Improving the likelihood of deals closing is critical to getting more output from your sales team(s). Doing it effectively is one part process and one part technology…and data is at the center of both.
By fine-tuning your approach and tailoring your communications for each prospect, you can effectively boost your deal conversion rates to grow your revenue. Most importantly, put predictive and prescriptive data analytics powered by AI and machine-learning into the hands of all your revenue-critical employees so you can identify deal risk and opportunities in time to make an impact.
According to our study of over 100 CEOs, CROs and other executives, 8 in 10 companies are not effectively using predictive analytics to mitigate risks with pipeline traction and velocity. 34% of companies are not doing it at all. Ironically, data is one of the biggest assets of all companies who participated in this study: digital information, media and events organizations, in addition to marketing service providers.
If your competitors are using these methods and you’re not, your company is at a disadvantage. The tools exist to make it happen.
Here are some other important considerations to close more deals:
Tip #1: Adopt conversational intelligence tools to understand customer intent and interests at different stages of the sales process. Connect to predictive analytics and dashboards to identify opportunity and risk.
Tip #2: Dissect objections from prospects, and ensure they are well documented for each account in your CRM. Standardize and carefully manage objection responses, with solid training for your team. Using your data platform, when objections are identified, immediately deal-storm with revenue-critical members of the team to craft the next step of the deal plan. Put metrics in place to measure impact on that deal.
Tip #3: Closely examine wins and losses, and debrief with your sales teams and take action on what’s working and what’s not. Using predictive analytics, create algorithms that identify the potential loss ahead of time to help mitigate and turn into a win.
Tip #4: Personalize communications to each account and, when efficient, every stakeholder. In partnership with marketing and using a unified view of the customer, develop a continuous improvement strategy where prospect and customer communication is constantly tailored using what’s working and getting rid of what’s not.
Want to jumpstart your revenue?
Our Revenue Acceleration solutions will help you extract more value from current operations while planning for the future. We’ll help you get set up to use predictive and prescriptive analytics to identify deal risk before it happens, with our platform, Insightify. We deliver a rapid time to value, with quick wins and a continuous cycle of improvement – a Flywheel effect.
Look out for other topics we are covering in this series.
- Reducing Customer Churn
- Improving Pricing Power
- Managing Discounting and Value-Add
- Increasing Expansion and Cross-Sell
- Identifying and Eliminating Revenue Leakage
- Tightening up Sales Cycles
- Aligning Revenue Critical Teams
- Developing Leading KPIs for Growth
- Using Predictive Analytics to Control the Business
Each topic should be part of your operating plan and will have short and long-term benefits — as long as the words "sustainable and scalable growth" are embedded into the discussion.
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