In the B2B realm, stagnation can spell your demise, so you need to continually evolve and grow in order to survive. Of course, to do that, you need to find ways to increase the velocity of your sales pipeline. That’s a tall order when your sales teams are already working at maximum capacity, so leveraging cutting-edge technologies is your route to success. Here, we’ll talk about three sophisticated business tools and explore how they can help you to supercharge your sales pipeline.
1. CPQ Integration for CRM
If you are operating a company in the B2B sphere, then you probably already have a solid B2B CRM system in place to provide you with an overview of your customer base and manage your interactions. However, you are squandering a considerable amount of your CRM’s power if you aren’t leveraging its data with the right CRM integrations. Specifically, we’re talking about CPQ, or Configure-Price-Quote, software.
In B2B, where products and services are often highly complex and configurable, the quoting process can be an arduous one. As a result, your sales teams can easily get bogged down in red tape as they try to deal with all the admin tasks involved in the creation of custom quotes. This slows down the process significantly, putting a cap on your pipeline velocity and potentially even losing your business if rival companies are faster in producing quotes to potential customers. CPQ can be a legitimate game-changer for your business because it can enable you to streamline your sales process in a way that no other tool quite can.
CPQ software will enable your sales reps to work more efficiently by providing them with a way to create quotes more quickly. The software automatically compiles all the most up-to-date pricing rules and possible product variations in one place and combines an intuitive interface with graphical representations of products for enhanced user-friendliness. Were that not enough, sales teams can also CPQ to automate approvals workflows, significantly streamlining the CPQ process. As a result, reps can get more accurate quotes to potential customers in a more timely fashion. Naturally, this translates to faster sales cycles, increased pipeline velocity, and greater ROI.
2. A Sales Intelligence Platform
As you know, your profitability in B2B is heavily reliant on your sales team’s ability to identify prospects and generate leads. But, this can often be quite a laborious process for your reps, as gathering data from a multitude of sources can require. Naturally, there exists a substantial degree of inefficiency here. When you obtain leads in this way and they don’t pan out as expected, the time and effort spent generating those leads go to waste. Moreover, there is a not-inconsiderable opportunity cost involved, as your organization could have utilized its resources on more fruitful efforts. This is why your B2B enterprise needs a sales intelligence platform.
Sales intelligence software like Ampliz SalesBuddy can help you to expedite the lead generation process dramatically by providing sales teams with a fast and simple way to gather the data they’re looking for. The software, which comes as a lightweight browser extension, is simple to install and configure. Reps can use the software to establish clear customer personas by defining key parameters such as the location, annual revenue, employee count of companies, as well as the seniority of relevant management. Then, when visiting the site of a company, the tool will offer a compatibility rating for that company based on those criteria, and provide all publicly available contact information key figures at the company.
By providing real-time analysis of prospects and aggregating vital contact information, a sales intelligence platform will enable your sales teams not only to generate leads more quickly, but also to produce higher-quality leads that better align with your business’s customer personas. That will allow you to optimize your business’s sales process to achieve faster cycles.
3. Email Marketing Automation
To truly send enhance your pipeline velocity, you have to optimize every aspect of the customer journey. Once you’ve managed to streamline your lead generation process, you will want to seek ways to nurture those leads more effectively to close deals and ensure the highest achievable conversion rate on your efforts. To do that, you should embrace email marketing automation.
Email marketing platforms can revolutionize the way that you engage with your audience in a couple of significant ways. Firstly, by enabling marketing teams to create email workflows, email marketing software can enable your company to be more dynamic and respond automatically to the behavior of those who visit your site. This can help to ensure a smooth progression through the customer journey once prospects have initially had their interest piqued.
Secondly, email marketing automation can enable your organization to personalize its marketing. This can include the use of personalized content, send-time optimization, and drip campaigns with custom email frequency to better align with customer engagement. All of this serves to nurture leads seamlessly, allowing you to present your product or service in a way that best demonstrates its value relative to the needs of each potential customer. That translates to greater engagement, smoother customer journeys, and a higher conversion rate that will further accelerate your sales pipeline.
Final Thoughts
In B2B, the customer journey is everything, and your success is contingent upon your ability to streamline the pathway from prospect to valued customer. By utilizing CPQ, sales intelligence software, and email marketing automation, you can do this effectively to accelerate your sales pipeline and ensure maximal returns on all of your efforts.
