Ultimate Guide to Sales Acceleration Platforms
The increased adoption of technology in the business industry has led to business processes becoming more streamlined than ever before, and various processes can now be completed more efficiently, within a shorter period of time.
Given that sales are the business function mostly associated with revenue generation, enhancing its efficiency and effectiveness can positively impact your company’s bottom line. That said, without investing in the right sales technology, achieving this feat is easier said than done.
Sales acceleration platforms can help you better scale up your sales team and come up with strategies and processes that result in sustainable growth.
What Is a Sales Acceleration Platform?
A sales acceleration platform enhances a sales team’s ability to undertake all its tasks, thereby improving its efficiency and effectiveness. It provides sales reps with a wide range of tools that help them improve their sales call performance so they are more likely to move leads through the sales pipeline more efficiently.
Simply put, a sales acceleration platform is a set of tools that allows sales teams to attain scalable and profitable growth.
Typically, a sales acceleration platform involves different tools performing different functions to help with different areas—these functions are usually aimed at attaining the same goal.
Some of the solutions found in sales acceleration software include company research tools, email tracking software, sales engagement software, and conversation intelligence platforms, among other tools.
Types of Sales Acceleration Platforms
Effective sales acceleration platforms provide marketing and sales teams with timely insights and data designed to enhance the relevance of customer conversations. There are several ways technology can help accelerate sales, and they vary in their approach and complexity. Here is an outline of the different types of sales acceleration platforms available to sales and marketing teams today:
1. Sales Engagement Platform
Sales representatives are primarily tasked with connecting with prospective customers. This usually happens through calls, emails, and live chat. Sales engagement software makes it possible for users to connect different sales tools and communication solutions into a single streamlined sales platform. They typically allow users to interconnect CRMs, phone calls, emails, and other sales tools.
As such, sales engagement platforms allow users to store customer data and communication in one central location—this makes prospecting and customer engagement more personalized, efficient, and streamlined.
Without sales engagement software, sales reps would have to make do with phone calls and regular email inboxes –they would also have to track everything that’s happening manually –this would make it difficult for them to determine whether they are communicating with the right people or if other agents had already spoken to them about the same topic.
Besides tracking communication and helping sales reps stay on top of their tasks, sales engagement software uses customer data and previous conversations to drive personalized customer communication.
It does this by using machine learning and A/B testing to pull insightful data that truly engage customers. For instance, if the software notices that prospects are more likely to respond to live chats than emails, it will recommend reaching out through that communication channel.
Key Benefits of a Sales Engagement Platform
- It personalizes sales communication to all prospects and customers
- It provides a single platform for all customer data
- It provides valuable insights into customer engagement
Some excellent examples of sales engagement software include Outreach, HubSpot Sales Hub, and ActiveCampaign.
2. Sales Enablement Platform
A prospect’s time is valuable. Once a sales rep has gained the attention of a potential customer, they have a limited time to convince the prospects that their product or service can address their pain points. It is crucial that sales reps present well-crafted sales content to impress the customers during the pivotal interactions.
Sales enablement platforms allow sales reps to easily access all the resources they need, including product descriptions, presentation templates, and marketing content. These platforms help ensure that your sales team can access high-value sales content throughout the sales cycle from anywhere at any time.
Key Benefits of a Sales Enablement Platform
- It aligns marketing and sales messaging, thereby creating a unified voice
- It ensures that sales reps maximize customer engagement by providing them with relevant product information on time
- It allows sales reps to easily access high-value sales content
Some excellent examples of sales enablement software include Salesforce, Brainshark, and HubSpot.
3. Conversation Intelligence Platform
Keeping track of sales conversations involves more than just the success or failure of a sale. The interactions that take place during the sales process carry a lot of data, including the details of what was said during the calls and the average duration of the calls.
Conversation intelligence software records and analyzes your sales calls. This software can identify keywords and phrases used during the call to help you identify where objections may arise and how they may affect your ability to close a deal.
They can also make adjustments to a prospect’s lead score based on what was said during a sales call. In short, conversation intelligence software can help businesses record key conversations with potential customers and identify risky conversation topics, among other factors, that can be obtained from the analysis of a sales call.
Key Benefits of a Conversation Intelligence Platform
- It simplifies phone conversations for better analysis
- It generates valuable insights for improving conversation strategy
- It scores leads, calls, and sales reps based on specific results
Quantified enables you to unlock potential using science-based intelligence and personalized feedback to help sales reps become excellent communicators. They can, therefore, better engage customers throughout the sales funnel.
4. Email Tracking Platform
Email tracking tools allow users to keep track of emails and gather analytics like email open rates, the number of downloads of email attachments, and the number of clicks on links in an email. They can enable a sales rep to determine how much a prospect has engaged with a given email and the type of engagement they are getting from their email marketing campaigns.
Email tracking solutions make use of features such as web beacons to allow users to monitor the delivery of emails to the intended recipients. Businesses typically use email tracking software within their marketing and sales departments to identify points when engagements are at the optimal level so that they can improve communication with potential customers.
Key Benefits of an Email Tracking Platform
- It seamlessly integrates with email platforms such that users can schedule, create, send, manage, and track their emails
- It notifies users when a recipient performs a given action
- It provides insights on email use to help users understand how emails are received.
Some excellent examples of email tracking platforms include MailTrack and Saleshandy.
5. Sales Coaching Platform
Sales coaching solutions enable sales managers to listen to sales calls in real-time and identify proactive ways of improving both the relationship with a given customer and the overall sales strategy.
They can also offer real-time coaching. This means that new sales reps can be onboarded faster, given that real-time feedback makes it possible to start conducting outreach earlier in the training process. Sales coaching software can also help struggling sales reps identify areas they need to improve on.
Key Benefits of a Sales Coaching Platform
- It makes the onboarding of new sales reps more efficient
- It helps create consistent messaging across all sales calls
- It helps sales managers refine their sales strategies so that they are more efficient
Quantified makes sales coaching more efficient. It delivers evidence-based, personalized, AI-powered coaching that measurably enhances outcomes – in revenue, customer experience, and audience perceptions.
6. Sales Pipeline Management Software
Management of your sales pipeline is crucial to the success of your sales function. Sales managers need to know the type of deals that are in progress and the number of deals that they can expect to close. With this information, they can determine which sales reps need more training and the areas of the sales process that need to be improved.
Similarly, sales reps need to know how they are performing against their targets and what deals they are working on at the moment.
Sales pipeline management software enables you to track the progress of your overall sales. It gives you a 360-degree view of your team’s sales process in action. You can, therefore, keep track of all deals that are in progress and identify the areas in your pipeline that need to be improved.
Key Benefits of a Sales Pipeline Management Software
- It provides a clear picture of your sales process
- It enables you to keep track of your team’s progress
- It reduces the manual processes involved in the sales pipeline, thereby enabling you to close deals faster.
Some excellent examples of sales pipeline management software include Pipedrive, Salesforce, and HubSpot.
7. Proposal Management Platform
Proposal management tools help sales reps create and distribute proposals as well as manage the incoming requests for proposals (RFPs). These tools streamline the process of creating proposals to help sales and marketing teams develop tailored responses to the RFPs. They also help businesses manage other documents, including contracts, agreements, welcome letters, and quotes.
Most proposal management software has pre-built sections based on a product or service involved in a deal—this feature helps save time.
Key Benefits of Proposal Management Platform
- It saves time with proposal templates
- It helps make a lasting impression on customers
- It helps you track interactions with your proposals
Some excellent examples of proposal management software include PandaDoc, Agiled, Proposify, and ClientPoint.
8. Training and Onboarding Tools
Training and onboarding software is used to distribute high-level information that new sales reps need to get started. These tools typically provide information about your business, your sales process and strategies, and the tools that your sales team uses.
Training and onboarding tools make it easy to standardize the training that your sales team receives and cut down the investment needed to carry out training.
Instead of having to conduct live in-person training every time a new sales representative is hired, training and onboarding software allow you to record the sessions and compile the necessary information just once.
Wrapping Up
Sales is an important function of a business, especially since it plays a significant role in determining how much revenue a business generates. Businesses should therefore invest in the appropriate sales technology to improve revenue generation.
Whereas all the sales acceleration platforms outlined above can be beneficial to your business, you may not need to invest in all of them. Rather, you should choose the tools that are vital to the success of your business. What’s more, whenever you are thinking of investing in a new tool, you should ensure that it integrates with your existing tech stack, particularly your CRM.
Develop Your Sales Team With the Most Advanced AI Sales Training Solution
The different types of sales acceleration platforms outlined above can help streamline your sales processes and maximize your efforts so that your customers move quickly through the sales pipeline.
Are you looking for a solution that’s tailored to increase the productivity of your sales team? Quantified is the go-to solution. Our AI-powered technology can help people across all organizations make better human connections to attain their sales goals.
With our solution’s automated objective feedback, coaching, and performance measurement capabilities, you will be able to assess customer interactions at scale and measure sales rep performance based on key behavioral dimensions. Quantified can transform your team into high-performers, enabling them to achieve and exceed sales goals. Request a demo today.