resource relevant to their company or industry, such as a video, report, article, or guide.

If they answer, you can use this to do more discovery. If they don’t answer, leave a personalized voicemail that speaks to their needs and challenges.

Send a direct message via LinkedIn and/or engage with the prospect’s content on LinkedIn.

Try one more time to get the prospect on the phone.

If there has been little to no sales engagement up to this point, it’s time to end the sales cadence. Thank the prospect for their time, and let them know you’ll no longer be following up. However, leave the door open for the prospect to reach out to you in the future should their needs and priorities change.

Sales cadence best practices

A sales cadence can be a great tool to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your sales reps. But creating one doesn’t mean it’ll generate great results.

Read on to explore some best practices to help your sellers engage prospects and convert more of them to customers.

Personalize each touchpoint

A report from Adobe found that 66% of B2B buyers expect fully or mostly personalized content when buying a product or service. Generic touchpoints and experiences simply won’t cut it.

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Templates and scripts are key to a sales cadence. But be sure your sellers understand the importance of personalizing their outreach based on what they know about a prospect. After all, tailored, relevant communication is more likely to capture your prospects’ attention.

Provide a flexible framework

A cadence helps reps understand what types of outreach to do and when. But it’s important to note that a sales cadence isn’t set in stone. Sometimes, a sales rep can (and should) adjust the sales cadence based on the prospect’s behaviors, responses (or lack thereof), and preferences.

For example, let’s say your cadence includes three phone calls. However a prospect indicates they only want to be contacted via email. In this case, the rep should adapt the cadence accordingly.

In addition, you can use revenue intelligence to understand which deals are most likely to go through. This information can be used to make adjustments to the cadence.

Provide proper training and coaching

Whether it’s a sales battlecard or a cadence or something else – it’s important to ensure your sellers know how to use the tools and resources available to them.

Let’s say you spend a ton of time and resources developing a winning sales cadence. But if your sales reps don’t know how to use it, it won’t have an impact.

Ensure your entire sales team knows your cadence and how to use this tool. Of course, you’ll want to cover it as part of sales onboarding. However, it’s also important to provide ongoing training, coaching, and sales enablement so sales reps can hone their skills.

Be sure to measure KPIs related to sales cadence regularly. That way, you can understand each sales rep’s performance and determine when they might need additional training, coaching, and enablement.

Revisit your sales cadence often

As we’ve already mentioned, it’s important to track cadence performance and optimize accordingly regularly.

But there are also other times you should revisit your cadence. Some examples include:

  • When you’re releasing a new product
  • When you’re breaking in to a new market
  • When there’s increased competition

Leverage the right sales cadence tools

A sales cadence has several moving pieces. Multiply that by several prospects, which can be difficult for a sales rep to manage.

Look for opportunities to leverage sales cadence tools and technology. These tools can help you streamline and automate your sales cadence and improve outcomes.

For example, you can use an AI sales assistant tool to automate follow-up emails. Or, you can use an AI-powered tool like Mindtickle Copilot to draft personalized, contextual emails to accompany a piece of sales collateral you’re sharing with a prospect.

With the right sales cadence tools and technology, sales reps can spend less time on tedious, time-consuming tasks and more time building customer relationships and closing deals.

Set your sellers up for success with a winning sales cadence

Modern B2B buyers are busy, and they have high expectations. A proper, data-driven sales cadence ensures your reps know how to reach out to these busy prospects at the rights times and in the right ways. With this framework, sales reps can move more prospects through the funnel – faster.

With Mindtickle’s integrated revenue enablement platform, your sales reps have the training, coaching, and tools to master the sales cadence – develop all the other skills they need to crush quota.

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5 Essential Sales Productivity Tools to Boost Sales Team Performance 

Rahul Mathew on August 21, 2024

Even the best sales teams have room for improvement. According to Salesforce research, 84% of sales reps missed quota in 2023, and 67% don’t expect to meet their targets this year.

According to research

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It’s no wonder why so many revenue teams invest in tools and technology to boost sales productivity and performance. Around 70% of sales leaders report 10 or more tools in their tech stacks.

There’s certainly no shortage of solutions to your sales productivity challenges. But investing in a sales productivity tool doesn’t guarantee it’ll impact team performance.

Instead, it’s important to determine which sales productivity tools will drive a return – and then invest accordingly.

Read on as we explore:

  • The advantages the right sales productivity tools can provide to your company
  • The essential solutions and features to look out for when improving sales productivity at your company
  • The top five sales productivity tool “must haves”
  • Our recommendations and best practices

What is sales productivity?

Simply put, sales productivity is how efficient and effective your sales executives are at hitting various revenue milestones and goals. Of course, just because reps make more calls and send more emails does not necessarily mean they are progressing sales or generating revenue.

So what is a sales productivity tool? 

At Mindtickle, we define a sales productivity tool as anything that improves and measures reps’ skills, will, and in-field behaviors.

That might include tools that hold reps accountable, such as email and call activity tracking; those that empower reps to better prepare for meetings and follow-up, such as Content Management Systems (CMS); and solutions that arm reps with insights that help them drive specific deals and accounts forward more effectively.

After reading this post, you’ll be able to understand:

  • The advantages the right sales productivity tools can provide to your company
  • The essential solutions and features to look out for when improving sales productivity at your company
  • The top five sales productivity tool “must haves”
  • Our recommendations and best practices

Why are sales productivity tools important for your business?

The most powerful benefit of sales productivity tools is that they help reps win more business by holding reps accountable, saving them time, and helping them deliver a better, faster customer experience.

This has a butterfly effect that improves revenue metrics like quota attainment, pipeline coverage, number of at bats, average contract value, average cycle time, and even customer lifetime value.

At the same time, these tools align cross-functional members of revenue teams by providing a high degree of transparency and visibility while centralizing access to things like content, training, and insights.

With sales productivity tools, your team can do things like:

  • Search for potential buyers to set meetings with them
  • Grow, develop, and convert sales opportunities throughout the sales cycle
  • Understand areas of opportunity to improve their performance
  • Do more with less time and facilitate better hand-offs or deal collaboration
  • Access content and insights that can help move deals forward faster and personalize the customer experience
  • Learn from the winning attitudes and skills of top peers
  • Keep up-to-date on new strategies, product launches, competitors, and market approaches
  • Keep track of activity, pipeline, and progress toward goals

Modern sales productivity tools make your entire sales process more simple, measurable, and effective. This can result in benefits like:

  • Faster onboarding and revenue contribution
  • More opportunities in the pipeline
  • Higher conversion and win rates
  • Improved performance against competitors
  • Better understanding of winning playbook
  • Increased renewal rates
  • Improved rep performance and retention
  • Improved forecasting
  • Tighter alignment around customer needs

What are the top benefits of sales productivity tools?

Now that we know what sales productivity tools are and why they’re important for your business, let’s look at the top five benefits these tools deliver.

1. Manual data entry & note-taking is eliminated

In 2024, the days of manually inputting deal data into Salesforce and trusting it’s correct are over. This method wastes a lot of time and often results in a complete, inaccurate view of your sales pipeline. It also gravely reduces your organization’s ability to compete by limiting access to voice of customer insights.

Investing in tools like revenue and conversation intelligence that automatically transcribe every call, email, and meeting while scoring deal health is critical.  After all, teams that use conversation intelligence have lower churn rates and close more deals.

These tools also help reps self-coach by proactively flagging any deal risks, issues with buyer sentiment, or competitor mentions that must be addressed to move deals forward faster. As reps move into new roles or leave the company, it’s much easier to ensure no deal or account falls through the cracks by facilitating best-in-class hand-offs.

2. Personalized customer experience

To improve sales productivity, it’s critical that reps can quickly find relevant content to nurture leads, follow up with prospects promptly, and convince important decision-makers of the value your products provide.

Today, half of all customer engagement comes from only 10% of content created. That’s why investing in a sales content management system, or CMS, that helps reps know what content is new, suggested, and preferred by peers is key to boosting customer engagement and wins. The ideal content management system to improve sales productivity helps reps know what content they can use to drive a deal forward without even thinking.

Ideally, it will be integrated with your conversation and revenue intelligence solutions so that the system can suggest valuable assets to reps based on what was said in previous emails and calls, such as a competitor mention.

At the same time, your CMS should include a feature like Digital Sales Rooms to help reps personalize the buyer experience and understand which assets buyers viewed or shared. Since improving pipeline is critical to sales productivity, DSRs automatically identify new potential leads who visit and automatically upload them to your CRM so they can be nurtured through marketing programs.

3. Valuable voice of the market and financial insights

Since it’s a given that today’s inside sales teams must use a tool to email and call prospects en masse, such as Outreach.IO, we’re not going to put that on our list of must-haves. But sending generic emails and making calls is not enough. Every interaction must provide value and be highly personalized.

There are many ways to do this at scale. The first is to use a tool like Databook to uncover market and financial insights that will help your reps prioritize accounts and determine what business challenges your solution will need to solve. These insights can also help you write emails that inspire urgency, build better proposals, and make ROI-driven business cases.

When paired with tools like conversation and revenue intelligence that summarize key themes discussed in calls and emails that you can reference in follow-ups and suggest next steps or action items, reps can quickly ensure they’re doing the right things to drive deals home.

Insights on buyer engagement, such as whether reps have the right volume and title of prospects accepting their meetings and responding to emails, are also crucial to ensuring reps focus on truly winnable deals and don’t waste time.

4. Opportunities to practice and self-coach

A traditional approach to enablement does not drive sales productivity on its own. Reps need to quickly learn best practices from peers, practice, and improve independently.

Another way conversation intelligence solutions can improve sales productivity is by providing reps with access to call snippets and playlists of best practice calls. Organizations can build playlists around key competencies such as discovery calls, objection handling, how to lead the perfect demo, competitor smackdowns, pricing/negotiation, and more. They also share examples of what top reps do and say on calls about new products and services.

enablement-certification-white

At the same time, these tools provide immediate feedback to reps on how they compare to peers. Some of the best conversation intelligence insights reps can use to self-coach include understanding if they’re driving a customer monologue of a minute or more, measuring if they’re getting customers to ask or answer 12-14 questions, and trying to maintain a balanced talk time where reps speak 60% of the time or less.

5. Scale and measure coaching

Last but certainly not least, it’s critical that you not only provide sales productivity tools for reps but also for your front-line managers. One of their biggest challenges is they cannot find the time to coach and get pulled into too many different directions. When they have time to show up for 1-to-1s and offer coaching, they do not often have valuable, highly relevant data on how to help each rep and simply resort to doing deal reviews on the fly.

This is not productive, and it does not scale.

Instead, managers need sales productivity tools to run an end-to-end coaching workflow and measure performance improvement over time.

At Mindtickle, our coaching workflow starts with conversation and revenue intelligence. Every day, our managers can see exactly which deals are healthy and a detailed snapshot of all the calls, emails, and meetings associated with them. They can then show up to 1-to-1s more prepared to discuss how healthy a rep’s pipeline is and where they might be able to offer deal-specific support.

At the same time, our enablement team provides managers with a detailed report on which skills and competencies their team and individual reps need to develop each quarter. This data is provided via our Sales Readiness Index, a comprehensive way to benchmark which reps have the skills, will, and demonstrated in-field behaviors they need to drive deals home – or not.

Based on data like the Sales Readiness Index, managers can see how reps compare to their peers on various competencies, such as buyer engagement, outreach activity, objection handling, competitor win rates, and more. By comparing how reps perform on various competencies to the ideal rep profile created for each role on the revenue team, managers can know exactly who to coach on what topics without much thinking.

Managers can then immediately create and track the coaching as complete. Or, they can sort and filter through a list of recent calls to provide more comprehensive feedback on specific interactions with call scorecards.

At the same time, managers can collaborate closely with enablement and revenue operations teams by helping them understand which reps are ready to hit quota and where they can provide cross-functional support.

What are some of the best sales productivity tools?

Sales productivity tools can deliver significant benefits to both sellers and sales managers. With the right tools, your entire sales team can be more effective and efficient. In other words, sellers can close more deals—and do so faster.

Today, many tools are available that promise to boost sales productivity. But every sales productivity tool is different.

Which sales productivity tools are the best for your business? There’s no easy answer. It’s important to determine your goals and challenges when it comes to sales productivity. Then, you must find the sales productivity tools that best suit your unique needs and goals.

The truth is, there’s no “one-size-fits-all” sales productivity tool. However, the following are some of the most popular sales productivity tools on the market.

Mindtickle

Often, organizations purchase myriad solutions that address a single challenge related to sales productivity. However, a better approach is to adopt an integrated solution that addresses several common sales productivity challenges. Integrated tools like Mindtickle drive sales productivity in several ways – without requiring sellers to switch between different, disparate tools.

Mindtickle incorporates conversation and revenue intelligence, recording and transcribing calls while scoring deal health. This means sellers don’t have to take notes during calls; they can pay attention to the meeting. In addition, sales managers can leverage analysis of call recordings to determine where a sales rep might need additional training and coaching.

Mindtickle also incorporates sales content management. Sellers can easily find the content they need for any selling scenario, spending less time searching and more time actually selling.

Mindtickle’s integrated sales productivity platform includes many other features and functionalities that boost sales productivity. For example, sales reps can use Mindtickle to practice skills and unlock self-coaching opportunities on their own time. Sales managers can also leverage Mindtickle to deliver personalized coaching to sales reps and measure how (or whether) their efforts improve seller productivity and sales performance.

Other sales productivity tools

A few additional top sales productivity platforms include:

Salesforce is one of the most popular CRMs in the world. The platform incorporates myriad features that empower teams to increase sales productivity and performance. Salesforce unifies data across multiple sources to provide teams with a single source of truth for all customer information. Salesforce also leverages AI to drive sales productivity and enable better customer experiences.

This is an AI-powered workflow platform. Sellers that use it are better equipped to delight customers throughout the customer journey and close deals. Salesloft also equips sales managers with data and insights that enable them to more effectively coach and lead their teams. In addition, Salesloft provides features and functionality that allow for more accurate forecasting.

Calls and emails aren’t always the most productive forms of outreach. With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, sales reps can tap into LinkedIn to engage buyers and increase sales productivity. LinkedIn Sales Navigator also provides insights to help sellers understand which accounts they should prioritize. That way, they can spend their time on the deals they will most likely win.

Outreach is a sales productivity platform that enables SDRs and other sales team members to engage prospects throughout the sales cycle. With Outreach, sellers can automate their outreach processes – which means they can achieve more in less time. Outreach also gives sales leaders a complete picture of the sales cycle to increase deal velocity and sales rep productivity more effectively.

Databook is a Strategic Relationship Management Platform (SRM). This tool illuminates market and financial insights that help reps prioritize accounts and understand their business challenges. As a result, sales reps can spend less time researching and more time creating and articulating solutions.

Our recommendations and best practices

Now that we’ve covered five benefits of sales productivity tools and some of the top tools in the market, we’ve got a few recommendations and best practices to share.

Centralize tools & simplify the rep experience

Not all tools are created equal, but you must simplify the sales rep experience in mind.

That’s why we believe centralizing and consolidating as many tools as possible is the best way to help drive sales rep productivity, as well as get more out of your tool investments. That means everything related to onboarding, training, ongoing coaching, content, and access to voice of customer or performance insights should ideally be in one place.

Doing so also provides you with a single data model to understand revenue enablement and performance and a single model for compliance and security.

Increase cross-functional collaboration

Driving sales productivity is the responsibility of every division at your company – not just sales. That means teams like product and marketing need frontline access to the valuable insights gauged from your sales interactions, such as competitor mentions or product feedback requests.

At the same time, in modern-day sales, you must ensure that your entire revenue team, including BDRs, sales, SEs, and CSMs are working together to understand deal or account health and drive those opportunities home.

Ensure that whatever solution you are using is standardized across your revenue org, focusing on providing the utmost transparency into what’s going on with key accounts and deals.

Improve visibility into what top performance looks like

Sales productivity is simply impossible if all of the roles on your team aren’t crystal clear about what success looks like in their role. How can I improve if I cannot know if I’m saying, showing, and doing the right things? If I don’t understand how my emails, calls, and how I engage prospects and customers compare to my peers, how will I even know what to do better next time?

That’s why your sales productivity tools must clarify best-in-class performance during every interaction and stage of your sales process.

Sales Productivity Tools FAQs

What is sales productivity?

Sales productivity measures how effective and efficient your reps are at meeting their sales goals. You can measure sales productivity across the entire organization, as well as at the team and individual rep levels.

Why is sales productivity important?

Simply put, unproductive sellers are ill-equipped to engage buyers and close deals. In today’s competitive market, that simply won’t cut it.

When seller productivity increases, so too does revenue generation. Productive sales reps can effectively and efficiently engage buyers and close deals. In other words, they can close more deals, faster, which leads to revenue growth.

What are KPIs used to measure sales productivity?

Ongoing measurement is key to assessing and improving sales productivity. However, there’s no single metric you can use to determine sales productivity. Instead, you must measure it by tracking a variety of metrics, including:

  • Quota attainment
  • Sales cycle length
  • Conversion rates
  • Annual recurring revenue
  • Sales rep habits, such as number of calls made and emails sent

What is a sales productivity tool?

A sales productivity tool is any solution that improves the effectiveness and efficiency of sales reps. In other words, it’s a tool that increases the productivity of sellers.

Reps only have so many hours in the day. A sales productivity tools helps ensure they make the most of that limited time.

What are some of the best sales productivity tools?

There is no single sales productivity tool that’ll solve all challenges for all businesses. Instead, the right sales productivity tools depend on the needs and goals of your organization.

However, some sales productivity tools are particularly popular today. Those include:

  • Mindtickle
  • Salesforce
  • Salesloft
  • LinkedIn Sales Navigator
  • Outreach
  • Databook

Sales Productivity in action

Learn more about how to consolidate your sales tech stack while driving more revenue per rep.

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This post was originally published in January 2023, updated in February 2024, and again in August 2024. 

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