Using Lian To Relentlessly Unlock New Sales Opportunities

Many sales organisations face significant challenges in guiding teams dispersed across large territories. This limits the ability of sales reps to access valuable customer insights, share best practices, and expedite sales processes that can make a meaningful difference to their bookings.

When cultivating new customers, Lian Solutions makes outreach both simpler and less expensive. It will be particularly helpful with large accounts where your sales teams have had difficulty in identifying customers’ pain points, finding information and comparing options, especially where there is a lack of internal expertise on important components.

Using our machine learning system to mine behavioural data from sales and marketing, you can survey large numbers of individual deals and sales rep interactions (external data, competitor activity, emails, meetings, and phone calls, for example) to find patterns in completed deals and to generate insights on which behaviours can help win deals and boost customer satisfaction scores. These data-driven insights can then help sales leaders to steer and coach their sales force in a way that will drive both top-and bottom-line growth.

You can also simultaneously use data and analytics to identify accounts that currently generate little revenue but have the potential for strong growth and Lian will help your sales and marketing efforts to target these groups in a more cost effective and precise way compared to expensive, widespread, unfocused campaigns.

Effective sales operations focus on concentrating reps’ time and attention on the handful of metrics that disproportionately matter – the size of the pipeline, conversion rate, and incentives consistent with the company’s overall sales vision.

Embedding weekly routines and daily expectations of activities reinforces the ultimate goal of driving sales growth. Therefore, sales leaders need to focus on digital and analytics capabilities that deliver on these needs.

Using digital tools is vital to scale solutions across the sales organisation. This includes creating tailored dashboards for all sales personnel as well as decision support metrics and tools to help reps in the field make better decisions.

These don’t need to be overly complex; even quick and dirty solutions can deliver profitable results without waiting for more sophisticated IT investment and development.

Example business issue

A technology company had limited data on sales, margins, and no performance management systems for products sold at the rep level. When it attempted a large transformation that involved capturing new growth, realigning coverage to match opportunities, building frontline capabilities, and redesigning compensation structures, results were slow to arrive and quarterly target pressure did not let up.

Worse, the sales force was so fragmented and dispersed that it was hard for the customer to know whom to call for help. There were more than two dozen sales roles within the function, from account managers to software architects, and the company realised that the right people were seldomly working on the right deals.

The solution

Using a solution like Lian enabled the company to transform their sales operations processes and use analytics and automated report systems to create dashboards personalised for each salesperson:

• The sales operation process redesign resulted in a digital tool within their CRM system that gave sales reps the precise names of the right people to call for any particular deal based on their specific experiences.
• This tool also scrapes email and calendar data to understand what patterns of sales staff interactions are most highly correlated with strong performance – frequency of interactions at each stage of the deal and the specific combinations of people who work well to close and support a deal.
• The personalised dashboards gave reps their top opportunities on a daily basis which helped to prioritise their follow up actions
• The dashboards also introduced transparency from a performance management perspective, allowing managers all the way to Board level to identify the best performing reps, what opportunities they had closed and where reps needed coaching. Reps could also flag where they needed help, which also ensured that priority opportunities got the right level of attention.
• The dashboards and new sales support processes were also used to help sales support staff build capability to drive the most efficient selling process, with experts such as pricing specialists flagging where the hottest opportunities were and also identifying opportunities to cross sell their customers.

This decision to make information available at the individual level – the combination of dashboards and reporting, sales enablement and coaching delivered an enormous impact very quickly: a $55 million uplift in revenues for that quarter using “quick and dirty” tools effectively rather than making enormous investments.

Identifying the actions that separate top performers from the rest can help managers refocus sales efforts and simultaneously identify skills that need upgrading.

Irrespective of whatever business you’re in and no matter which metric you use, the top 30 percent of reps will outperform the bottom 30 by as much as a factor of four.

Closing this gap by helping weaker performers to operate more like high performers is a surefire way to drive additional revenue growth.

Lian precisely identifies that the top sales reps do differently and identifies overall best practices that all sales reps should follow within their verticals / accounts to increase sales and improve efficiency.

By personalising analytics to identify the traits and skills of top performers, you can use Lian to discover where everyone’s gaps are. Then digital tools can be deployed alongside more traditional learning mechanisms to effectively roll out coaching to large and widely distributed sales forces.

According to McKinsey, up to 30 percent of sales activities can be automated, including lead generation activities. Here’s a small example:

● Lian’s analytics can identify leads with the best conversion potential.
● The client uses Chatbots to reach out to them over text or email, using artificial intelligence to understand the contact’s response and assess the conversion potential.
● This enables sales reps to contact only those leads where there is clear buying interest, saving time, reducing cost, and improving conversion rates

Companies that refine their sales strategies based on personalised sales behaviour insights are seeing an average improvement in sales productivity of 20 percent. The combination of our new sales process working alongside Lian’s algorithms makes the most of the abundance of data and draws the right insights to drive bookings based on highly targeted and relevant prospects.

Sales leaders then personalise the delivery of tailored insights and sales plays to individual reps, continually operating a feedback loop to improve the search results,

From a personal development perspective, this approach enables better performance tracking, provides coaching based on what’s working in the field and enables day-to-day efficiencies that eliminate waste.

Additionally, sales managers benefit by getting new reps up to speed faster

In the average company, for example, reps spend only about 16% of their day in front of customers, virtually or in person but reps in the best performing sales organisations spend 40 to 50 % of their time in front of the customer.

Research shows that top reps spend just as much time on unappealing internal tasks as low performers, but they take the important step of putting in additional time to connect with customers, whether by email, phone, or in person.

But how much more?

Most sales organisations don’t quantify this additional effort, but using Lian’s analytics to do so can give managers to improve performance by:

(1) Changing how low-performing reps should adjust their behaviour and

(2) Encouraging additional customer contact by minimising the administrative and internal tasks.