2016 is flying past. As the dust settles, we can start seeing some new trends emerging among top sales organizations. These trends are enabling sales leaders to reach their targets and execute their modern sales playbooks. Here are the Top 5 Strategies for Inside Sales in 2016.
Getting Social – Adopting social selling practices is nothing new among sales reps. This year we’ve seen its adoption expand far beyond highly-motivated reps and gain traction as a top-level initiative. The top sales organizations have already rolled out social selling strategies and are equipping their teams with software like Sales Navigator, People Linx, Nimble and Colabo to drive, track, and understand social engagement and the results it’s yielding.
Account-Based Targeting – Top sales teams are moving further away from ‘spray and pray’ outreach techniques in exchange for highly personalized and targeted touches. They are focused on engaging with personalized interactions and solutions that solve specific prospect challenges, delivering relevant content and going wider and deeper into organizations for better visibility.
Often times these interactions begin on social networks or in-person and evolve more organically than your traditional mass email campaign would.
Decreaseing Non-Sales Tasks – Top sales leaders are violently focused on keeping their sales reps doing what they do best, selling. To do this they are embracing sales software that eliminates non-selling activities and in return boosting sales rep productivity.
This is generally focused around maintaining internal CRM compliance through automating manual data entry tasks and figuring out what’s next in the engagement process.
Investing in Sales Reps – Sales leaders are investing in lowering sales team turnover and improving the sales organization’s culture. They are adopting gamification apps, investing in team training on emerging trends like social selling and sales stack technologies, building culture, and working on turning their reps into a unified team.
They’re realizing that lowering sales team churn and rep burnout goes hand in hand with improving the culture of the organization and rejecting the long-standing lone-wolf approach to sales.
Embracing Sales Enablement & Ops – Technology is evolving so quickly that it’s impossible for a sales leader to run a team and keep a pulse on what tools are coming to market. To stay ahead of the tech curve, they are embracing SalesOps & Enablement. SalesOps is a role that bridges the gap between sales and operations in a technical way. SalesOps & Enablement plays a key role in vetting new software & processes to augment their sales team’s efforts, maintain software integrations, and keep the corporate CRM clean.
Partnering with Marketing – There’s a long-standing divide between sales and marketing. This year we’ve seen sales and marketing leaders putting past griefs behind them with the joint goal of partnering their efforts, driving more qualified leads, and building a bigger pipeline. These improved relationships have lead to joint sales and marketing campaigns that are integrated, improving customer perception and insight, ultimately shortening sales cycles.
We’re excited to see what is in store for the remainder of 2016, and the sales trends that will continue to emerge.
