Sales Acceleration Software

 

Do you your salespeople have to call the office multiple times a day to check in or to gather crucial customer data? Are you losing leads because they weren't assigned quickly enough?

The successful or poor performance of your sales team has a direct impact on your bottom line. Yet, a recent report shows that nearly two-thirds of a sales rep's time is spent on administrative functions that don't generate revenue. This data identifies a major challenge small businesses are facing—maximizing their salespeople's selling time and reducing time spent on tedious manual data entry.

Sales acceleration software can help with these challenges. These tools make it possible for businesses to close deals faster by automating routine tasks while at the same time uncovering insights about clients and prospects in order to engage them in more meaningful interactions.

In this guide, we'll look at the features sales acceleration software provides that can help sales teams gain a higher volume of leads, respond more quickly to inquiries, keep prospects engaged and reduce the length of the sales cycle.

Here's what we'll cover:

What Is Sales Acceleration Software?
Common Features of Sales Acceleration Software
What Type of Buyer Are You?
Benefits of Sales Acceleration Software
Market Trends to Understand

What Is Sales Acceleration Software?

Sales acceleration software is a set of tools designed to speed up the process of closing deals. Sales acceleration applications are mainly used by business-to-business (B2B) organizations, where sales reps and/or account managers directly meet or talk with potential buyers and clients rather than relying on mass advertising campaigns to sell their products. Capabilities of these solutions include data visualization, chat and messenger tools, voice communication apps, sales intelligence tools and gamification.

Sales acceleration software bridges the gap between your CRM and marketing solutions by offering features that identify the best methods for contacting leads, most productive email templates and successful marketing campaigns. Sales analytics features help you to understand buyers' interests, personalize client interactions and make sales processes more predictable.

With this type of software, you can automate simple yet time-consuming tasks such as email sequencing, tracking responses and scheduling meetings. Features such as predictive analytics, machine learning and AI create holistic prospect profiles and support more meaningful client conversations.

Common Features of Sales Acceleration Software

Here some of the most common features of sales acceleration software:

Email tracking	Monitors email delivery to the intended recipient using time-stamp recording technology. Tracks metrics such as delivery, open and click-through rates, ratio of email responses to the total number of emails sent to qualified leads etc., to determine the effectiveness of sales emails.
Email templates	Offers prebuilt sales message templates to quickly connect with prospects and improve communication efficiency. Includes customized templates for prospects from different industries, personas and business sizes, along with embedded analytics to improve personalization.
Dialer	Includes a communication system built into the software so reps can call leads with a single click, record calls, leave voicemails, narrow down persona-optimized call times and automatically log disposition, sentiment and other notes.
Analytics	Offers engagement insights and inline analytics to help you identify prospects that are closest to a sale, channels that help attract maximum leads and best email messages and times.
Integrations	Allows users to share data and insights seamlessly by integrating with other key business tools such as a CRM and sales productivity, sales enablement and marketing automation software.
Sales intelligence	Aggregates information from multiple sources including social media channels, blogs and database sites that provide prospect contact information (e.g., ZoomInfo, Hoovers) to help salespeople build a complete profile of their prospects.
Meeting scheduler	Allows booking meeting rooms and facilitates meetings with both clients and colleagues using meeting templates, personalized invitations, Google calendar integration and rescheduling options.
Sales workflow management	Helps manage sales reps' workflows using features to view events and emails, prioritize activities, set notifications about urgent tasks, identify lead status, share workflows and build customizable workflow templates.

Sales rep workflow in Outreach

What Type of Buyer Are You?

Sales acceleration software helps businesses of all sizes improve the overall productivity and performance of their sales reps. Here, we'll take a look at how different sales acceleration technologies help businesses at different stages of their growth.

Small B2B organization. As a small business, you may not have the resources for a full-scale market research team to supply relevant, timely information about prospects. Sales acceleration software can help you overcome this hurdle. Features such as sales intelligence, automation tools and customizable templates provide sales teams with the necessary insights while reducing their research time and personalization efforts.

Midsize B2B organization. According to a HubSpot study, midsize companies are the largest users of CRM software. Sales acceleration software analyzes data stored within your CRM system to build client personas, identify their pain points and improve the quality of customer conversations. It also gives these businesses an extra edge over their competition by letting them connect with prospects faster using autodialers and email templates.

Large enterprises. There has been a radical shift in buying behavior, with many deals nowadays being completed over the internet, email or social media channels, rather than in person over business dinners or golf games, for example. Prospective buyers do their own online research, and they're present on multiple channels.

These businesses may have a large sales force, but they'll lose out to competition from smaller, more agile organizations if they stay stuck in the traditional field sales model or opt for random cold calling.

Sales acceleration software can better prepare these sales reps by equipping them with superior customer intelligence and client pain points information, obtained through analysis of data from multiple sources.

Benefits of Sales Acceleration Software

According to LinkedIn's State of Sales 2017 report, more than 91 percent of salespeople use some type of sales technologies to close deals, shorten sales cycles and increase revenue.

Here are some of the specific benefits that sales acceleration software can bring to your sales team:

• Strategic prospect targeting. Without a specific strategy for targeting prospects, salespeople will potentially spend a lot of time and resources on leads that ultimately go nowhere. Sales acceleration solutions analyze the characteristics of your best customers, enabling you to identify prospects that you can target effectively.
  
• Better engagement with prospects. Sales intelligence and analytics tools provide a complete profile of your prospect. This enables you to understand their pain points and have more engaging conversations. Sales acceleration software suggests the best email templates, campaigns and message times based on a buyer persona.
  
• Higher efficiency. Automated email templates, reply detection features, tailored messages, sequencing tools and autodialers save time and allow reps to concentrate on the core task of selling. These tools also provide recommendations and tips such as "next best actions," reminders and alerts about pending tasks, unassigned leads, etc., to optimize time and improve efficiency.
  
• Shorter sales cycles. Sales acceleration tools reduce the sales cycle length by automating tasks such as adding contacts, prioritizing and distributing leads, emailing prospects and reporting. It also saves time by identifying leads that are most likely to convert and targeting them to close the sales cycle faster.
  
• Improved win rates. According to research by MarketingProfs, B2B organizations that used sales acceleration technology experienced 36 percent higher customer retention rates and 38 percent higher sales win rates. Sales acceleration software features such as analytics, sales intelligence and automation help sales reps connect with more leads, have smarter conversations using real-time contextual prospect data and close deals faster.

Market Trends to Understand

• Inside sales is growing. According to a study by Velocify, inside sales is growing 15 times faster than the traditional in-person method of closing sales. What's more, companies are recruiting less experienced sales reps to fill sales positions. The average experience required for new reps fell 18 percent from 2009 to 1.3 years in 2016. To help these inexperienced sales reps succeed, it's important to equip them with sales acceleration tools that enable them to connect with more prospects in a targeted way. These tools also automate tedious tasks and facilitate smarter sales conversations.
  
• AI-powered sales acceleration. Sales organizations are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) to prioritize their tasks, contact customers and close deals. According to Salesforce, adoption of AI by sales teams will grow by 139 percent between 2017 and 2020. Business leaders from different industry verticals agree that AI has great potential for sales acceleration. AI for sales offers contextual insights, automates tasks and prescribes the next best actions that help to close a sales deal.