Sales Cloud

A pie chart will not close many deals. Bar graphs may elicit a yawn from customers and prospects. Handfuls of stats sprinkled through a pitch deck may simply look tacked-on. This is not the way you tell a compelling story with data.

Meetings of any kind should largely be about providing direction, making decisions and ensuring everyone understands what’s most important. They are a filtering process. And that’s never more important when marketing and sales teams sit down together at the same time.

Even before you dim the lights or stand in front of the screen, you may notice your customer or prospect’s body language start to change once it’s time to walk through a slide presentation. Some people settle back in their chairs. Others may start casting furtive glances at their smartphones.

While many organizations are becoming more excited about the possibility of predictive sales, where intelligent software helps teams essentially see into the future of how customers will be spending their budget, prescriptive sales ensures the process of selling doesn’t break down along the way.

Sales professionals frequently have to creatively solve problems for their customers as part of closing a deal. These are just a few of the traits that sales coaches and their teams could cultivate - or rediscover - in themselves in order to optimize their performance.

The real art is not in the first follow-up - customers and prospects expect that. It’s that second follow-up - the one that happens when the salesperson doesn’t receive that initial reply and wants to keep their pipeline moving along.

Just like you would do at the movies, in church or another place where people are gathering for a collective activity, you turn off your smartphone. You don’t want to be the person who suddenly gets a loud call and draws unwanted attention to yourself. The same goes in a sales meeting.

Just as smartphones, apps and related tools offer an ever-increasing complement to traditional ways to conducting business, though, there are ways digital devices could make sales coaching more consistent, accessible and effective.

There’s no way to know for sure if you have a great idea until you have something in the market, so many of them have adopted something that sales professionals could make their own: a minimum viable product.

Sales playbooks have become fairly common in large organizations, for example, where there’s a recognized need to have consistent, repeatable processes for processing purchase orders and essential market research.