Having access to information while out on the field is an invaluable resource for salespeople. Yet, until recently, they didn’t have the luxury of cloud computing. Instead, they often had to burn time and money getting pricing and inventory details from the office. Once back at headquarters, employees had to re-enter the order details into the computer manually.
The pandemic forced many businesses out of their comfort zones, sales teams especially. Instead of meeting with prospects, sales teams had to make do via online platforms such as videoconferencing, for example. Despite initial skepticism, many adopters warmed up to the new system of remote interaction. This allowed personal interactions to continue, but from a safer distance.
Skills shortages have been named as the eighth-largest risk facing South African businesses and the seventh-greatest risk worldwide.
Building your inside sales team is a challenging undertaking, but an important one. If you want to grow your business and your revenue, you need to build a winning inside sales team. Internal sales teams are the bedrock of the ever-increasingly important customer experience phenomenon and in the absence of a dynamic inside sales team, your customer relationships will quickly break down.
As a result of Covid-19, employers need to re-look office culture, teamwork, and talent strategies to acknowledge both a shifting business landscape and changing employee expectations.
Data-driven insights help companies make more informed decisions. B2B guided selling gives businesses the ability to synthesize, connect and enrich disparate data sources and helps to build a more complete picture of how buyers behave. This allows sellers to identify needs, predict behaviors, and close more sales.
2022 was set to be a year of growth and recovery for small businesses, however, the war in Ukraine is beginning to thwart this projection. The World Trade Organisation has recently slashed its global growth forecast to 2,8% from 4,1% before the war. This, coupled with supply chain disruptions and rising fuel and food prices, is set to have a further negative impact.
Modern work culture is becoming increasingly demanding. Between navigating new technologies, acclimating to remote work environments, and keeping up with the daily grind, employees and managers alike may find themselves working longer hours and dealing with a lot of stress. These factors can negatively impact their ability to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
Sending your sales and marketing teams into the field with a well-thought-out plan and a vision of their model client is key to successfully closing more deals. If your team doesn’t know who their ideal buyer is, they’re likely to waste a lot of time chasing dead leads and not knowing how to work around various objections to their offer.
Companies use many different metrics to quantify their success. Some of the more common ones include: reports to track and measure operations data, website traffic, and employee performance. Beyond these, customer lifetime value (CLV) has been identified as one of the most helpful business metrics.
The latest South African Chamber of Commerce and Industry (SACCI) Business Confidence Index rose to a three-month high of 94.1 up from 92 in the previous month. This is attributed to the recovery of external trade and retail sales following the easing of Covid-19 restrictions and the end of the travel ban imposed by several countries.
In a sales representative’s ideal world, every pitch would elicit an enthusiastic “yes” right off the bat. Yet as sales reps know all too well, the real world doesn’t work that way. Pitches and presentations sometimes fail for reasons beyond a salesperson’s control. However, in most cases, their shortcomings can be attributed to one or more tactical errors.