Too often when businesses conduct research to improve their sales processes, the research is solely focused outward: What products are the hottest right now? What problems is this industry trying to solve?
As valuable as having detailed answers to these questions is, they are only half of what a business should be researching at any given time: businesses should also always be researching themselves.
No matter how well a business understands its market, it must understand itself to capitalize on any opportunities it discovers. Each business must know its weak spots and develop strategies to improve on them. And equally important, each business must know what it’s doing well and double down on those efforts. The way for each business to know itself is with sales automation software with sales analytics that track your sales process from beginning to end, helping you to better know your own business top to bottom.
@@The more you know yourself, the more you can convert.@@
1: Sales automation: make learning automatic.
Let's face it: researching your own company can be challenging. If you're trying to learn something that nobody knows, you can't just count on a search engine or your preferred open-source encyclopedia. You'll have to @@be innovative in your research methods to innovate your sales process@@.
Fortunately, our CPQ with analytics and reporting built in makes it easy to research your business 24/7. Our sales automation software tracks your process from quote to close, maintaining up-to-the-minute data across your sales team.
With this reporting process in place, you might, for instance, notice that Emma closes in half the average time of your team—and then you can apply Emma's processes across the sales team. Similarly, if Brad is tending to lose his prospects after sending out his quote, you can identify the problem and come up with a fix. Whatever is going on with your sales team, sales automation makes it easy to keep track.
@@Don't just automate sales with sales automation software—automate self-improvement.@@
2: Better manage your forecasts with better sales analytics
Our CPQ software's sales analytics doesn't just help you understand—and improve—the way your sales team is functioning right this minute: it can also help you improve your sales forecasting—and that means improving sales tomorrow.
Our sales analytics tracks past and current data to @@make accurate sales forecasts for both the short and long terms@@. And the better you know where you're going, the better prepared you'll be when you get there. If, for instance, you learn that a particular industry expects an especially busy summer, you can invest in additional resources so you'll be ready. And if you know that product A tends to be more popular in the fall, you can get your whole sales team ready to promote it.
The more you know what's coming, the better prepared you can be when you get there. And nothing can help you track your business than the right sales analytics built into your sales automation software.
If you'd like to learn more about this topic or see IQX for yourself with a free demo, contact us.
