Follow these four steps to organize your sales team around buyer
behavior: organize, capture, collaborate and optimize. By using these
steps as guidelines, businesses can balance buyer interactions and
better arm sales teams with the knowledge they need to always be
closing.
1. Organize: Prospect information scattered in
different apps doesn’t help anyone close a deal -- organization goes
hand-in-hand with sales enablement. Orienting sales around buyer
behavior begins with providing a one-stop shop for all account, contact
and sales opportunity data -- and keeping it up to date is critical.
This enables sales pros to easily locate, update and act on real-time
behavior and eventually allows a salesperson to predict future behavior
based on past experiences.
2. Capture: The most effective sales teams capture
intelligence on their prospects, customers and markets to form a
360-degree view for each sales opportunity on file -- and with the rise
of social, for the first time companies can get closer to customers and
understand them through social monitoring. During the sales process it
is important to log as much prospect information as possible. A
seemingly minute detail from a tweet can be a staple of sales
intelligence responsible for closing a deal.
3. Collaborate: Sales is no longer the only company
contact point for customers or prospects. Customer service, marketing or
operations are often the first touch point and since so many avenues
lead inside an organization, sharing interactions with prospects between
departments can provide priceless pieces of a puzzle that eventually
leads to a sale. Overall collaboration will lead to increased business.
4. Optimize: Optimization comes as a result of sales
team data collection. It’s taking the information learned during the
sales process and refining messaging or changing strategies based on
behaviors gleaned by sales reps. Building in requirements to meet data
milestones for each prospect can help reps develop messaging and create a
more accurate sales forecast. Having this information also benefits
sales managers who need to gauge when an extra touch point is needed to
close a deal.
Whether you’re selling brake pads like Tommy or real estate like
Ricky, knowing buyer behavior and leveraging it to predict prospect
actions is a crucial part of closing more deals faster. For businesses
looking to make the shift to leverage buyer behavior analysis, focusing
on these steps -- organize, capture, collaborate and optimize -- will
provide a simple, easily digested and shared repository that will serve
as the key to closing new business and strengthening existing
partnerships.
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.