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    How Sales Professionals Can Get the Most Out of Their BI Technology

    The sales and marketing technology industry has no shortage of products available aimed at helping sales professionals improve their productivity around cross selling and prospecting. However, despite the plethora of products saturating the industry, salespeople often fail to leverage resources to their full potential. In many cases, sales leaders believe that by merely providing a resource they are doing enough to encourage product usage. Because teams aren’t necessarily aware of all the capabilities and functions at their disposal, they are apt to neglect products altogether.

    Business information technology has the ability to contribute significantly to a company’s bottom line, but it will be a wasted expense if your team does not understand how to use it properly. Here are a few tips, identified by Roseanne McCauley, senior vice president, Enterprise Sales, Avention, Inc., to help ensure your sales force is taking full advantage of your product investments.

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    How to Help Your Sales Team Be All It Can Be

    Click through for a few tips to help ensure your sales force is taking full advantage of your product investments, as identified by Roseanne McCauley, senior vice president, Enterprise Sales, Avention, Inc.

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    Provide Proper Training

    In order for salespeople to best take advantage of the resources supplied to them, it’s important that teams receive training from both their sales enablement technology vendor as well as their internal sales leaders. A broader, more general training with their vendor account manager will give salespeople a holistic view of the product’s features within the context of their industry, while an internal company training with their sales leader will help them see how the key features relate to their day-to-day role and responsibilities.

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    Develop a Strategic Sales Process

    Sales leaders should also encourage a strategic sales process to help their teams incorporate technology into their daily routines. Whether that is an initial scan first thing in the morning or a final review at night in order to prioritize targets for the next day, setting aside time each day to dig into sales technology encourages usage and productivity. Otherwise, technology can be neglected in favor of older, more familiar methods that likely do not provide the same swiftness or sophistication of the technology that is available today.

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    Set Up Alerts and Triggers

    Many business information systems offer the opportunity for users to create alerts and triggers that will notify them proactively as relevant events or opportunities present themselves. Often, salespeople don’t activate these resources and instead leverage their business information tools only for manual searches. By allowing the business information technology to work proactively, the salesperson is able to identify prospects in real time and capitalize on opportunities more quickly, all with minimal effort.

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    Facilitate a Relationship with Your Account Manager

    By building a relationship with a dedicated vendor account manager that is familiar with their organization’s use cases, a sales force can spend less time digging around a platform and more time deriving value from it. Account managers exist for that specific reason, so sales leaders and their team shouldn’t hesitate to reach out with individualized questions or concerns so that they can do their jobs better.

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    Create Goals

    Identifying goals that can be achieved through a business information platform helps to facilitate efficiency. By determining why the company has invested in a product and how it provides value to the sales team, individuals are better able to use the solution to derive value in the intended manner.

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    Share Success Stories

    A sales leader is responsible for motivating his or her team to achieve its sales goals. This should be no different when encouraging business information technology usage. Sales leaders need to be sharing success stories that result from leveraging a specific technology across their teams in order to encourage other individuals to use the product. If one team is consistently delivering results due to the technology that is available, other peers within the organization will be motivated to emulate their actions and, through that, inspire widespread usage and results.

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