How to Improve the Effectiveness of Outbound Sales Teams

One of the biggest challenges for any Sales Leader is that they need to free up their team from monotonous administration and other productivity-sapping activities so that they can focus on what they do best – making contact with prospects and customers in order to close more business. For the vast majority of sales organizations - assuming the right individuals are in role - it's a very simple numbers game – make more calls, drive more revenue.

The problem

Most sales organizations now use some form of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution in an effort to keep tabs on each customer touch, while ensuring good continuity in the event of a salesperson being absent from or departing the organization. It's been a great leap forward from the days of paper filing systems, complex spreadsheets and other attempts at tracking sales activity.

The issue is that the way some CRMs have been deployed within sales teams has been far from perfect. The salesperson often has to grapple multiple systems, constantly switching between applications and even copying and pasting content from one system to another. The result can be too much time is spent on this inefficient administration, since completion of these tasks often drives reports of activity from which the salesperson's compensation derives. Alternatively, a salesperson decides that the administration is getting in the way of the sales process and focusses on making contact with customers at the expense of properly tracking activity. The result is a lose-lose scenario since the salesperson won't get properly rewarded for their efforts and the organization is not capturing important parts of the customer journey from which future decisions will be made.

The solution

The answer is to automate as much of the sales administration process as possible, so that the key data gets automatically captured and the salesperson is freed up to do more selling. NewVoiceMedia facilitates this through deep integration of its cloud contact center with Salesforce CRM:

• All calls coming into or out of the sales team are automatically logged in Salesforce
• Call recording can be set to start automatically and can be accessed from the simple clicking of a link in the Salesforce record
• Stored call recordings can then be used to train new starters and share best practices around the team so that everyone can become a high performer
• Click-to-dial, directly from the Salesforce record, saves an enormous amount of time over manual dialling and far more accurate
• Screen-pops of customer records ensures salespeople instantly have the right information to hand
• Easy access to a notes field allows the agent to quickly add any pertinent notes straight back into the Salesforce record, all from within the single application
• Reporting, in real-time, gives management far deeper insights into the sales operation, uncovering previously missing insights to ensure continuous improvement

To learn more, please download our latest customer success case study from Inside Marketing who are planning to double their number of outbound sales agents due to: an 11% uplift in call engagement, 10% productivity improvement in the first two months, 100% faster dial times, better agent performance and compliance, improved reporting and disaster recovery secured.

Check out the Inside Marketing case study

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