Here's a scary thought: We're well on our way to 2020. That means that we're already nearly two decades into the 21st century. Apart from the appalling lack of personal jetpacks, are you where you thought you'd be? How about your sales organization?
If you're still using clunky, turn-of-the-century tech to navigate today's dynamic sales environment, chances are that you have a visibility problem. What may have worked in the 1990s no longer cuts it today.
Now, in order to be competitive, you need a single, reliable source of truth across your organization—a kind of roadmap that clearly lays out every deal and the fastest, most efficient route to close.
The Sales Status Quo
Back in the 90s, CRM was that source of truth—the AAA TripTik of sales, if you will. "What's a AAA TripTik?" you ask? (Sigh.) Back in the day, travelers (including salespeople) could call or visit their local AAA branch and request directions from point A to point B. An agent would print out pages (and pages and pages) of paper maps and highlight the best route by hand, noting restaurants, attractions, and potential hazards along the way.
As cumbersome as a spiral bound ream of marked-up maps seems today, it did manage to help folks get where they needed to go at the time. Still, it was static information—hard to update, confined to a specific area, and very limited in scale. Flash forward a few decades and you (and everybody you know) have a global positioning system in your pocket. More likely, it's in your hand. Right now.
The point is, there's a better way to do things now. Asking your reps to manually update CRM records is a lot like taking a highlighter to a paper map; it's time-consuming, fraught with the potential for error, and no longer necessary in the age of sales-ready AI.
The New Roadmap for Sales
If you think of every deal as a destination, how you get there matters. You don't want to get lost along the way or take unnecessary detours, and you definitely don't want to arrive late. Competitors are everywhere. One wrong turn and they'll drive off with your prospect and leave you in the dust.
Sales-ready AI is the 21st-century tool that takes the promise of CRM and finally makes it automated, actionable, and predictable. Like your GPS, it can suggest the shortest, most efficient route to your destination, tip you off where there's risk (and opportunity), and predictably tell you where you're going to land. In addition, it saves you the trouble of manually writing down every turn or highlighting every road, and it's always right there at your fingertips. Here's how it works:
- It updates automatically in real time: Sales-ready AI pulls in activity data from your reps' emails and calendar and connects it to open opportunities, freeing reps from manual data entry. It even identifies the contacts that your reps are talking to—that's valuable, up-to-the-minute information that rarely gets recorded in most CRMs. Best of all, it's data that gets harvested automatically behind the scenes so you never have to depend on a rep to populate a field again.
- It analyzes historical win-loss data: Sales-ready AI continually examines deal data in your CRM and other business systems, including your marketing automation system, to identify patterns and predict how likely a deal is to close based on previous performance. It's a lot like the way your GPS combines historical information, real-time data, and predictive analytics to navigate you through rush-hour traffic congestion and away from fender benders.
- It gives you better visibility: Sales-ready AI shows you what every rep is doing, where they're spending their time, and where they're getting traction. Managers can easily see which deals are most likely to close and which are going nowhere. Execs get immediate visibility into what's really going on and foresight they never had before.
As you hit the ground running in 2019, equip your team with the right tools to get you where you want to go. You wouldn't rely on a static, outdated paper map to get somewhere you've never been before—especially if you were on your way to meet an important new prospect. Don't ask your team to either.