SALES ACCELERATION - A PRIMER

In short, sales acceleration is about speeding up the sales cycle by shortening it. Put another way, sales acceleration refers to strategies to improve prospect connect ratio, move prospects through the sales pipeline with greater efficiency, and reduce deals attrition. Sales acceleration is also seen as a function of sales enablement.

Using data management, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics, sales acceleration tools can deliver intelligent insights in real-time in a much quicker fashion, connecting it with buying signals and providing it with relevant context. The intelligent automation based sales acceleration tools allow reps to focus on their main priority — selling or closing sales — by handling the more tedious routine tasks in the sales process.

Scientific approaches based sales acceleration tools can automatically predict and recommend best standards/actions that have a probability for high pipeline performance and sales success, thus saving precious efforts and time of sales reps. Also, these tools help sales leadership by providing strategic insights to reverse pipeline risks and optimization.

Sales acceleration tools built for provisioning intelligent engagements could heavy-lift customer engagements for automatic analyzing to provide real-time engagement recommendations and insights to optimize customer engagement strategies.

• Too many leads are stagnant with no progress
• Huge mismatch in sales target or forecast expected and achieved.
• Most of the new incoming leads are pending for the first engagement.
• Unanswered or missed customer calls are not returned on time.
• Huge mismatch in sales team productivity rate expected and achieved.
• No consistency in sales productivity at both team and individual levels.

Focusing on Right Deals

As identifying the prospects which are profile fit and has the best probable chance to win involves analyzing multiple factors & patterns, Sales Acceleration tools can help with AI-backed scoring techniques to do this job for the sales reps.

Identifying Pipeline Risks Proactively

For sales reps, it will be difficult to always keep track of signals that impact pipeline performance manually. Instead, if Sales Acceleration tools can help to predict best standards/actions that have
a probability for high pipeline performance and recommends the sales reps automatically whenever they are out of the track, it can translate in enormous sales wins.

Efficiently Engaging Customers

Another area where sales reps usually struggle is for successful customer engagements. This is where AI can help sales rep with recommendations on the best channel (Email or Call) and timeline to reach customers based on the historical engagement data, thus helping them to finetune their customer reach out strategies.

Deriving Accurate Sales Forecasts

Achieving Sales forecast accuracy still remains the prime target of most of the sales managers. As achieving it with just manual analysis and gut instincts will not yield expected results, AI-backed prediction tools can help to precisely predict the expected closure time and the winning probability of forecasted deals thus improving the accuracy.

Addressing Team Performance Bottlenecks

Sales managers spend most of their productivity in tracking their sales rep performance. Factors that holds a significant impact on top-performing sales reps performance are sometimes less obvious and difficult to find. This is where AI-backed team performance intelligence tools can help to analyzes such patters and helps sales managers to guide their underperforming sales reps with right performance prescriptions.