Here are five simple tips (one for each member of The Jackson 5) that could boost your sales productivity to the top of the charts in no time:

1. Let your sales team sell. In their debut year, The Jackson 5 released four albums and replaced The Supremes as Motown Records’ best-selling group. Compare that output to Pace Productivity’s estimate that an average sales representative is only able to spend 22 percent of the workday selling and the disconnect quickly becomes apparent.

Get your hands on tools that automate time-consuming tasks like researching key data, visualizing competitive insights, and unearthing past purchases. Your sales team will be free to make more sales and the real-time data they’ll be armed with will help them win more often too.

2. Get social. Before The Jackson 5 made it big, the group was championed by both Gladys Knight and Diana Ross. Even if you don’t have your very own Empress of Soul to rely on, you have access to the biggest audiences to ever exist: social media. Customers do research on social sites long before they reach out to sales representatives. By establishing a social presence of their own, your sales team joins the buyer’s journey earlier on. Connect with your existing customers too. You’ll make it easier for them to recommend you to a friend.

3. Inspire the masses. The joy and energy the Jacksons imparted was infectious. It made those hearing the group feel that they were part of something bigger than themselves just by listening. Make your own customers the heroes of your company’s story. Personalize your interactions with them by tailoring their customer journey just for them. With collaborative sales technology like videoconferencing and chat on your side, you and your team can provide support and solutions from day one of the sales process, even if you’re selling to a client from across the globe.

4. Give the people what they want. In 1973 The Jackson 5 departed from their pop roots and topped the charts with the decidedly disco Dancing Machine. The song embraced current trends and rocketed The Jackson 5 back to the top.

If you read the signs and gather insights into the minds of your own customers, you can keep yourself on top too. Why call the general information line at a prospective company when you share a contact with its CFO? Aided by tools that do the digging for you, your team will know who to reach out to and when.

5. Stay ahead of the trend. In 1971, Motown Records launched 13-year-old Michael Jackson’s solo career, delivering unto the pop music scene an artist who’s inherent showmanship and perfectionism would change the name of the game forever. Keep your finger on the pulse of your conversion rates, win rates, and pipeline value with intuitive analytics tools that give you a holistic view of sales while also providing the depth of insight to discover even the most surprising of trends.

That’s it for our retrospective on The Jackson 5, but if you want to dig deeper into the essentials of sales productivity, check out our e-book: Always Be Closing: The ABCs of Sales in the Modern Era.

The post The ABCs (easy as 123) of Productive Sales Teams appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

If you’ve turned your attention away from business evolution for a minute, you’ve likely lost a mile of ground. Fast-evolving strategies, far flung co-workers, and increasing expectations from top brass have sales teams fighting to reinvent themselves, according to Bob Kelly’s talk “The Future-Proof Sales Force” at Dreamforce last week. It’s a system that you might imagine to be unsustainable, but that’s where you’d be wrong.

Even as the sand shifts beneath their feet, experts are streamlining how they discover new sales models in order to increase productivity and prep for the future of sales. They’re doing it with a little help from data-driven insights and high-performing technology stacks. Here’s how it’s done:

• Unified customer view: Qvidian reported this year that 46 percent of sales reps admitted to a lack of clarity when it came to understanding their customer’s buying process. Customer insights garnered through social engagement technology can help identify where newly contacted customers are in their journey, as well as the buying signals of new potential customers. These insights can be shared with and built on by any team member, meaning that even your newest hires will have all the context they need when reaching out to make their next sale.
• Data-driven decisions on the fly: Often, big-impact decisions need to be made quickly. By unifying data that was once spread across spreadsheets, databases, and systems, decision makers can now create a single, searchable hub for your entire knowledge base. The result? Clean, concise insights and reports, generated on demand.
• Cross-platform collaboration: More and more, sales teams are working remotely and going mobile. In order for sales managers to coach and collaborate with their teams, strong cross-platform lines of communication are a must. These same connections can pull double-duty when last minute sales opportunities present themselves and team members need access to their team and their sales space at the drop of a hat.
• Automated trend discovery: By marrying social insights and in-house CRM data, team leaders can now detect developing trends in real time. Interactive, self-service charts allow for faster discovery, without having to put in a request to the IT department.

Your takeaway from all this? If you’re serious about future-proofing your sales team, your secret weapons are data and the analytics tools that let you take informed action fast. Start by checking how well your current analytics measure up with our white paper, Measure Your Impact: 5 key principles of sales analytics proficiency.

The post The Most Critical Decisions Sales Leaders Face Today appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

When you’re in charge of a full sales team, you may develop fears that can keep you up at night. Even when you finally make it to sleep, work anxiety can creep into your subconscious and turn your dreams into nightmares. We’ve targeted the top three work-related nightmares that sales executives face—and offer the weapons to keep those horrors at bay.

Get a handle on your nightmares with our 5-question test

NIGHTMARE 1: Your sales quota is unrealistically high and your team can’t meet the target.

Kind of like a dream about being unprepared for a big test at school, this fear is born of anxiousness about not stacking up. And there’s good reason to be scared.

According to CSO Insights, in 2014, only 58% of salespeople met their quota, which was down 4% from the numbers in 2012. Even more unnerving is that CSO Insights asked companies what percentage of their sales force they expected would make quota, and in general they overshot by a wide margin—guessing 66.8% of salespeople would hit the mark.

So not only are reps not hitting the target, but sales executives don’t have awareness of what’s actually happening on the ground. What can they do? Sales execs need to be involved in company strategy. The TAS Group found that when sales contributes to setting the company’s strategy, sales effectiveness increases by 15%. And by modernizing their sales organizations, the top sales teams saw 25% greater occurrence of reps meeting quotas.

Learn how to bring change to your organization

NIGHTMARE 2: Customers think they don’t need you anymore.

This bad dream is all about losing control, like falling out of a plane without a chute. Acquity Group reveals that 94% of B2B customers have done research on their own before they connect with a salesperson or make a purchase. Sales organizations can feel that a transition has taken place, and it’s terrifying to lose the position they once held.

In 2006, based on a survey of opinion leaders in eight countries, PR firm Edelman introduced a new category of influencer that was branded “a person like yourself.” The survey revealed that trust in figures of authority is being supplanted by trust in people we perceive as being like us. Customers no longer see salespeople as guides; instead, they look to their peers for advice.

There’s an easy way to take control. Inject yourself into that early research and discovery phase by seeding the Internet with useful content: blogs, videos, articles, graphics, presentations, etc. A thought leader who interacts with her followers on Twitter will be seen as a peer and can bring clients through the sales funnel simply by being a trusted resource.

Get your guide to modernizing sales teams

NIGHTMARE 3: You’re leaving money on the table.

Have you ever dreamt that you’re trapped or somehow stuck? It’s a mental manifestation of powerlessness, and that feeling is echoed in this sales nightmare. It can be hard to tell the good leads from the bad, and salespeople spend too much time on the wrong tasks, leaving quality leads dangling until they’ve cooled down and it’s too late.

In the last year, social media rose to being the third most popular avenue for generating the best and most powerful leads, and the popularity of that lead generation channel is only expected to increase. With effective use of LinkedIn and social media as a nurturing tool, sales teams can target hot prospects and make a personal connection.

Further, using technology to automate marketing efforts so individual sales team members can focus their time and attention on relationship building can yield big results. According to Forrester Research, companies that nail lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost.

Do you spend too much time on lead generation?

To learn more ways to quiet the nightmares and increase your sales team’s effectiveness with strategic, custom recommendations, use our free online tool today.

Start your World-class Sales Organization audit

The post 3 Ways to Turn a Sales Exec’s Nightmare into a Dream appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.