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The Grande Guide to
Sales Enablement
The best ways to supercharge
your company's sales team

Sales Effectiveness

The efforts related to optimizing the effectiveness of the sales force, often measured by positive changes in close rates, average sale price and length of sales cycle, and including the software, systems and tools to achieve these positive outcomes.

The job of the sales rep has changed. Over the past ten years, buyers have become savvier and have at their disposal, more tools than ever to educate and research potential purchases. Buyers no longer “shop around” in the physical sense – the average buyer today conducts in-depth online research before ever contacting a sales person. Because of this change in buying behavior, the average sales person has to leverage every tool and piece of information available in order to gain an advantage and outsell the competition.

In much the same way that marketing effectiveness has to do with tracking the impact of marketing programs and campaigns on lead generation, sales opportunities and revenue – sales effectiveness looks at the tools and systems made available to the sales force in order to decrease sales cycles, increase average sales price (ASP) or annual contract value (ACV) and result in higher close rates. By providing the sales force with visibility into buyer behavior, productivity tools to improve efficiency and the proper training to be effective – organizations can greatly impact their overall sales effectiveness and see positive outcomes in terms of revenue generation.

While every organization will take a different approach to improving sales effectiveness and empowering the sales force to be more productive and efficient, there are certain tools, systems and bodies of intelligence that many companies provide to maximize sales effectiveness.

Training: sales training may be provided in any number of formats or frequencies. Some organizations provide regular sales training to ensure that the sales force is as effective as possible in engaging prospective customers in the right dialogues in order to uncover and close sales opportunities. Informal role playing, "lunch and learns", smaller sales meetings and online sales training courses may also be used to fine tune sales skills and keep the sales team up to speed on new market developments and strategies for effective selling.

Systems: today’s sales rep has many systems at their disposal to aid efficiency and support transactional aspects of the sales cycle. Most common are Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation (SFA) systems. These software systems help to automate aspects of the sales cycle like contact management, information sharing, order tracking and processing and sales forecast analysis. Other systems may include sales proposal generation software or contract management software – all designed to help the sales force efficiently and consistently perform the tactical or transactional aspects of their jobs.

Tools: sales effectiveness tools come in all shapes and sizes. Many organizations provide competitive intelligence in order to help the sales force sell effectively against the competition. Others provide tools to aid prospecting like business information databases. When sales and marketing are closely aligned, the organization may use a marketing automation platform to provide the sales force with intelligence to help them understand buyer interest. This could include lead scoring to prioritize the leads sent to sales and tools to push relevant information regarding the online behaviors of their prospects directly to the CRM system or sales rep’s inbox.

Insights: in order to be effective, today’s sales rep needs insights into buyer behavior. This insight is based on visibility into which buyers are actively engaged in research and would be worth engaging in a sales discussion. Marketing can provide this visibility into a buyers’ digital body language in order to help each sales person be more effective. These insights may include the following:

which accounts in their territory are actively researching your solutions and showing buying signs
which individuals within those accounts are most active, and which individuals are not engaged
for an individual, exactly what their level of engagement is, and what topics they have found interesting

Armed with these insights, sales reps know which accounts to focus on, who to talk to, and what to talk about, making them far more effective at selling.

The way that an organization approaches the process of optimizing sales effectiveness is unique to the goals, strategies and sales approach of that organization but these tools are the common sales effectiveness vehicles in use by many organizations.

Sales Effectiveness Resources

Grande Guide To Sales Enablement
A short, readable guide about the tools available to help sales execs to find leads and close deals.

6 pages

Boost Sales
Eloqua offers a suite of tools for the sales team that enable them to close more deals, faster. Find out more!

1:57 minutes

CSO Insights: Optimizing Lead Generation
Looking for lead generation marketing services? Eloqua's lead generation software can help direct marketing teams produce a continuous flow of quality leads.

10 pages

The Fifth P of the Marketing Mix
Every business student at one point learns the Four P’s of the marketing mix: product, price, place, promotion. But according to Sirius Decisions analyst Marisa Kopec, there’s room for another P.

1 page

Top 5 Reasons to Add Marketing Automation to Salesforce.com
As I write in the B2B marketing space quite frequently, I tend to delve into very specific topics that are mainly of interest to those with an extensive background in the space. However, it’s often worth revisiting core topics, such as the relationship between marketing automation systems such as Eloqua and CRM systems such as Salesforce.com.

The Key to Number Crushing -- Alignment Between Sales and Marketing
When Sales & Marketing share one-view of the business, the result is accelerated revenue generation.

60 minutes

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