Sales Prospecting Perspectives

If Sales Technology is the Future, How Do We Keep B2B Sales Interactions Human?

  

 Email Article  

Tweet  

  

  

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Lauren Weatherall, Senior Marketing Manager at TinderBox. 

For the first time, people accessed the internet on their mobile devices more than on their desktop computers in 2013 – OK, we all knew that was coming. What does this mean? It means that online, cloud-based, and internet solutions are taking over not just consumer markets, but business-to-business marketplaces. Especially when it comes to sales technology.

What problem are we solving? The fact that sales professionals only spend 41% of their time actually selling. I like to quote TinderBox’s Director of Sales, Adam Becker, who jokes that, as a sales manager, if your rep is only selling 41% of the time, they should only get 41% of their salary, right?

This is where sales automation technology comes into play. Automating non-selling tasks in inside sales reps’ day-to-day activities can amount to huge time savings. But, with this influx of sales technology in the B2B space, we have to ask ourselves: Is genuine human interaction in the sales cycle disappearing at the expense of automation? How could we possibly have both?

I’ll break it to you – we can. At the heart of the conversation is what your organization chooses to use software for and what your goals are. I strongly encourage every B2B business to assess their technology needs for 2014, especially when it comes to administrative, repetitive, and (basically) non-selling tasks that are a part of your sales process today. These are the biggest time challenges and sources of inefficiency.

I’ll leave you with three suggestions I’m unabashedly taking from sales leaders in our space, joining forces for a webinar today, to enable your sales team to use technology without losing the human touch that leads to success in sales:

1. Data is power. Having real-time data to make better decisions in the sales process is invaluable. Take advantage of solutions today that can easily put you and your inside sales team a step ahead.

2. Technology is not a crutch. Technology is a beautiful thing, but don’t let it be the thing you rely on in your sales process. Use software to reinforce and guide your sales team through the process – don’t let your reps forget how to be a sales person.

3. Let inside sales reps do what they do best – sell. Don’t ever interfere with an inside sales rep’s most important task: closing business. There’s an unsurprising correlation between what successful inside sales reps do well (put simply, sell) and what they don’t do as well (let’s call it, administrative tasks). Take away the menial, time-consuming tasks with technology.

If you think about those 3 things, you can set your company on track to using automation and technology the right way in 2014, while still keeping one-to-one interaction sales human.

Interested in hearing more tips to best use sales technology in a sales process that needs to stay personal? Tune in today at 2 p.m. (EST) for a webinar on building efficiency in B2B human interaction sales: From Prospect to Proposal.

Lauren brings hands on experience with marketing strategy and execution for both marketing automation and sales efficiency technologies. Working at fast-growing companies has enabled Lauren to learn how to effectively market new software products and concepts in young, but quickly developing markets. Joining the TinderBox team in November 2012 as the Senior Marketing Manager, Lauren is actively supporting the company's growth and success by implementing marketing-backed sales enablement strategies and revenue-driven marketing initiatives. Follow her on Twitter.