BUSINESS
Great Seller Experiences Facilitate Better Buying Experiences appropriate touch pattern, message or content to engage the buyer with minimal friction.
A look at the top sales engagement challenges for 2022. By Lloyd Lofton
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he TOPO Sales Engagement Leadership Report released in December 2020 focused on the innovative practice of sales engagement across high-growth sales teams in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report takes a deep dive into the issues of sales enablement and the factors that prevent best-practice results. It provided my team with the instruction and information we needed to address in 2021 as we develop strategies for our continued journey toward excellent service to our clients, converting all consumer interactions to a continuous flow of relationship building and predictable revenue growth. Although the report was published in 2020, after rereading it, here are some lessons we will continue to implement for growth and engagement in 2022. They are lessons that your practice can implement as well.
The Challenge
Sales engagement platforms are a mission-critical technology investment necessary to implement a sales engagement strategy. The overwhelming top sales engagement challenge is content strategy — the need for an effective sales engagement playbook and sales process. Although sellers are responsible for creating the messaging, they lack the infrastructure and experience to scale in an optimizable fashion. This leads to disorganized content libraries and ineffective and unchecked content. The result is a poor buyer experience. The goal is the successful alignment of touch patterns. This includes but is not limited to text messaging, LinkedIn and other social media, video, direct mail and chat — organized by segment and the minimum 50
Automation Capabilities A Top Factor For Success
People buy from people they trust. So how do you build a rep’s confidence in this new selling environment? content needed to deploy the messaging. Great seller experiences are paramount to facilitating better buying experiences. Sellers can use the technology within the context of their work, such as email inboxes, or use the technology directly on accounts, contacts and opportunities in their customer relationship management system.
What is an effective sales engagement strategy?
An effective sales engagement strategy includes prescriptive guidance on how to prioritize leads and accounts; how to store relevant research; how to create a touch patterning decision tree and guided workflows; and how to develop an easy-tosearch content library tagged by scenario, product and use case.
What is an effective playbook?
An effective sales engagement playbook visualizes the common scenarios and triggers for sellers to enroll prospects into touch patterns. It then simplifies the number of decisions sellers must run through to pull relevant content into those scenarios. Getting a team of sellers to adopt a new way of working requires an effective playbook process. That playbook process needs to be designed to prioritize, to recognize common buying behaviors, and to select the
InsuranceNewsNet Magazine » December 2021
Workf lows design and automate processes based on predefined business rules. Previous capabilities of automated or augmented known workflows must be revamped. Today, more advanced workflows completely shift the way sellers prioritize their time. Personalized messaging automation improves reply and meeting rates. This creates high-impact selling activity. To accomplish this, you must leverage available data, messaging and content to craft targeted messages using a combination of custom copy and prewritten templates. Spearheading this is artificial intelligence that provides a Google-like translation of every customer interaction. This creates a “story so far” so sellers know exactly what occurred on every call. It also creates coaching opportunities at the point of deviation to develop best-in-class sales teams. Automation also can create triggers to automatically enroll buyers into targeted touch patterns. This reprioritizes buyers in real time based on frequent engagement with emails. AI and machine learning also can be used to suggest specific messaging-based scenarios.
Work-From-Home Has Upended Industries
The work-from-home sales environment has upended traditional sales enablement — from onboarding sales representatives to training sales reps to getting reps in production sooner and in a cost-effective way. Most training today is something like Zoom sessions. This reduces or eliminates the opportunity for managers to “ride with reps” to see whether they are adopting your suggestions — because they are no longer “riding to see their prospects.”
