As a business expands its sales team, it also amplifies its Revenue Operations (RevOps) requirements. Success in sales hinges on various elements, and to ensure your sales team reaches its full potential, you must meet certain minimum prerequisites. In this article, we'll explore the indispensable components every sales team needs to thrive in the competitive landscape of today.
Target Account Lists
While it may seem tempting to let your sales team curate their own account lists, this approach can lead to inefficiency. Sales professionals might inadvertently focus on prospects that don't align with your company's goals. To optimize their time and efforts, provide them with pre-compiled target account lists. This ensures they're pursuing high-potential leads, such as post-series B or high-revenue accounts, and not wasting valuable time building lists from scratch.
Make sure you research the businesses that fit within your ICP and potentially score them in tiers. What is your preferred location? How about size and industry? Which are your most important, tier one accounts?
You'll want to make sure your reps have time to sell and craft targeted, "Personalized" is the correct spelling of the word. messages for your target accounts and not spend that time researching accounts and uploading to your CRM.
Contact to Account Mapping
Efficiently mapping contacts to accounts is another critical step in streamlining your sales process. Doing this before handing them over to the sales team not only saves time but also reduces the cost associated with acquiring LinkedIn Sales Navigator accounts for every team member. Consider centralizing this task with a specialist to maintain consistency and accuracy.
As with many things, the result will be better when 'it's a dedicated job'. And, providing accurate contact-to-account mapping might not be what your Sales reps will focus on when they're working to hit their targets.
When you correctly map your contacts to their accounts and assign buying roles, you'll get a good overview of your penetration into your TAM (Total Addressable Market) and whether you've identified decisionmakers or other buying roles.
Contactable Contacts
While LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a valuable tool for networking, it may not provide all the necessary contact details. To bridge this gap, invest in additional data sources such as the Cognism Chrome plug-in for UK-based information or ZoomInfo for the US. Relying on multiple data sources helps mitigate the high error rates inherent in most data providers.
Offer various sources, use automation to populate the contact details into the relevant fields and assess the quality of your sources over time. Make sure to clean up incorrectly formatted phone numbers and email addresses to increase the efficiency of the sales outreach.
Test and create effective sequences
In addition to personalization and continuous learning, it is crucial to tap into the collective wisdom of your sales team when it comes to outreach strategies. While it's important to avoid sticking with a template based on a single opinion, it's equally important to gather insights and perspectives from your team members. By doing so, you can benefit from a diverse range of experiences and ideas that can enhance your outreach efforts.
Incorporating the collective wisdom of your sales team into your outreach strategies not only improves the effectiveness of your communications but also strengthens the overall cohesion and collaboration within your team. By valuing and leveraging the insights and expertise of each team member, you create a culture of shared success and drive better results for your organization.
Frictionless Calendar Booking Systems
Simplify the process for your sales team to schedule meetings with prospects. Tools like HubSpot's one-to-one calendar booking system, available on its free tier, can be a game-changer. At the very least, ensure your sales team integrates their calendars with your CRM system, whether it's Salesforce, Salesloft, HubSpot, Outreach, or Gong. This integration is crucial for accurate reporting on the number of meetings set and their outcomes.
Where possible, connect your calendar booking system with your Sales outreach reporting and automate your Lead Status or lifecycle management with your calendar tool.
Lead Status Tracking
Implementing a Lead Status property or field in your CRM is essential. This feature allows you to track the progress of outbound communications effectively. It's a fundamental step towards a more organized and productive sales process.
If you use a Lead object in your CRM make sure to not make it a dumping ground for low-quality leads that 'need to be stored somewhere' but make sure to use it in order to report on important engagements with your Sales team or marketing collateral. I'm super excited about the out of the box options HubSpot offers in their new Prospecting tool.
Intelligent Lead Routing
As your sales team grows, it becomes increasingly challenging to manage and distribute inbound leads. Establish a lead routing system that assigns leads to sales representatives based on their previous performance and expertise. Prioritize Customer-Rep Fit over fairness to optimize conversion rates.
At a minimum make sure to route any contacts that are linked to an open opportunity or contacts that might belong to a customer account to the opportunity or contact owner.
Opportunity Management System
Logically documenting the qualification process in your CRM significantly enhances your chances of closing deals faster. Sales professionals who consistently track their progress in a CRM tend to have higher success rates. Tools like WINN.AI can further streamline this process, making it easier for your reps to qualify leads effectively.
If your team is using a spreadsheet to calculate their own progress, something isn't right in your CRM system and it deserves time from a specialist to make sure your reps are comfortable with the dashboards and reports you're providing.
Confirmed Products with Pricing
For accurate insights into the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) to Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) ratio, input all product details, including pricing, directly into your CRM. This ensures you have a comprehensive overview of your opportunities and can make informed decisions about your sales strategy.
Building and managing a successful sales team is a multifaceted endeavor, and RevOps plays a pivotal role in achieving that success. These eight essential components—target account lists, contact-to-account mapping, contactable contacts, frictionless calendar booking systems, lead status tracking, intelligent lead routing, opportunity management systems, and confirmed product details—are the minimum requirements for a thriving sales team. By implementing these elements, you'll create a robust foundation that empowers your sales team to excel and drive revenue growth for your organization.
