No matter where you fit into your company — whether you’re a marketer driving leads, a sales leader responsible for quotas, or the CEO — you’re impacted by the efficiency of your company’s sales team.
When your sales team is armed with the right data, tools, and support, they’ll be able to make the most of new (and existing) opportunities to maximize revenue. When they don’t have the data, tools, and support they need, your whole company leaves money on the table.
Here are three key data points you can measure to ensure that your sales team is positioned to operate at peak efficiency.
Predictive lead score
Not all leads are created equal. Make sure your sales reps are following up with leads that are both valuable and likely to convert.
Nearly all marketing and sales teams use lead scoring to indicate the potential value of a lead. When a new lead is captured, they are assigned a score — either manually or with the help of marketing automation — based on their likelihood to convert.
A lead that visits the pricing page of your website, for example, will score higher than one who reads a blog. A lead score is helpful in determining which leads marketing should pass on to sales, and which ones sales should follow up with first.
Predictive lead scoring goes a step further. In addition to user behavior, it uses AI to determine a new lead’s likelihood to convert based on indicators of their buying intent, how similar they are to other leads that ended up converting, and other factors. It automatically assigns lead scores in real time and based on data, ensuring over time that you aren’t overlooking potential opportunities for new customers.
In addition to predictive lead scoring, your CRM can open the door to many more insights about your audience, customer journeys, and sales performance. The right CRM also aligns your marketing and sales teams under the same data, goals, and 360-degree view of your customer.
Average lifetime value
You’re tracking new leads, email follow-ups, phone follow-ups, customer behavior, and all the right data points to make sure your reps are as productive as possible in contacting the leads your marketing team generates. However, are their efforts resulting in closed deals and happy customers?
Customer lifetime value is the end result of your marketing, sales, and service initiatives coming together to create excellent customer experiences.
According to the State of the Connected Customer, 69% of business buyers expect companies to anticipate their needs. Customer lifetime value indicates how well you’ve anticipated your customers’ needs and invested in creating the kinds of relevant, personalized experiences that lead to meaningful relationships — including opportunities to grow relationships through upselling, cross-selling, and renewing service agreements or warranties.
By tracking the average lifetime value of the deals your sales team is closing, you can see how effectively your team is building lasting, meaningful relationships.
69% of business buyers expect companies to anticipate their needs. – State of the Connected Customer
Time-to-quote
Does this situation sound familiar? Marketing gets a new lead, and it’s a hot one. The lead goes through a nurture journey, engaging with content and sharing information along the way.
When the time is right, marketing passes the lead along to sales. Sales spends time building a relationship with the potential customer — answering their questions, understanding their goals, and guiding them to solutions. Finally, the customer says those magic words: “Send me a quote.”
However, the team is backlogged with quotes — which are created manually — and by the time it’s finally ready to send to the customer, that hot lead has become a missed opportunity.
If your marketing teams and sales reps are putting time and effort into building a relationship with a new potential customer, only to have it fall apart because a quote takes too long or is incorrect, they’ve wasted those time and resources. If you depend on manual quoting, you aren’t maximizing the efficiency of your sales process or your sales reps’ time.
Automated quoting and billing can help you reduce the time it takes to price and quote contracts — and ensure the quotes you send are accurate and consistent every time — so you can make sure your sales team’s efforts result in closed deals.
By tracking the right data, you can understand how your sales team is performing and where roadblocks or clunky processes are tripping them up. Armed with the right tools and data, your sales team can spend more time doing what they do best — building meaningful customer relationships.
Want to learn more about how you can take the guesswork out of selling and maximize your sales team’s potential? Check out Extra Credit: 3 Marketing Strategies to Help Sales Close More Deals.