Driving Conversations & Conversions Within CRM E-Book

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Driving Conversations & Conversions Within CRM

How Progressive Sales & Marketing Teams Are Improving Pipeline Metrics by Triggering The Right Content At The Right Stage

Driving Conversations & Conversions Within CRM | 2

Closing The Gap To Reach Revenue Goalss

IntroductionTable of Contents

Introduction 3

Buyers Charting Their Own Educational Journey 6

Closing The Gap To Reach Revenue Goals 8

Moving Beyond Random Acts Of Sales Enablement 10

Making The Most Of Limited Opportunities 11

Conclusion 13

About SAVO 14



IntroductionBuyers Charting

Their Own Educational Journey

Closing The Gap To Reach

Revenue Goals

Moving Beyond Random Acts Of Sales

Enablement

Making The Most Of Limited Opportunities

Conclusion

Sales teams must be equipped with the right resources that address the exact need of buyers at their particular point in the journey.

The majority of marketing organizations now have specific revenue goals and most have a substantial quota in place to gauge marketing’s contribution to the pipeline. In fact, according to a 2013 benchmark report from Demand Gen Report, nearly two thirds of organizations reported that as much as 50% of their pipeline is now marketing sourced.

This shared approach to driving revenue is generally seen as a positive trend, but it has also upped the ante for both marketing and sales to track and influence performance at all stages of the pipeline. Where marketing was traditionally tasked with finding, nurturing and qualifying leads, they are now focused on how leads are actually

converting to opportunities and deals after they are passed over to sales. The sales team enters the equation when it comes to connecting with prospects, bringing them further along in the sales funnel and closing deals.

Since marketing teams are now investing significant budget to create leads with the expectation that they will turn into real revenue, these teams are paying more attention to how their leads perform at various stages and identifying potential points where they are stalling or dropping out of the pipeline.

This expanded role has also changed processes and approaches for marketing and sales. Where marketers used to

Introduction





Revenue Goals


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Conclusion

only focus on the outbound messaging working within an email or marketing automation system, they are now spending more time within CRM systems and developing resources for specific stages to convert and accelerate more leads to deals.

The focus on lead conversion has led to an expanded relationship with the entire sales organization, which is also concentrated on deal velocity and accelerating sales cycles.

To become true sales professionals, sales teams must be equipped with the right resources — content, collateral and support materials, coaching and expert guidance — that address the exact need of buyers at their particular point in the journey.

It means both sales and marketing teams now rely heavily on buyers having positive interactions with the sales team at key stages of the sales or buying cycle. In order to achieve this, both sales and

marketing are more focused on coaching and aligning resources and content to the buyer’s buying cycle. Otherwise, good leads potentially end up in a black hole.

Given the increased investments in generating leads and the increased pressure of creating opportunities in the sourcing pipeline, both marketing and sales now must have confidence that the investments they are making convert and accelerate into revenue.

Progressive companies are recognizing that the best way to achieve this goal is to have one central place where the marketing team can feed the sales team everything they need to help them convert leads and accelerate the buying process.

Since customer relationship management (CRM) systems have emerged as the central point of revenue reporting, where both marketing and sales are tracking responses and buyer behavior, many leading companies are building out new tools and tactics within those systems


to help ensure the right messages and resources are provided to buyers at key stages in the decision-making process.

This e-book will take a look at the opportunities to boost the impact of CRM systems on both lead conversion and deal acceleration.

It will explore the following topics:

■ How marketing can improve lead conversions by feeding sales development teams with relevant, prescriptive and situational resources, and coaching tools that create immediate alignment to the buyer’s process to better qualify and accelerate leads at the early stages of the sales cycle.

■ Simplifying the process of accessing the pertinent resources — relevant, dynamic and situational — to help

close deals. Sales professionals need a consolidated screen with all of the content and support they need to control their conversations with leads or opportunities at all stages of the process.

■ Recognizing where some deals are hitting a “bump” and providing the appropriate messaging to move deals along more quickly.

■ Taking coaching and support tools to the next level by going beyond sales playbooks and other standard operating procedures.

■ How progressive organizations are developing repeatable processes that help sales and marketing zero in on the pertinent content that is meaningful to an individual prospect.




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Research estimates that buyers are 50% to 75% of the way through their journey before talking to a salesperson.

Buyers Charting Their Own Educational Journey

One challenge for sales and marketing to convert and accelerate leads is that B2B buyers are educating themselves much more thoroughly prior to engaging with the sales team. Research estimates that buyers are 50% to 75% of the way through their journey before talking to a salesperson. As buyers move from research to conversation, studies show that they are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of their interactions.

This changing buying behavior has made it essential for both marketing and sales teams to communicate with buyers

in both a timely and relevant manner. According to the B2B Buyer Behavior Survey by Demand Gen Report, more than half of buyers have already compiled a short list of solution providers before connecting with a salesperson.

The survey also found:

■ 57% of respondents ranked the timeliness of a vendor’s response as a key consideration in their purchase decision; and

■ 53% cited the relevance of infor-mation provided by a company as a key trigger.

50% 75%





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“Despite all of the tools available — CRM, web analytics and marketing automation — this shows that marketing and sales teams are still struggling to keep pace with the changing expectations of buyers,” the report stated. “This also underscores that those firms that can transform their engagement models rapidly will have a decided advantage over their competitors.”

B2B organizations are seeking solutions to help the sales team accelerate leads and differentiate their offerings. “The sales-enablement marketplace — a few years after the first flushes of interest

passed — has recently begun to return to life,” according to Matt Mullen and Alan Pelz-Sharpe, analysts for 451 Research and authors of Sales Enablement: CRM’s Forgotten Sibling Attempts A Comeback.They noted that the growth in interest for digital marketing is a driving force. “Sales enablement’s basic premise is that the influence of the salesperson is on the wane, so best use the limited touch points in prospect interaction as cleverly as you can,” the report stated.

B2B organizations are seeking solutions to help the sales team accelerate leads and differentiate their offerings.



Closing The Gap To Reach Revenue Goals




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Nearly half of all CEOs are now actively tracking marketing’s impact on revenue and almost one quarter of CFOs now have direct visibility into the revenue performance of marketing.— “Data Rich: The Payoff of Marketing Measurement On Revenue Performance,” Demand Gen Report

The pressure on marketing to justify its investments has clearly focused the attention on improving marketing’s alignment with sales. According to the IBM Global CMO Study, 75% say that return on marketing investment will be the primary measure of their effectiveness by 2015, but only half feel sufficiently prepared to provide hard numbers.

Those findings were echoed in another study by Demand Gen Report, entitled Data Rich: The Payoff of Marketing Measurement On Revenue Performance. More than two thirds (68%) of respondents reported pressure to

justify marketing spend. According to the survey, nearly half of all CEOs are now actively tracking marketing’s impact on revenue and almost one quarter of CFOs now have direct visibility into the revenue performance of marketing.

A majority (63%) of respondents said that CMOs are now providing reports, which show marketing’s impact on revenue. This increased visibility is linked to the technology solutions now being used by organizations to tie marketing investments to revenue performance. Nearly three quarters (72%) of respondents are using their CRM systems to measure and track





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marketing’s impact, 69% are using a web analytics application, and 54% are using a marketing automation platform.

As the CRM system is the primary tool of the sales organization and anything related to revenue, marketing needs to be integrating with the CRM at some level. As more organizations are adopting marketing automation systems, which typically integrate with a CRM system, marketers are also spending more time within CRM and tracking buyer behavior and pipeline acceleration.

Because marketing’s contribution to revenue is now more visible, there is increased incentive to expand marketing’s responsibility for lead performance beyond just sending the lead “over the wall” to sales. The more deals that make it to the signature stage — and the faster they make it through the pipeline — the quicker they reach their goals.

The primary way for marketing to bridge that gap is to improve lead conversion rates. However, marketing faces a challenge when it comes to managing and impacting lead conversion rates, because the person who is responsible for converting a lead to a sale — either a sales rep or someone such as a sales development rep who does some of the pre-sales screening — is typically someone outside of marketing.

This is where sales enablement tools come into play. These tools provide dynamic and prescriptive resources to prompt the person making the phone call with the information that aligns to that prospect and helps accelerate the process. Without that, they aren’t giving their salespeople the best opportunities to qualify their leads.






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Moving Beyond Random Acts Of Sales Enablement

Structured processes help ensure that the sales team has the right messaging that speaks to the needs of the prospect at their point in the buying process.

While sales enablement happens in an unstructured way in many companies, leading organizations are putting more structured and dynamic processes in place. These processes help ensure that the sales team has the right messaging that speaks to the needs of the prospect at their point in the buying process.

“As technology vendors work to respond to the changing conditions their buyers face, salespeople are overwhelmed with an avalanche of random acts of sales support generated from many different groups throughout the organization,” according to a Forrester

report, Launching A New Sales Enablement Service With A Bang. “Lacking transparency into the cause-and-effect relationship between sales support investments and their value, executive management also lacks the appropriate visibility into how its revenue engines actually function and continues to suffer from these profit-undermining inefficiencies.”

Forward-thinking organizations are arming their sales team with structured, repeatable processes that can be accessed from the CRM screen that they view for all of their day-to-day activities.






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The odds of entering the lead into the sales cycle increase 21 times if called within five minutes of receiving a web site message compared to 30 minutes.

One of the major hurdles to lead conversion and deal acceleration is the lack of the proper resources to guide the salesperson during their initial contact with a prospect. They need content and context to help steer the conversation to what is most important to the buyer.

Sales enablement is responsible for applying a sales methodology to a company’s content development efforts, noted SiriusDecisons executives Marisa Kope, Vice President and Group Director; and Erin Estep, Service Director, Strategic Communications Management, in a presentation at SiriusDecisions Summit 2013. They explained that high-performing reps require persona knowledge and assets, as well as tools that customize the business value

conversation. They identified a need for content that does more than describe the product, adding that content must align with the sales process.

While a prospect may have attended a webinar, downloaded a white paper and visited your web site a few times, in the B2B world, buyers still buy from people. There is a finite period of time that a salesperson has to connect with a lead or it is gone forever. In particular, leads that are generated from your web site need to be handled quickly. According to research conducted by Dr. James Oldroyd, Ph.D., the odds of qualifying a lead if called within five minutes versus the first 30 minutes are 100 times greater. The odds of entering the lead into the sales cycle increase 21 times if called within five





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minutes of receiving a web site message compared to 30 minutes.

The key is to have the right content and resources in front of sales professionals each and every time they call on clients. Salespeople can be overwhelmed if they have to determine what information they need for each interaction. By putting the information in front of them, it tells them it is important to their success on this call.

At an early point in the sales cycle, it may be appropriate to present the salesperson with a script, a list of hot topics in the prospect’s industry, and an image of the ad that sparked their interest. Further down the sales funnel, the right resources could involve a PowerPoint presentation,

a subject matter expert and opportunity-specific coaching to help salespeople overcome objections and differentiate their offerings.

All of these resources go beyond the standard sales playbook and operating procedures found in most organizations. These are typically static documents that treat every lead the same. Every organization — and even every buying decision in an organization — has a unique flow and set of requirements. With a dynamic approach, these documents are automatically parceled out based on the information currently at hand. The more information the sales team possesses, the greater the chance to accelerate the buying process.

The key is to have the right content and resources in front of sales professionals each and every time they call on clients.






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Conclusion

It is critical that both marketing and sales teams focus on having the right resources and content accessible at specific stages of the buying process.

To reach the goals of lead conversion and deal acceleration, marketing and sales must work together to optimize and sim-plify the selling process.

Realizing that more buyers are often self-navigating through the early stages of the buying cycle, it is critical that both mar-keting and sales teams focus on having the right resources and content accessible at specific stages of the buying process.

While buyers are waiting longer before initiating contact with sales, it hasn’t meant a reduction in the number of times they contact a company before making a buying decision. In fact, more than one third of respondents to Demand Gen Report’s 2012 B2B Buyer Behavior Survey (35%) reported at least four contacts (via sales calls, email or other methods) with the winning vendor, and 31% said they had eight or more contacts.

One of the biggest benefits to aligning marketing and sales is having clearly defined goals. It is not just about having a script and a small bit of information on the lead available to salespeople before they make calls. It is about ensuring that they have all of the resources — both content and context — to give them the best shot at success.

There has to be structure to the process of arming the sales team with the right information, but it also has to adapt to the situation. Every company, every sale, every lead and every stage in the buying cycle has a different set of requirements.

With the right tools, marketing and sales can work together to ensure that the resources spent to develop those leads result in signed contracts.


SAVO is the market leader in sales enablement. Our SaaS solution uses the power of content management, team selling, RFP/proposal automation, mobility and insight to harness companywide knowledge to deliver professional selling. Smarter Selling™ methods align sales, marketing and operations to prescribe materials, coaching, tools and experts at the right time in the buying process. SAVO is helping customers close the performance gaps in their business. Driving higher profits, volume and market share goals.

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Driving Conversations & Conversions Within CRM E-Book

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