Calculating sales commissions fast and accurately with traditional methods, like spreadsheets, is a daunting task in any sales organization. Slow payments render even the most strategic incentive plans ineffective - salespeople can't connect the dots between their rewards to their sales behaviors. When commissions are not accurate, salespeople lose trust in their company's ability to deliver on their commission plan and sales managers often invest their precious time resolving clerical errors. Inaccurate payments lead salespeople to create their own shadow accounting process which takes them further away from the customer.
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How fast and accurate are your salespeople when it comes to configuring products, generating accurate quotes, and delivering persuasive, branded proposals to your customers? What makes this vital business function often unstable is the diversity of interests involved in a complex process, which impacts the workflow of sales, marketing, finance, production, logistics, transportation and channel partners. In many companies, proposals are managed administrators who depend on management for approval. When a proposal is delivered late, or is inaccurate, the risk of losing the sale increases. CPQ technology can generate more accurate proposals in less time.
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Companies that are able to deliver an emotionally satisfying experience across all customer touch points will enjoy a premium price, higher customer loyalty, and more customer referrals. While many companies talk a good game when it comes to creating a customer-centric business, few companies measure the impact of their customer conversations across all touch points. While most CRM programs promise a 360-degree view of the customer, the reality is that most customer-facing employees don't have a clue about what customers experience when dealing with them and their company. Companies can become far more resilient by adapting their organization to the customer's needs with the help of new CEM apps and CEM experts.
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Customer relationship management is the most commonly used term in sales, and it is often the least understood. CRM is part of the company's strategy for managing interactions with customers and prospects. It involves using technology to organize the sales process and give other departments, such as marketing and customer service, visibility into all customer transactions, from generating leads to closing sales. The core strategy underlying CRM is to identify, engage, and win new clients; retain existing clients; and reduce the cost of doing business. Successful CRM requires executive sponsorship, well-documented sales processes, effective implementation, and ongoing training to drive up user adoption and realize consistent benefits.
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Gamification describes the use of games to enhance nongame performance. Gamification relies on technology that encourages users to engage in desired behaviors. Gartner predicts that by 2015, more than 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes. Gamification taps into people's native instinct to play, keep score, and enjoy virtual rewards. It's not that games will transform work into play; rather, the game element will inspire the player's commitment to perform at a higher level. Gamification apps allow companies to reward honor badges to salespeople, celebrate winners on flashy electronic scoreboards, launch friendly competition, and create point systems as a reward for achievement.
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Business battles are won by how fast you can create customers. And to win more customers, companies need to create a steady flow a leads. Lead generation is a top marketing challenge in the majority of companies. Reaching the decision maker is close second. Effective lead management depends on three key factors. First, sales and marketing must be aligned and be in agreement around the definition of what is a lead. Second, companies need a reliable process for lead acquisition. Third, companies need technology tools that help salespeople spend more time with prospects and less time searching for information.
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Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers." (Source: AMA) While less than 50 percent of companies use marketing automation, the majority of companies are struggling with sales and marketing alignment, As the business world expands its connections through social and mobile media, marketing's complexity is increasing at breakneck speed. Marketing automation is helping companies manage the avalanche of data created through online and off-line marketing activities. It helps companies collect, aggregate, analyze, and use marketing data designed to optimize customer engagement and facilitate sales.
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In a market that's heavily impacted by commoditization, it is important to engage the right prospects with the right message. A value-driven message that's embedded in a quality conversation can turn into a key competitive differentiator. While many companies allow salespeople to continually improvise their conversations, successful companies are creating conversation maps that start with the customer's business objectives and core challenges and lead salespeople to the most relevant and insightful responses. What sells in today's market isn't knowledge; it is insight that leads to untapped business value. Message management is all about selling with value-based conversations.
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Technology is quickly transforming screens into virtual sales offices, where buyers and sellers meet to co-create a sale. Presenting a product or service requires an optimal blend of art and science. Computer science allows salespeople to share their screens to collaborate with clients, and new presentation technology delivers dazzling virtualization, visual configuration, and 3-D animation. But all the power of technology will not eclipse the impact of a smiling face; it will not be able to replicate feelings of trust or simulate the power of passion. That's why a number of companies are embracing video-conferencing technology that brings the face-to-face connection back to selling.
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According to a McKinsey study, a 1 percent increase in realized price delivers a healthy 10 percent increase in operating profits. While many companies simply calculate pricing based on product cost and profits, best-in-class companies manage pricing strategically to improve their competitiveness in different markets while increasing profitability. As companies plan price increases, buyers are quick to fight back when a company misreads what its customers value. Pricing automation tools are designed to eliminate pricing risks while protecting profit margins.
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In sales, our end point is always a target number. What's not clear is the rapid flow of data and what we need to do to get to our target. That's why we need the skills, tools, and practices that allow continuous iterative exploration of all sales and marketing processes. Ideally, analytics help us gain insight into the effectiveness of salespeople, sales processes, marketing campaigns, and strategies. While many sales leaders are still used to making decisions based on hunches, analytic applications take the guesswork out of interpreting data.
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Sales enablement is often handicapped by fuzzy organizational boundaries. In some companies, knowledge assets are created by marketing, selling skills are supplied by sales training, and the sales process is the responsibility of sales management. Salespeople can win more deals if they are better prepared. IDC research shows that 33 percent of unsuccessful deals could have been won if the salesperson had been better informed or more client-oriented. Sales enablement can deliver the right information, to the right person, at the right time. 
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A sales process is a systematic approach to selling your product or service. In an ideal world all salespeople in your company use the same sales process and achieve predictable sales results. In reality most salespeople don't follow a consistent sales process and more than half of them don't reach their sales quota. The causes are twofold. First, executing a sales process is not as simple or easy as painting by the numbers. Second, rapid shifts in a highly competitive market and inconsistencies in sales talent, sales training and coaching will often impair sales results.
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Each step of the sales process can turn into a time sink that can be avoided with smart automation. An example: A sales rep may dial 120 prospects a day and have seven conversations with prospects, but the manager may not know that automation tools can connect the salesperson with seven prospects in one hour. Another big time waster: chasing customers to sign off on an agreement long after they've said yes. With e-signature apps, salespeople can improve the turnaround and close sales faster, and the company will get paid sooner. The best-run sales organizations associate a metric with each sales process to identify the variables in efficiency. These metrics will lead to better processes and automation tools.
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Social media has fundamentally changed buying behaviors. Customers no longer listen to companies; they listen to their peers. Research conducted by the Sales Executive Board suggests that buyers have completed 57 percent of their buying steps before they connect with a salesperson. As a result, companies are retooling their sales processes to mirror the new buying processes. Social-media technology creates instant connections to internal and external stakeholders and gives companies new ways to connect, collaborate, learn, and co-create. Social-business technology is giving birth to a new social culture that is flattening hierarchies and changing the way companies are managed.
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