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In the early 1900s Henry Ford pioneered mass production of automobiles. He divided the roles of workers so that they each specialized in one aspect of production, thus increasing productivity and lowering costs.

Similarly, companies now seek to bring efficiencies to their lead management and sales processes. The purpose is to close more deals faster and more cost-effectively. Just as Ford used specialization on the manufacturing floor, sales and marketing leaders are learning the value divvying up sales roles to achieve higher revenues.

There are two reasons why narrowly defining your sales roles can increase your success. First, each sales associate is empowered to become an expert in their more focused position. Second, different sales functions require unique skills and personality characteristics. If you split up the responsibilities, you can hire people who are most likely to succeed in each specialty. 

How many connections do your company’s employees have on LinkedIn? How many followers does your LinkedIn company page or Twitter feed have? It’s easy to get excited as these numbers build, but does it really matter?

Yes and no.

It matters because more connections and followers can result in an increased number of leads and ultimately boost revenues. However, the sad reality is there’s no guarantee that social media buzz will transform magically into qualified leads.

So how do you transform online followings and social activity into bottom-line results? You need to integrate your social media marketing initiatives into your lead generation process. 

Unless they filled in a form on one of your organization’s landing pages or called your sales department, it used to be impossible to identify who was in the market for products and services your company offers.

But of all the people looking for a solution like yours, how many actually give you a direct signal of interest?

Sadly, the leads you receive are likely the tip of the iceberg; a large majority of the market remains hidden from view. That’s because many potential buyers may not find your site or leave before registering for your latest e-book. If you sell technology products or solutions, however, your prospects probably seek information on third-party publisher and review sites.

Wouldn’t you like to know who the rest of these people are? 

In my last post, The Causes and Ramifications of Your Inside Sales Turnover Problem, I outlined why so many companies are facing constant churn among their phone agents. The issue is driven by the challenging nature of the job, the rush to hire and fill positions quickly and the intense competition for qualified personnel. Given the lengthy time to hire a new rep and bring them up to speed (from nine months to well over a year), it’s a costly problem.

But have you ever considered how this issue impacts your bottom line? Have you had the time to slow down and think about new ways to solve it?

If not, read on. 

You’re constantly battling with the revolving door of inside salespeople. You feel as if you’re always recruiting, hiring, training and then seeing the fruits of your labor walk out the door. It’s frustrating.

It may make you feel better to know that with turnover rates for telephone agents at 20 percent, you have plenty of company. But that doesn’t solve it. Understanding what drives the flux in inside sales is the first step in finding the solution which, so far, has eluded you.

The three primary drivers of the turnover issue include: 

Sometimes you or your reps end a call with a prospect or customer and just wonder, “What went wrong?” If that has ever happened to you (and it’s probably happened to anyone who has ever made a sales call), keep the following tips in mind.

Over the last couple of decades, the language of marketing has evolved. Today, the buzzwords include Big Data, artificial intelligence, marketing automation, content marketing, social media marketing, account-based marketing, influencer marketing and more. The thread that runs between these marketing methods is technology. While it enables them all, it does not tell the whole story.

Technology can make us more efficient, precise in our targeting and personalized in our B2B marketing outreach. It cannot, however, do the whole job. That’s because B2B products, services and solutions tend to be complicated and expensive. To educate buyers and to build the trust required to make a substantial investment, you need good, old-fashioned human interaction that is central to a couple of traditional marketing tactics.

While tried and true, these tactics have changed with the times. Let’s look at how these traditional techniques, now wrapped in new technology, have become more powerful than ever.

Your reps spend more than 25 hours out of a 40-hour week on non-sales generating activities. At least, that’s if they mirror the average sales associate’s work profile.

This statistic is based on a study of over 200 sales reps. It showed that NON-revenue generating tasks take up on average 63.4 percent of a rep’s time. Even worse, the study included both field and inside salespeople and concluded that phone agents were on the low end of the spectrum. Field reps outperform them in revenue-generating time by 17.5 percent.

So, what are salespeople doing with their time? 

If you’re in the fast-paced world of sales and marketing, you likely aspire to stay one step ahead of the competition. It’s not easy to do because you must keep up with constantly changing sales and marketing trends. Here are three trends worth mastering in 2018.

• Artificial Intelligence: Efficiency and Personalization
  
  Self-driving cars. Smart homes that decipher speech, schedule appointments and turn on lights. Amazon’s uncanny ability to predict what you want to buy.
  
  What do they have in common?
  
  All are examples of how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing our daily lives. But it’s not just in the consumer world that you feel AI’s impact. It’s entering the B2B sales and marketing stage and is on its way to playing a starring role.
  
  Salesforce’s Fourth Annual State of Marketing research reported that half of marketers are using AI today and 27 percent plan to use it in the next two years. In their analysis, Salesforce separated high performing companies from the pack, those companies that are “extremely satisfied” with their marketing results. These businesses represent 12 percent of the universe they surveyed. A striking 72 percent of them currently use AI. 

Sometimes sales fluctuate a little from month to month. And at other times, sales gyrations feel more like a roller coaster. You just wish you had more control over the ups and downs, allowing you to forecast your future revenue with some degree of certainty. For this dream to become a reality, you need an inside sales team that fires on all cylinders all the time.

How do you make that happen? Sales enablement.

You want to make your sales team’s job as easy as possible and help them to win more deals. That means offering training and coaching to increase success rates, adopting sales processes and technologies that improve efficiency, and creating content that helps move prospects through the buying cycle. Essentially, you remove the barriers to success, establish a predictable process and allow your salespeople to do what they do best — sell.

Here are five essentials of sales enablement that can help your salespeople to meet and even exceed their quotas.