By John Mercado 
Sales teams are dealing with managed chaos on a daily basis. Their days are split between prospecting, following-up with prospects and customers, and closing deals. In addition to customer-facing activities, sales reps need to update the CRM email integration with notes, emails, calendar events, and their next steps. Unfortunately, most sales reps are not very good at updating their CRM – they are too busy, too lazy, or just not detail-oriented enough to enter all of the important information. The best sales reps (and teams) are the ones that can best manage their time and still make time on a daily/weekly basis to keep their CRM tools updated and current. These same reps then use the updated data to better manage their time, their schedule, and their account planning.
As the data moves up the food chain, the sales managers and the sales operations team also benefit from seeing more activity data in the CRM. Insights can be extracted about the rep’s activities, their habits, their best practices, and whether or not they are properly engaged with the prospects, customers, and opportunities.
With good data, sales managers can have more productive one-on-one meetings with their sales reps. Instead of spending an hour going through every deal in the rep’s pipeline, the sales manager can use insights and analytics based on the rep’s captured activities to determine which deals they should focus on and which ones are “on track.” This becomes a win-win for both the manager and the rep since their meetings will be more productive and efficient. This gives the manager the opportunity to drill and go deep into the details of a few deals instead of only going surface level on all of the deals. For the rep, the meeting might actually be helpful and take up less time – enabling them to have more time to sell.
But how do we get there? How do we get to a point where sales reps and managers can have productive conversations about their deals? How do they get the insights and analytics they need to have meaningful conversations?
Rather than relying on sales reps to manually enter the data, sales leaders should provide methods and tools that automatically capture and log sales reps’ activities into the CRM. Rather than asking the rep to associate and log every email, they send to a prospect with the right opportunity in CRM, the system should be intelligent enough to know that all emails and meetings booked with “Prospect [email protected]” should be associated and logged with “Contact [email protected]” and the appropriate opportunity.
There are tools on the market today that can capture and log emails, events, and activity into CRM tools like Salesforce but most of them are clumsy, unreliable, or don’t quite do what they say they do.
Most tools require that the sales reps install either a plugin to their Office 365, Outlook, or Gmail interface, or they require some kind of browser extension in order to work. Unfortunately, these are very clumsy ways to deploy software to your sales reps. Computers and experiences vary based on whether they are Mac or PC, what browser they are using, etc. Plugins and installed add-ons are often not allowed in most enterprise environments for security reasons. But the most important reason that most of these tools fall short of automation is that they often still require the sales rep to manually intervene and tag or log or associate the email or the calendar event with a record in the Salesforce platform in order to work properly. In other words, the software isn’t smart enough to do the work by itself and it requires sales rep intervention to work properly. Expecting a sales rep to manually intervene and log activity defeats the entire purpose of trying to automate activity capture.
For sales teams that want to automate sales rep activity capture and that want to give their sales reps more time to sell (instead of bogging them down with manual data entry), they need to look at tools that will completely and intelligently capture all of their sales activities. B2B sales teams need a revenue operations platform that integrates with Salesforce and provides the revenue intelligence they need to act nimbly and scale their organizations.
SalesDirector.ai’s revenue intelligence platform can automatically capture ALL of your sales reps’ activities and automatically log that information into the salesforce platform (SalesDirector.ai also supports Microsoft Dynamics CRM). SalesDirector.ai’s revenue data platform does not require any client-side plugin, browser extension, or add-in; the solution works entirely at the server level and in the background. It leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to associate the sales rep activity with the right opportunities and contacts. SalesDirector.ai will even auto-create contacts for new contacts it discovers in email threads and meeting invites.
Revenue intelligence is the goal of every B2B sales organization. The desire to see ahead of the curve and the ability to act in anticipation of what is coming. With revenue data platforms like SalesDirector.ai, companies can lean on the data to help them make decisions. Sales managers and revenue leaders can trust the data being captured knowing that all of the data is being captured – not just some of it. As companies become more and more reliant on AI to help with decision-making – the need to have a strong revenue data platform at the foundation of the company is critical to long-term B2B sales success.
Shazeensamad.com has taken proper intelligent automation from qbotica. If you also want to provide intelligent automation services. Feel free to email learn qbotica at [email protected]