Forward-looking B2B companies are looking to expand their use of data, automation and AI to improve sales performance. But many also struggle with knowing in which areas to focus to maximise ROI. In this blog post, we outline how Sales Intelligence & Engagement platforms such as Outreach can be used to improve sales execution and productivity.
Shift towards “Sales 4.0”
Based on our work with leading companies across B2B industries, the pattern is clear. Go-to-market models are transitioning towards what we at Avaus call “Sales 4.0”.
B2B organisations are transitioning their go-to-market models towards “Sales 4.0″
As the “tide” of automation continues to rise, the scope of where B2B firms are applying data, automation and AI is expanding from marketing and into sales.
Gaps between strategy and sales execution
The leaders that we engage with in B2B organisations typically have clear strategies and plans for how to generate revenues in the years to come. They know which offerings, markets, account types and buyer personas their organisations should focus on to succeed. At the same time, many are facing challenges with sales execution – or at least have room for improvement. Examples of challenges that we have seen are:
- Sales reps spend too much time on administrative tasks (e.g feeding data into systems rather than using it to sell better)
- Many reps are underachieving but there is not a clear understanding of the reasons why
- A small number of sales reps are generating a majority of the orders for the organisation – but without a scalable way for other reps to replicate their success
Perhaps you have faced some or all of these – or would like to avoid them altogether. This is where Sales Engagement & Intelligence platforms could come into the picture.
A unified “system of action” for sales
Sales engagement platforms help sales teams engage with prospects and customers across multiple channels by helping sellers to stay organised and streamline their workday through cadences, automation, and integrations with other sales tools.
Sales Intelligence offers insights into buyer relationships and engagement activity that can be used to optimise sales and marketing processes. The combination of the two can be used to fill gaps in features and user experience within and between traditional salestech categories.
There is a range of Sales Engagement & Intelligence solutions on the market. This guide from Gartner provides the basics of vendor selection. In this post, we showcase Outreach.io – listed as a “leader” both by Gartner as well as in Forrester’s Wave Reports™ for Sales Engagement in Q3:2020 and Revenue Operations & Intelligence Q1:2022.
Outreach provides support for:
- SDRs and sales reps in boosting reach and conversion in prospecting through automation and optimization of workflows at the early stage of the sales process
- Sales reps in improving sales effectiveness through guided workflows to enable them in moving deals forward with the right actions at the right time
- Sales leaders in reducing the guesswork from forecasting through pipeline analysis and buyer engagement signals to predict and commit with confidence
Working side by side with CRM, Marketing Automation and other solutions, Outreach provides a unified system of action for sales where the day-to-day sales work is executed. To support this, it has native integrations to SalesForce and Dynamics CRM, as well as for commonly used email, ABM, sales data, sales asset management and chatbot applications.
From scattered sales tools to a more focused “system of action” for sales teams
Forward-looking B2B organisations are evolving how they engage with buyers and manage their sales teams. Are you also looking to improve prospecting, deal management and forecasting? Then a Sales Engagement & Intelligence platform such as Outreach could be worth looking into.
Avaus and Outreach entered into a partnership in May 2022 to help Nordic B2B organisations develop sales performance using data, automation and AI. Read more.
