What do top salespeople want? Besides success and eternal glory, that’s it. Salespeople want to know who they should be selling to, what they should be talking about, and what’s the right time to do so. Simple, isn’t it?
To answer those questions, we regularly create different types of content that explain how to become relevant through the use of real-time company information when prospecting, calling, and meeting. For beginners and experts.
In this article, we’ve compiled our most popular resources. Our greatest hits if you will. Download these resources to have a complete toolkit to master real-time sales.
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Doing sales the right way
Let’s get started by taking a look at the big picture. Cold calling through random lists and spamming emails without targeting give salespeople a bad rep. They aren’t viable sales tactics anymore. Instead, salespeople should be relevant in every step of the sales process. They should focus on the right things, like helping their customers.
This 30-page guide to real-time sales empowers salespeople to do sales the right way, one where you carry out personalized conversations at scale, using real-time company information in every customer interaction.
Pro tip: The key to real-time sales is being proactive: anticipating the buyer’s need and reaching out when time is ripe. Salespeople must show a clear understanding of decision-makers’ needs, wants, and desires, so they can share tailor-made content and communicate in a personalized way.
Know your ideal customers
This is as obvious as it gets. Attracting accounts matching your ideal customer profile will demand less from your company resources and bring in the best results. But do you really know who your ideal customers are?
Defining—and documenting an ideal customer profile must be the first order of business for any sales organization, but not every company has defined or successfully implemented its ICP. This template will help you get started if you need to create or refine your ideal customer profile.
>> Download ideal customer profile template
Pro tip: When the definition of your ideal customer is crystal clear for your whole company, the tasks, routines, and goals of both your marketing and sales teams will be coherent with it.
Timing’s everything
Once you know your ideal customer profile, knowing which accounts to prioritize comes next. Because in sales timing’s everything. If doing sales the right way is about being relevant, you must reach out when the time’s ripe.
There are moments in a company’s lifecycle that suggest they are more interested in what you have to offer. Look for sales triggers events within ICP accounts to focus your sales efforts on the right ones.
>> Download outbound sales triggers tracker
Pro tip: Find a correlation between a happy customer and a specific event, and you can find a heap of actionable leads in the future.
Sales and marketing alignment
If your pipeline runs dry, knocking your marketing colleagues’ door (literally or not) will keep you going. Because when sales and marketing work together, great things will happen.
Sales and marketing teams need to work closer than ever before to increase the ROI of each department and achieve business goals. Sign a service level agreement to bury the hatchet and boost the collaboration with marketing.
>> Download sales and marketing SLA template
Pro tip: For seamless alignment, sales and marketing software should be fully integrated. When the systems that sales and marketing are using can “talk” to each other, data can automatically be synced between them.
Do more of what works
All the resources listed so far will be worth little if you can’t prove those tactics work. This sales activity tracking spreadsheet is designed for sales teams to keep track of their daily activities of prospecting, calling, and meeting customers.
>> Download sales activity tracking spreadsheet
Pro tip: Choose your compass metric. Don’t be overwhelmed by the number of metrics available. Carefully consider where you want to put your efforts
Build systematic winning habits with a stellar sales playbook
And finally, don’t forget to document your tactics and strategies. Like the best sports dynasties, successful sales teams use a playbook to build systematic winning habits and processes.
Integrating sales playbooks into your business strategy ensures better attainment of quota, increased customer retention rates, and improved lead conversion rates. This sales playbook template describes the main elements you should include in a sales playbook.
>> Get sales playbook template
Pro tip: Every time your sales process changes, your product line expands or shrinks, your ideal customer profile gets updated, your strategy evolves, or your sales compensation plan is tweaked, reflect these changes in the playbook.
And finally, tap into technology
Case in point. The resources above evidence the complexity of the sales job in today’s business-to-business sales.
Fortunately, there’s a vast amount of sales tools (here are the top 100 sales tools) that can make salespeople’s life easier. Vainu is one of those tools, come and see how you can find all prospects matching your ideal customer profile and get alerted when it’s time to reach out.
