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*Authored by Vinita Sinha - CX Scale and Solution Value Adoption Lead Americas | CX Solution Advisory | SAP Adoption Services Center
In today's fast-paced marketplace, sales representatives grapple with the challenge of engaging with highly informed buyers who conduct extensive research before making purchasing decisions. This blog explores the hurdles faced by sales professionals, including the limitations of intuition-based selling and traditional CRM tools. It highlights the transformative potential of intelligence-driven sales solutions, such as the Intelligent Sales Add-on for SAP Sales Cloud, in overcoming these challenges.
Discover how integrating intelligence-backed insights and having a structured approach to sales with the Intelligent Sales Add-on for SAP Sales Cloud can drive better results over the long term, enabling organizations to thrive in an era of innovation, agility, and value-based selling.
Challenges Salespeople Face Today
Buyers are a step ahead: In today's marketplace, sales representatives face a significant challenge as buyers are increasingly well-informed, often conducting extensive research before engaging with sales professionals. This trend has shifted the dynamics of the sales process, requiring reps to deliver interactions that are not only meaningful and valuable but also differentiated and personalized to the specific needs and preferences of each prospect. To effectively engage modern buyers, sales reps must be able to provide insights, solutions, and experiences that go beyond what buyers can discover on their own, thereby establishing trust, adding unique value, and ultimately driving successful outcomes.
Relying on intuition-based selling: In such a competitive and dynamic marketplace, relying on one’s gut and intuition alone to sell can be disastrous. It can lead to inconsistency, subjectivity, limited scalability, risk of missing out on opportunities, and pose a challenge for training and development due to lack of transferability.
Overheads of tools that don’t support selling: CRM tools that are purely system of records are not reliable since salespeople resist adopting it. If the system doesn’t help them sell, why use it? This is a big challenge since the barrier to adoption means having data that is not trustworthy or reliable for any decision making. Tools need to be easy to use and make salespeople successful. Intelligence-backed tools that rely on patterns of success and failure to advise on sales opportunities can save time and efforts that can be spent building relationships with buyers
Lack of Insights: Salespeople need insights about their customers that are holistic. Buyers need to feel that the seller knows them and their history, that their needs are understood, that salespeople have their best interests in their mind, that they can rely on salespeople being their trusted advisors, etc. To facilitate these needs, tools need to equip salespeople with insights about the relationship, network, buying history, meaningful products, selling value and more. Relationship based selling in fact is crucial for long term success.
The AI Advantage
Most organizations have already started to invest a lot of time, resources, and energy into evaluating how AI can benefit then in their business processes to stay competitive. Within the realm of CRM, it's widely recognized that low adoption rates pose a significant barrier, often resulting in poor data quality. AI effectiveness hinges on factors like data volume, quality, and balance. For organizations to effectively leverage AI, they must establish processes and utilize tools that streamline and automate data capture, making it intuitive for salespeople and reducing resistance. Implementing intelligent tools embedded with AI functionalities that genuinely enhance sales efficiency fosters improved adoption rates, enhances data quality, and ultimately drives overall success with AI. This synergy creates a self-reinforcing cycle of improvement.
Prepare for Success
Integrating intelligence backed, data-driven insights, and a more structured approach to sales can help mitigate these challenges and drive better results over the long term. Sales processes can thus mature from an ad-hoc and chaotic approach to a visionary state where innovation, agility, long term customer relationships and value-based selling thrives.
The Intelligent Sales Add-on for SAP Sales Cloud make selling reliable, and helps salespeople gain efficiencies to drive better sales outcomes. Below are the key capabilities and highlights of the add-on
Sales Effectiveness
- Enhance pipeline visibility and improve forecast accuracy with Intelligent Sales Execution which has capabilities for pipeline management, forecast tracking, pipeline flow and analysis and trend analysis.
- Discover high propensity-to-win opportunities with Pipeline Manager. Expose at-risk opportunities with intuitive pipeline visualizations, maintain pipeline hygiene and provide detailed roll-ups with ease, and do real-time edits without having to jump out of the pipeline manager.
- Improve forecast accuracy while reducing the time-to-forecast with Forecast Tracker. The importance of accurate forecasts cannot ever be overstated since this blind spot can cause delays, revenue losses and affect business outcomes. With the flexibility of doing a what-if analysis, having information of deals at the product level, adding notes for follow-ups, quickly identifying deals for proactive engagement and tracking forecast submissions prepares you for accuracy in forecasting. Imagine the benefits of doing this interactively between the sales rep and the manager in real-time, with simulations as well as the possibility to edit the deals directly from within the tracker. This not only saves time, but also establishes transparency and trust between the manager and reps, and encourages the mindset to have SAP Sales Cloud as the single source of truth where all data is captured, discussed and shared for planning, tracking as well as reporting.
- Understand Pipeline Flow and proactively resolve issues with root cause analysis. Gain a full view of your pipeline and easily track new and existing deals visually. Explore the evolution of opportunities to uncover selling and coaching insights.
- Leverage Trend Analytics to predict the progress of current quarter opportunities based on historical data.
- Reduce sales cycle length and increase opportunity win rates with Guided Selling. Ensure adherence to flexible sales methodology and provide actionable insights to expedite sales progress and close deals. Achieve easier onboarding of Sales Reps using Smart Assist functions, reducing time to sell. Leverage the intelligent recommendations and predictions driving confidence in customer purchase decisions. Guided Selling can help with increasing productivity and sales effectiveness, and lead to better adoption. This also leads to better data, processes, quality of information and reliability.
- Guide your sales reps to progress on opportunities with prescribed yet flexible activity proposals via Playbooks, leaving the gut-based, unstructured ways of selling behind. As an administrator, you have higher flexibility and the possibility to tailor the processes for the different phases of the sales cycle according to a specific division/brand/region etc., without needing the support of IT. Reacting quickly to market situations has never been easier. Tools and technologies like Playbooks provide significant advantage by presenting tailored content at the right time, with efficiency and in response to changing customer demands.
- Increase sales effectiveness and make better informed decisions with consolidated ML based Customer Insights. Provide key insights for each account for data driven actions and ML backed recommendations to grow accounts with potential and mitigate challenges.
Leverage machine learning to surface accounts with growth potential and ones with challenges.
Provide specific Insights for a customer, helping every account manager to take data-driven decisions and actions from one screen.
Smart Selling
- Leverage ML-scoring insights for Leads Intelligence and Deal Intelligence (opportunities scoring) to focus on the most promising ones, while ensuring proper planning for the at-risk ones. Have realistic forecasts considering these insights.
- Use Business Text Intelligence to recommend activities based on notes, and pre-fill information for sales efficiency.
- Leverage Relationship Intelligence and network to strengthen relationships with key contacts. Easily add accounts and contacts that are not there in the system, know the best-connected colleagues for warm introductions, improve relationship scores and view interaction history.
Relationship Intelligence
My Network
In summary, navigating today's sales landscape demands overcoming challenges posed by informed buyers and outdated sales methods. By embracing intelligence-driven solutions like the Intelligent Sales Add-on for SAP Sales Cloud, organizations can drive efficiency, foster innovation, and build lasting customer relationships. With a focus on data-driven insights and smart selling techniques, businesses position themselves for success in a dynamic marketplace. By integrating these tools effectively, they can thrive amidst evolving sales trends and achieve sustainable growth.
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