What is Sales Acceleration and why it is important for your business?

It isn’t very often that the world of sales is radically impressed by a new dominating and trending technological breakthrough. Sales acceleration is a technology that has made corporate decision-makers and sales heads sit up and take notice unlike anything in the past. It’s a given that all businesses are driven by the same desire to make more profits and now sales enablement has suddenly become a buzzword in corporate corridors. In this era of heightened competition it pays to accelerate your sales efforts to get faster results .

Sales acceleration rightly is a hot area of interest for corporate decision-makers for the sheer amount of value it can add to the company. Sales training takes up a lot of resources and time in any company so it is just natural that technology can assist in making the process more efficient and streamlined. In today’s increasingly data-driven world it pays to be armed with the answers to all the questions that the customers would be asking and hence learning more about the customer is very critical. Deploying predictive analytics can help to better zero in on potential customers faster.

It’s a fact that every department in a company directly or indirectly assists the sales process. It could be IT, marketing, product development, advertising, and so on. But the efforts of the various departments are not channelized in the right way so as to help the whole to become much bigger than the sum of the parts. The need of the hour is to create synergies in order to make the maximum impact on the sales process.

Sales acceleration attempts to make away with the gross inefficiencies in an enterprise to streamline the whole process to make sales nimbler and more impactful. The consequence is better return on investment, lesser time spent on low-quality leads, increased preparedness in dealing with the customers, and finally taking confidence in the fact that right customer insight is always at hand.

Marketing automation brought about a systematic approach to the marketing departments and now it is the turn of sales acceleration to the do the same to the sales departments.

Changing the dynamics with sales acceleration software

Companies are clearly beginning to see the impact of sales acceleration software directly on their bottom lines. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”, is not just a cliché anymore. It was previously next to impossible to measure the customer’s preparedness to buy a particular product or service. Sales executives also need data to channelize and corroborate their efforts on a continuous basis. Enter sales acceleration and there are ample opportunities to assess sales readiness and customer interest.

In this day and age of inbound marketing , social media listening and applying analytics can help brands save a lot of time and effort in order to nurture the right leads. Most sales representatives today spend a lot of their time nurturing leads and doing customer research. All this time can be fruitfully spent in interacting with the customers so that they can be better familiarized with the product. Hence the right set of actionable data is the most crucial factor to close more leads and move on to the next lead in a fast-paced world.

Sales acceleration software is not to be confused with the CRM software since the purposes of both are very different. The CRM tool will help you stay on top of your sales leads by streamlining your contacts, customer interaction, size of deal and so on. But a sales acceleration will do much more than that. It will shed light on what are the deals to follow, what is the potential of a deal being cracked, what is the best way to pursue a lead, how much of cross-selling and upselling is possible and so on.

It is just a matter of time before companies large and small get used to the prospect of sales acceleration software technology. Consumers today are the savviest and have already gone through 70% of their buying journey before they have even met the sales representative. So staying at the top of customer expectations is not an option but critical in acquiring new customers in a highly competitive market scenario.