# About Pixis

Pixis is a California-based technology company that provides codeless AI infrastructure to enable customers to scale accurate data-driven marketing. 

Pixis’ codeless infrastructure for marketing helps Establish a powerful AI blueprint to make marketing effortlessly intelligent, agile, and scalable.  Pixis has raised over $100Mn in funding from marquee investors and helped brands save millions of dollars in marketing spend. 


# The Problem

Pixis was excelling at providing metrics and insights about campaigns but was looking for ways to integrate its sales and marketing stack to optimize its sales process. Let’s explore how clientell reduced friction in managing data silos and created a single source of truth for their entire org:

## Scattered Salesforce:

- Firstly, their Salesforce data was incomplete and not regularly updated by sales reps. On every forecast call, multiple sheets were being reviewed, and every field had to be checked twice, as the data wasn’t captured correctly or entered at the correct time. 

> We always felt there is a need to be a better way to analyze only the critical metrics instead of spending valuable time switching between sheets and dashboards.
> -Hari, CBO Pixis

- It is not his sales reps’ primary job to enter data into salesforce. Their primary job is to sell and focus on that, as that’s how they earn their commissions.

Moreover, if this data entry took a small amount of time or were easy to do, they wouldn’t mind. But you’re looking at 6+ hours every week across reps and managers, and that too while doing your calls to record live status, which makes it like a hiccup in the main job of selling. 

You make a call, you get a specific outcome from it, and then you go to various fields on salesforce to enter that, not to forget that it takes 16 clicks to update a single field within Salesforce. 
The inaccuracy within data made accurate forecasting and performance reviews a challenge, and Pixis had to maintain a small team of analysts to take care of their data needs. 

# The Solution

First, Pixis tried to wait it out by repetitively asking their reps and AEs to fill Salesforce, but that seemed to go in vain as they weren’t inclined to use it due to the unfriendly user experience. 

Combine this with multiple spreadsheets and various custom fields within sales tools. However, this process wasn’t integrated with Salesforce, which wasn’t feasible in the long run.

Under these circumstances, Pixis turned to Clientell, a team that Hari trusted and had previously worked with. 

They suggested using two of Clientell’s main tools - Tracktable and the Clientell Revenue Operations platform. 

- Tracktable is a chrome plugin that incentivizes data entry by making it a habit instead of a task by bringing salesforce to LinkedIn and spreadsheets.

- Tracktable would provide the in-line edit feature, where fields to be updated in an opportunity were adjacent to the opportunity. You could update the data with a couple of clicks, which would immediately reflect in salesforce. 

- This meant the multiple steps in Salesforce would be reduced to a maximum of 2-3 steps to enter data, like the experience of editing a spreadsheet, making it much easier for reps and AEs.

- Add to this the Clientell Revenue Intelligence platform’s powerful AI, which would extract data from the notes entered in the CRM, calendar, email inboxes, conversation intelligence software, if any, and other third-party data sources. This would add up to 30% more data into the CRM and add over 3000 lost contacts. 

This combination built an efficient data entry process, giving reps and AEs more time to focus on selling. They were happier, and the results were much better regarding their mental peace and involvement with their job.

Of course, remember, the primary outcome was a better forecast meeting every week, where nothing was being guessed anymore. “Why didn’t we do this earlier,” said Hari when the Clientell team went to him for feedback.

Tracktable made data entry more effortless, and the Clientell platform’s AI efficiently extracted data, freeing up reps’ and AEs’ time. Clientell now sits on top of Salesforce at Pixis, improving data hygiene manifold.


Pixis was excelling at providing metrics and insights about campaigns but was looking for ways to integrate its sales and marketing stack to optimize its sales process. Let’s explore how Clientell reduced friction in managing data silos and created a single source of truth

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Pixis drives trust in data with Clientell

# About Unbxd 

Unbxd is a San Franciso-based, leading e-commerce product discovery platform that applies advanced data sciences to connect shoppers to the products they are most likely to buy while providing predictive, actionable insights for merchandising.

**To explain this in further simple terms, let's take an example:**

Merchant X puts up their products on a specific E-commerce platform after registering. For them, the most important thing is visibility and knowing whether they are shown to the right audience. 

Unbxd uses AI to do this. Using trends, demographic data, pricing, gender, and other filters and parameters historically for a particular segment or product, Ubxd ascertains which audience it should be shown to.

This results in more significant sales and success for the merchant. 


# Forecasting and Unbxd

Even though Unbxd built software to tell its customers with certainty what was best for their products and where they should show, they needed to be more certain about their own sales deals with their potential opportunities.

Their forecasts needed higher accuracy. Why? You guessed it. Their data needed to be completed because it took significant time to fill in salesforce, which reps avoided doing.

With Clientell’s automated activity and contact data capture from the rep’s sources(email inbox, calendar, and other integrations), the data entry process became much easier, and the data layer was sorted to forecast further. 

Now Salesforce’s forecasting was not effective for Unbxd at all. The process was limited to senior management submitting just “numbers.” 

Clientell brought ease and inclusivity into this process. It gave Unbxd the use of critical features such as pacing, nth-day analysis, and leveraging historical data using AI. Let's explore these and see how they helped Unbxd.

### Pacing
With pacing, Unbxd could see where their reps stood in real time with respect to their targets. This would help them re-allot deals and targets, depending on what reps seemed capable of after a certain amount of time had passed.

It also helped them see with what speed they’re able to achieve targets overall, and depending on that, they could change their forecast numbers. If they were achieving targets faster than expected, they could increase their forecast and add more deals, or if they were lagging, they’d do the opposite.

### nth-day Analysis
nth-day analysis helped them predict market situations and react faster. They could break down the pipeline by different business units and across different revenue streams, where they stand on a specific day compared to a previous quarter. The analysis would help them understand market trends and outcomes of their investments in marketing and sales efforts. 

### Historical Data
Finally, Clientell’s AI helps them with insights leveraging historical data. Being in action since 2010, and having smaller teams, Unbxd greatly benefited from this. They could see in real-time, with a couple of clicks, what worked for them and what didn't historically and how they could change accordingly.

With this, Unbxd’s monthly forecasting cadence became refined, and the takeaways were crisp and precise. 

Moreover, Clientell adapted their monthly cadence, as cadence frequency on the platform is customizable. Another client, Pixis, with a bigger team, prefers weekly cadences, which can be easily set with a few clicks!

> “We’re delighted with what Clientell has done for us. It's a game changer!” said a satisfied Pawan as he went in for his next monthly forecast meeting, much happier, content, and correctly anticipating a sturdy result.

Even though Unbxd built software to tell its customers with certainty what was best for their products and where they should show, they needed to be more certain about their own sales deals with their potential opportunities.

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Running Efficient Forecast Calls: Clientell for Unbxd

# About Unbxd 

Unbxd is a San Francisco-based, leading e-commerce product discovery platform that applies advanced data sciences to connect shoppers to the products they are most likely to buy while providing predictive, actionable insights for merchandising.

To explain this in further simple terms, let's take an example:

After registering, merchant X puts up their products on a certain E-commerce platform. For them, the most important thing is visibility and knowing whether they are shown to the right audience. 

Unbxd uses AI to do this. Using trends, demographic data, pricing, gender, and other filters and parameters historically for a specific segment or product, Ubxd ascertains which audience it should be shown to.

This results in more significant sales and success for the merchant. 

# The Problem

Unbxd built a great product that tells its users with certainty who they should show their product to and rightfully got the fruit for it. Over 1300 commerce websites now trust them in more than 40 countries.

With more customers comes more growth, and with more growth, more revenue. However, managing this revenue was not easy, and Unbxd was facing trouble with this. Their revenue machine was leaky.

This means that there was potential revenue that Unbxd could earn, which they sometimes factored in and sometimes not, but couldn’t.

Ernst and Young estimates companies regularly lose anywhere from 1% to 5% of EBITA due to inefficiencies in their pipeline. This severe problem needs attention, and Unbxd paid heed to it by choosing Clientell.

But first, let us see why they were facing this problem in the first place.

## Manual data entry
For updates on every deal, sales reps had to fill in data manually into salesforce. This was a time-consuming task that they weren’t even supposed to prioritize. Hence, it ended up being done shabbily. Reps would sometimes leave data fields incomplete and sometimes delay making entries.

This would cause their forecast numbers to be incorrect. Hence they wouldn’t be able to predict revenue efficiently, sometimes leaving out deals that could’ve been converted. 

Moreover, let's say the deal was converted. Data entered and updated post that wasn’t accurate often, causing revenue to leak here too.

## No single source of truth
Different teams at Unbxd had different tech stacks for increasing their productivity. They also worked on different aspects of the deal and handed it to the next required team. 

However, this handover didn’t include all the intricacies and nitty gritty, which could be a game changer in converting the deal. What marketing had done, sales broadly knew but didn't know clients' individual qualms and behaviors, which probably only the marketing POC did. There was nowhere to document this professionally.

Similarly, when the client was moved to the customer success team after converting a deal, there was a gap in knowledge about the clients. Since customers’ needs constantly evolve, CS needs to have a precise picture of what’s happened with the deal up till that point so that they know how to tackle it further and expect anything different in the client’s behavior if required. But this was not made possible.

This gap was a significant cause for not optimally converting and upselling clients. Unbxd was doing well, but they weren’t hitting their potential.

## Lack of an efficient view
Stemming from the previous problem, a follow-on was that the folks at Unbxd didn’t have a bird’s eye view of the entire funnel with a client.

As mentioned earlier, there was an incomprehensive flow of information between teams, and there needed to be a place where everything done with a deal was collated.

So let’s say a rep from sales is pursuing a potential client, and they’re showing interest. However, he feels that giving a discount will ensure the conversion. He asked finance for this, but finance takes some extra time, maybe a week, to approve that, and at this time, the customer’s lost interest.

If there was a platform where sales and finance, in this case, had a view of what was going on with this deal, and the deal was flagged as one where a discount was paramount, finance would’ve realized that this permission was more important than the way they treated it.  

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# The Solution

We at Clientell assured Unbxd that we would take care of this problem and help them hit optimal revenue. And lest be assured, we did. Here’s how:

- To tackle the manual data entry problem, we suggested they use two of our main tools - Tracktable and the Clientell Revenue Intelligence platform. 

- Tracktable is a Chrome plugin that incentivizes data entry by turning it into a habit rather than a work by integrating Salesforce with LinkedIn and spreadsheets.

- Tracktable would provide an in-line edit function, where fields to be edited in an opportunity were adjacent to the opportunity, allowing you to adjust the date with a few clicks, which would immediately reflect into salesforce.

This meant that the various steps required to enter data in Salesforce would be reduced to a maximum of 2-3 steps, similar to the experience of changing a spreadsheet, making it much easier for reps and AEs.

Add to that the Clientell Revenue Intelligence platform's sophisticated AI, which would extract data from CRM notes, calendars, email inboxes, conversation intelligence software, and other third-party data sources. This would result in 30% more data in the CRM, and the addition of nearly 3000 deleted contacts.

This combination resulted in an efficient data input method and more time for reps and AEs to focus on selling. With data in place, projections improved, as did deal awareness.

Reps and managers could now work more efficiently using software that provided accurate information, allowing them to aim and convert more effectively, maximizing revenue and avoiding leakage.

## Deal Rooms
Clientell's virtual Deal Rooms provided a powerful solution to the dilemma of an inefficient view and the lack of a single source of truth.

The Clientell Revenue Intelligence Platform's Opportunities page displays all active deals in a logical and easy-to-understand manner. Each deal has its deal room where all analytics, activity, and insights are visualized in a single collaborative platform. 

This, in effect, is like a virtual deal room. Visualize this:

1. On the platform, whoever owns the transaction creates an opportunity. The opportunity may belong to an SDR but be acquired by a specific product manager for feature requests and then passed on to a specific customer success executive.

2. When the view is opened, it shows what has happened with the opportunity over time. The prospect engagement window displays which meetings have occurred or will occur, which emails have been sent and received, and at what stage the communication occurred. To shorten ramp time, managers can examine objections and use winning opportunities to train incoming reps using real-life scenarios.


3. As a result, visibility improves because everything is conveniently available on a single page. This makes it much easier for all stakeholders to know what's going on in the opportunity, and the process of dealing with it becomes much smoother.

If the manager believes that a deal should be molded, included, amended, excluded, or passed on, he can readily communicate with the owner using this. Whatever dialogue takes place is available to everyone who is involved.

With such a comprehensive view and efficient flow of complete information between various stakeholders, decisions regarding deals are no more arbitrary but confidently taken, helping optimize revenue and preventing unnecessary leakage.

Unbxd built a great product that tells its users with certainty who they should show their product to and rightfully got the fruit for it. Over 1300 commerce websites now trust them in more than 40 countries.

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How Unbxd reduced revenue leakage up to 70% using Clientell

# Trinity Health <> Clientell


**Trinity Health** is one of the largest not-for-profit, Catholic health care systems in the US. It is a family of 115,000 colleagues and nearly 26,000 physicians and clinicians caring for diverse communities across 25 states. Nationally recognized for care and experience, the Trinity Health system includes 88 hospitals, 131 continuing care locations, the second largest PACE program in the country, 125 urgent care locations and many other health and well-being services.

---

# Problem Statement:  
- ***Current State:***  The rate of visibility of Trinity’s revenue income is low leading to lack of growth opportunities.  
- ***Gap:*** This is due to fragmented data, inaccurate pipeline and limited data exploration.  
- ***Future State:*** With the help of Clientell trinity can increase 55% decrease in A/R, 85% average insight accuracy, 78% fewer denials, 120% uplift in scoring accuracy and 10x increase in claim pipeline velocity  

---

# Dataset and datapoints
The data used to increase visibility is as follows:  
    
 - ***Demographic:*** Name, Age, Gender, Address.  
     
 - ***Administrative:*** Health insurance eligibility and membership, Type of practitioner, Physician specialty, "Insurance claim" information, e.g., charges for diagnostic tests and procedures and amounts paid

 - ***Health Risk:*** Health-related behavior, e.g., use of tobacco products and seat belts, exercise, Genetic predisposition

 - ***Health status (or health-related quality of life):*** Physical functioning, Mental and emotional well-being, Cognitive functioning

 - ***Medical History:*** Past medical problems, injuries, hospital admissions, pregnancies, births; Family history or events (e.g., alcoholism or parental divorce)

 - ***Present Health Management:*** Current problems and diagnoses, Medications prescribed, Allergies, Health screening

 - ***Outcomes:*** GeneMedical ral and/or condition-specific states, e.g., functional status, readmission to hospital, and unexpected medical or surgical complications of care; Satisfaction

 - ***Other:*** Discharge Date, Accommodation Days, Accommodation Charges,  Service Charges         
    
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# Insights       
    
Claims data analysed across unified profiles to identify and assign factor weightages based on claims settlement.
    
- ***Administrative***: The rate of clearing their claim from past claim data is inferred to be 45%.
- ***Health Risk***: The rate of clearing their claim due to smoking habits is 7%
- ***Medical History***: The rate of  clearing their claim due to pregnancy is 1.5% and 1% through vital signs
- ***Present Health Management***: The tendency to get their claim cleared from DAS is 5% .
    
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# Clientell’s Decision Landscape
- ***Analyse opportunity/risk in claims***: Understand drivers of revenue growth by locating the highest and lowest performing claims
- ***Unified individual account details***: Auto clean data and unify data from all data sources including third party sources
- ***Insurer’s propensity to clear claims***: Identify underperforming claims in the pipeline and predict revenue losses
- ***AI-powered Micro segmentation***: Risk and opportunity classification by breaking down revenue into streams based on region, Claims, BU & Managers
- ***Analyse revenue based on Health Units & Patients***: Provide and 360 view of patients, claims, TPAs and resultant revenue
- ***Time series forecasts of revenue***: Predict successfully on when and which claims will give highest revenue and analysing the factors driving it
    




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Trinity's revenue income is not well visible, resulting in a lack of expansion potential. Because of fragmented data, an erroneous pipeline, and inadequate data research, this is the case. The answer is to make better use of data in Revenue Operations.

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RevOps health


 
In the sales industry, performance optimization and achieving goals are constant, and here is where AI and ML come into play. You may program the system using machine learning to carry out particular tasks and achieve particular objectives. The same system can be made to repeatedly provide the same results by feeding it new data over time.
With each iteration, the system can learn more about what works and what doesn't. This effectively means that AI can examine the data of prospects, forecast which of them will go on to the closing phases of the sales pipeline, and suggest the most effective course of action at each step.

According to analysts, technology has the potential to add between 1.4 and 2.6 trillion dollars' worth of value to the marketing and sales industries because of AI's capacity to increase and improve sales figures. AI technology is not a toy. The experiments, which have received overwhelmingly positive reviews, demonstrate that artificial intelligence may revolutionize society as electricity did around a century ago.

By 2030, the GDP is projected to expand by $13 trillion, according to McKinsey research. Curiously, a sizable portion of this development is anticipated in industries other than the internet, such as manufacturing, education, agriculture, logistics, and energy. These numbers ought to be the right motivation for you to create your own AI plan as a sales manager.

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# How can AI help in Sales?

As McKinsey research shows, companies that have pioneered the use of AI in sales have seen benefits, including an increase in leads and appointments of more than 50%, cost reductions of 40% to 60%, and call time reductions of 60% to 70%. Here are four important ways AI and machine learning can transform sales:


## Lead Generation and Scoring

The skill of selling can occasionally be hit or miss. Sales representatives may spend ages attempting to close deals with leads with little interest in your goods and services. When this occurs, it isn't usually because the salespeople aren't good at closing deals.

According to data in the B2B sector, 61 percent of marketing teams often pass leads on to salespeople. Only 27% of the leads from this number are typically qualified.

This makes it clear that approximately 75% of the leads are a waste of time. Sales reps frequently cling to thin air since there is a lack of sufficient pertinent information about leads.
It's difficult for businesses to impact the market without a strong understanding of the market and their customers. However, the dynamics can alter with data. Your efforts in this regard shouldn't stop at gathering personal information on prospects and clients.
Data processing, with the aid of AI software, enables sales professionals to make decisions because of the technology's lead scoring feature. Overall, this data-driven strategy increases effectiveness and enables sales teams to engage in the traditional "willing-buyer, willing-seller" relationship. Since the AI algorithms are updated automatically whenever new customers make purchases, it learns more about the degree of compatibility over time. With the system continually running, you may obtain more precise results, and your sales force will spend less time thinking about whether their strategies are effective.


## Personalization

Because AI combines a good customer experience with precise targeting, selling is more straightforward than conventional techniques. Once you can tailor the content and the experience to the users in your database, this makes for a reasonably strong pitch.

As the numbers show, more than 50% of consumers are willing to share their data provided they can see content that aligns with their interests. 

Given that AI systems can assess information such as preferences, surfing history, interests, and demographics, this specific statistic is not all that shocking. It's crucial to imagine how AI will change how you sell things as you consider implementing it in your system. By doing this, you'll have time to consider what to put up for sale and what other data you can feed the algorithm to help it do a more than admirable job of bringing in the correct customers.


## Communication with Prospects

It is better to entrust chatbots with the task of connecting with customers in real time because they are equipped with the AI fuel of natural language processing. If you give chatbots these duties, you'll see that some of the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) can be answered quickly.
Human interaction will inevitably be required sometimes; therefore, remember to account for that in your estimates. Ensuring a sales representative is knowledgeable about a prospect's demands before engaging them is critical in this situation.
It's important to note that AI-assisted communication goes far beyond chatbots. You can decide when to contact prospects at their most receptive by using AI algorithms. You can build up a trigger-based technique that detects when a website visitor begins researching a specific line of products to get started. Your sales representatives can quickly jump in once a dialogue has been started, and the interest has been determined. Sales representatives can be more prepared in their manner of approach, the tone they use, and the language they use when speaking with prospects with the correct kind of data.

## Boosting Sales Reps Efficiency

You can set up an artificial intelligence (AI) system that simplifies your manufacturing line and automates workflow instead of relying on sales representatives' abilities to "just wing it. "Delegation of tasks and priority will be automated in this fashion depending on various criteria.
Because AI can identify the most promising prospects and assign the most acceptable sales representative who can contact them immediately, it effectively increases the effectiveness of your sales representatives.
Here, the analytical component of AI systems is vitally important since it can determine which techniques are practical and which should be discarded. As a member of the decision-making hierarchy, you'll see that you can gather trustworthy information on the best course of action and choose which ones should be applied universally.

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# Challenges With Implementing AI and its solutions

Although AI-enabled solutions are becoming widely accepted, enterprises still face difficulties deploying them. The following are possible locations for roadblocks to appear:

- **Data:**  
Data is the energy source for AI and ML systems. Businesses should ensure they have access to suitable data sources to get a complete picture of their consumers. The pursuit of flawless data availability, however, can sometimes provide challenges. Working with specialized data subsets for modest process goals can be a helpful first step when combined with initiatives to enhance data collection and quality.

- **Processes:**  
It's crucial for sales teams to build data-driven processes and break down silos between departments that interact with customers. Vendors of AI-enabled platforms can offer the infrastructure and advisory skills necessary for such alignment and behavior transformation. While investigating viable solutions, organizations should prioritize simplicity of integration and uptake. Additionally, they should spend money on the training sales teams require to adjust to more data-driven, AI-enabled procedures.

- **Management:**  
Successful AI/ML implementation can be significantly hampered by a limited budget and a lack of executive support. Building demonstrable use cases is vital to persuade doubters within the organization. Starting with a carefully thought-out pilot that shows quantifiable advantages can go a long way toward gaining support and funding.

- **People:**  
Fears of job loss and redundancy always accompany discussions of artificial intelligence. Even in cases where these worries are unfounded, sales teams may be reluctant to make significant process changes. To overcome these challenges, decision-making processes must be open and inclusive, and sales reps must be provided with the tools they need to adjust to their new positions.

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## *AI-Enabled Sales is already a Reality!!*

It's not a far-off dream; currently, highly efficient sales processes supported by AI and machine learning techniques exist. Intelligent, integrated AI-enabled sales solutions may enhance decision-making, raise sales representatives' productivity, and enhance sales processes' effectiveness to deliver an exceptional client experience.



Alexa! Play the music, Alexa switch off the light. It’s the effect and standard of ease AI has created in our day-to-day life. For Sales to be so challenging, i.e., dealing with humans, Al can act as a boon to reduce its intricacies.

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Integrating AI in Sales

A sales conversation is any communication between a potential buyer and a seller with the aim of influencing the prospect to eventually acquire a good or service.
But is it enough to get on call with them? What about the first impression? It is necessary to connect with the prospect to keep them engaged and eventually make them believe that your services can bring an impact to their business.


# How to Start a Sales Conversation

A sales conversation should never start with a sales pitch. Every time someone accepts a new connection on a communication network, they get those annoying pitches straight away. The majority of us would immediately delete or disregard those messages. It only takes a couple of seconds for the consumer to lose interest, which is why it is important to lead the conversations where the prospect can easily visualize the possible amalgamation of your services into their current operations to solve their problems. It is no longer effective to repeat a scripted pitch for the product you are selling with a general call to action. This strategy will only overload the buyer and make them feel obligated, neither of which are effective ways to attract new customers and close a deal. 



## Tips For A Great First Meeting


### **Be prepared - Know about your customers**

No matter what you sell, be sure to be familiar with what your prospect's business offers. This is so apparent and yet so effective because, regrettably, many sellers choose to ignore it.
Clients are not interested in the flashy patents you own, they are interested in the products that can relieve their pain points. Allow clients to speak most of the time, pay close attention to their concerns, and tailor your comments to how your product will be of assistance.


### **Build rapport**

Never undervalue the effectiveness of small conversation, your opening statement, or simply conversing with a new potential companion. Prior to making their pitch, salespeople should establish a rapport with the prospect by learning about their interests. Once a potential customer has decided to make a purchase, you may increase the likelihood that they will return to your vendors for additional purchases because of the connection you have built with them.

### **Create decks**

Decks demonstrate readiness and can pique a potential partner's interest. Make slide one of the agenda your topic. It should contain a section where you discuss your research and the reasons you believe the prospect will benefit from spending time with you. If you must include a slide about you, make it about one of your clients who closely resembles your prospect's company. Doing this will show clients that they are in safe hands and that the company understands their business.


### **Don’t lose buyer’s interest**

Sellers shouldn't be hesitant to start the conversation with a question or to ask questions throughout. It's crucial for the consumer to believe that their ideas and opinions are valuable as well. Additionally, it is a fantastic opportunity to learn additional details from prospective buyers so that your sellers can build a stronger connection and relationship. When utilized properly, open-ended inquiries are very effective at keeping a prospect interested.


### **Make the impact clear**
You won't close the deal if you don't present a convincing business case. Even if you accomplish everything else well, the prospect won't buy your solution if they don't understand its value (and you must be very clear about what that value is).


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# How To Get People To Buy Your Product


- ***Sell the dream***  
In this world, everyone cares about themselves even if they aren’t interested in your product or your services. An excellent place to start is by creating a vision of what the prospect's life would be like after buying your goods.


- ***Pique their curiosity***  
Once you have connected with a potential customer, you should focus on keeping the person in loop, ask them questions which force them to figure out the product’s application in their daily life.


- ***Guide by past successes rather than setbacks***  
Instead of focusing on errors, try to concentrate on what went right and strive to repeat specific accomplishments. Find patterns in their reactions, and then apply those effective strategies to new prospects.


- ***Create a sense of urgency***  
Offer a short-term discount or incentive: Customers may feel driven to act quickly if they know your offer is time-limited or only available for a brief period of time. When you make these restrictions clear to customers during the sales process, whether you are selling a limited-edition product or a service that is only available to a certain number of clients, you may persuade them to buy right away.

- ***Remain biased towards your product***
Pretending to remain unbiased to come off as credible is completely useless. Customers should feel that you are ecstatic to present your deals and your point of view of the product. Customers like opinions that are authentic and genuine rather than merely objective.


- ***Be transparent***  
Although biased, you should not keep the customer in dark. Mention all the key features and sometimes may be necessary to acknowledge situations where your product falls short of the client's expectations. You can help your prospect by describing product limits with some innovative alternatives, which will help you gain their trust.


- ***Make the choice convenient***  
Make it clear that you are aware of their busy schedules and that you may modify the procedure to be more convenient. The difference between the deal closing in five minutes vs five days can be made by providing them with a few bullet points that emphasize the contract. Keeping an easy transaction process will undoubtedly help them value your thoughtfulness.


> Why wait any longer when you have everything at your disposal to close your first deal? Simply keep these ideas in mind and watch the influx of potential purchasers reach its height.


Every sales rep wants to close more and more deals, generate more revenue and convert more leads. But all this depends on how the conversation goes. Selling is said to be the most important skill of a salesperson, but how can you do selling in the most effective way to have a good conversion rate? Answers to all these questions lies in this blog. 

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# What are Sales Tools?

Sales tools are digital tools that sales professionals use to make their jobs easier. Customer relationship management (CRM), sales intelligence and prospecting, sales acceleration, and data connectors and integrations are just a few of the technologies covered by the term ‘sales tool.’
Sales and marketing tools integrate massive amounts of data, compile critical customer information, automate email campaigns and scheduling processes, and much more. These tools are necessary for success in today's sales environment.

Sales tools assist salespeople in determining which prospects are most likely to be successful with their product or service, when to contact those prospects, and what to discuss with them. They save time on time-consuming administrative tasks and can focus on what is most important: providing value to people and businesses.

A reason to invest in sales technology is that employees have begun to demand greater access to a broader range of modern tools. This means that companies that use conservative or old-fashioned sales methods risk losing sales and their best sales talent.
According to LinkedIn’s State of Sales 2021, 94 percent of sales professionals say sales tools help them close more deals, highlighting the importance of sales tools.

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# Features to look in Sales tools

When selecting specific sales software, there appear to be infinite options. Consider these four characteristics as you search for the best sales tools for you and your company.


1. **Enhance workflows**   
Sales tools should allow everyone to spend less time doing things than previously. Sales tools can improve workflows by providing email templates, automated chatbots, and other features.

2. **Boost sales productivity**   
These tools should help to streamline the sales process and increase productivity. Instead of introducing decision-makers at each stage of the sales funnel, sales tools automate and expedite low-level tasks, freeing you and your team members up to focus on the more critical aspects of your jobs.

3. **Complement other tools**   
Your various sales tools should all work together seamlessly. For example, you might want important pricing information transferred from one app to another. Scheduling, data, intelligence, and social selling tools should be able to share resources. Information integration is critical to sales success.

4. **Ensure premium customer experience**   
Your tools should make customer sales interactions as simple as possible. Their functionality should inspire confidence in doing business with you and your company. Intelligent sales tools should assist you in connecting with customers who want to speak with you about your product, whether through automated email marketing campaigns, qualified lead generation, or something entirely different.

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# Sales Tools your team should be using right now 


## CRM software

Customer relationship management (CRM) software aids in the management of your company's customer relationships. It assists you in keeping track of existing customers, improving customer relationships, increasing customer retention, staying on top of sales and marketing efforts, and automating communication.  

For most businesses, a CRM is the first investment they make in sales technology, and it's understandable why: According to LinkedIn's State of Sales 2021, 68 percent of respondents said their CRM system was "critical" to closing deals.  

CRMs have evolved into complex, multi-tiered support systems due to technological advancements and ultra-competitive markets. CRM software now includes a plethora of features that assist salespeople in optimizing their sales processes, such as real-time updates, advanced lead scoring, and automated repetitive tasks.   

Most CRM solutions today are SaaS platforms where you pay per user, per month. On-premise installations are rarely required because most CRMs can be accessed online through a web browser. Some vendors charge a flat monthly fee for a certain number of users, but larger packages or additional fees are required for other users.



## Data connector and integration tools

Our increasingly digitalized world has many fantastic tools to help make our lives easier. One disadvantage of such a diverse set of tools is that they are frequently independent and not easily accessible from a single system. Data connectors and integrations come in handy here.
A data connector is a tool that connects various systems to allow data to be transferred between them. This means that the data is now accessible through a single system, significantly improving the quality of life.  
Data integration tools are distinct because they combine data from multiple sources into a single system rather than simply allowing data to move between systems. Sales and marketing teams must be able to combine data from various programs and spreadsheets. 


## Sales Analytics

Sales analytics software refers to tools and systems that enable sales professionals and managers to effectively track, evaluate, and improve the performance of their sales activities while predicting trends and results and uncovering relevant insights. They give sales managers a granular view of sales, breaking them down into manageable chunks for reviewing where salespeople, products, and campaigns are performing best and where they should improve.
Sales analytics has become an essential component of every sales report in the age of big data. Instead of gathering analytics manually through a tangle of spreadsheets, sales analytics software allows sales managers to access it systematically in one place.   
Sales analytics systems are typically built on top of CRMs and use algorithms based on existing data to uncover insights. However, some serve as the CRM system of record and analytics tool.  

The use of sales analytics software is rapidly spreading throughout the business world. Historically, this type of technology was used mainly by giant corporations. Adoption of sales analytic tools in this segment has recently increased due to the rise of SalesOps roles in small and medium-sized businesses.  

Analytics tools help manage customer data, aid in sales forecasting and provide many metrics to plan your overall sales strategy for B2C and B2B sales. The better you can analyze and visualize data, the easier it is to manage your sales pipeline.  


## Sales intelligence and prospecting

Sales intelligence refers to various technologies that assist salespeople in locating, monitoring, and comprehending information on prospects' and existing clients' daily operations.  

Sales intelligence informs salespeople about who they should be talking with, what they should be talking about when they should reach out to them, and how to present all relevant information to them during that conversation. Contextual information about these contacts, such as purchase history, current contracts, business objectives, and digital footprints, is provided by sales intelligence tools.  
> *According to LinkedIn's survey, 62 percent of sales professionals believe their sales intelligence software is "essential" in helping them close deals, and 74 percent believe their organizations plan to invest more in sales intelligence tools in the future.*  





## Sales Productivity 

As the name suggests, this category of tools helps to improve salespeople's productivity by providing a variety of automation and time-saving tools that allow sales professionals to focus on the more critical aspects of the sales process.  

It refers to any tool that can assist salespeople in their daily professional activities and allow them to generate more sales. Such a broad definition implies that a diverse range of tools falls into this category, and as a result, sales productivity tools come in all shapes and sizes.  

Sales productivity tools can assist salespeople in generating leads, making calls, scheduling meetings, writing proposals, creating pipeline reports, and automating other repetitive tasks.



## Sales Forecasting

Before the availability of sales forecasting tools, your best option was to stare at your previous sales data in a spreadsheet and consult your gut instinct for what to do next. However, by leveraging data and automation, sales forecasting tools remove the guesswork and allow for confident growth plans.  

Sales forecasting software uses data from yesterday and today to create an accurate picture of what the future might look like. Quantitative sales forecasting tools analyze past sales data, identifying historical trends and patterns to forecast future sales performance if similar practices are followed. In contrast, qualitative forecasting examines current market trends and customer feedback.  

> *Businesses using forecasting tools are better positioned to make data-driven decisions about hiring, inventory, territory expansion, and introducing new products or services.*





## Pipeline Insights Tool

Creating an efficient sales workflow usually entails building a pipeline sales tracker solution. Your pipeline is a visual representation of potential customers who are on their way to purchasing from your company. Salespeople in a well-structured pipeline follow clearly defined stages to guide potential customers to their destination—the sale. The best pipeline management sales tools are clean, well-integrated, and designed to facilitate quick communication so that customers don't have many opportunities to jump ship.  
A spreadsheet can easily track a small number of transactions. Spreadsheets, on the other hand, can quickly become overwhelming and cluttered as your lead and customer lists grow. Pipeline software allows you to manage a growing volume of potential deals that don't tax your time or resources while providing a centralized view of where your efforts should be directed next.



## Marketing Automation and ABM

Every transaction begins in two ways: the seller finds the buyer, or the buyer seeks the seller. Marketing automation and lead generation tools are designed to promote the latter.
Companies can streamline marketing workflows and optimize their marketing strategy by automating marketing tasks such as email marketing, social media posts, and lead generation. These activities generate an extensive contacts database through conversions, especially when a person exchanges her contact information and possibly information about the company they work in exchange for valuable content from your company.  

Building on this, account-based marketing (ABM) technology enables marketers to create scalable, personalized marketing campaigns, track their performance against key performance indicators, and demonstrate revenue contribution. Adopting the account-based marketing method entails focusing on high-value customers with highly targeted, personalized campaigns, targeting and marketing messages based on specific account attributes.  






## Sales Acceleration 

Sales acceleration is a strategic initiative that aims to increase the number of sales conversations, reduce the sales cycle, and close more deals. By automating administrative tasks and streamlining sales processes, sales acceleration software aims to increase sales.  

Without control, speed is doomed to fail. As a result, sales acceleration technology assists salespeople in improving both efficiency and effectiveness by improving engagement and organization throughout the sales process. This is comparable to the purpose of sales enablement software. Conversely, the latter focuses on sales behavior and providing salespeople with quality materials, opportunities, and best practices. Despite this, some vendors use the terms interchangeably.  

Some argue that sales acceleration is a catch-all term for all tools that assist B2B sales reps in locating the right companies to approach and enable sales outreach. This technology category includes coaching tools, email tracking software, predictive analytics tools, sales engagement software, and outbound sales dialers, to name a few.


## Customer Success

Businesses use customer success software to ensure that their customers get the results they expect when they use their product or service—in other words, improving customer relationships and ensuring customer success. Customer success initiatives are critical for revenue retention and growth, increasing customer advocacy, and maintaining profitability and growth. Adopting account-based sales strategies and the appropriate technology is one way to increase customer success.  

Customer success software offers businesses a detailed analysis of their customers' past behavior and a "health score" that estimates their level of satisfaction. Furthermore, customer success solutions will assist businesses in developing or identifying customer profiles, collecting customer data, history, and feedback, engaging customers throughout the lifecycle, providing input and customer success scores, and predicting future customer growth or red flags.  



As you can see, sales tools cover various platforms with various features and functions: sales productivity tools and more. Every business will have different tech stack requirements, and each team will take a different approach to implement new software platforms. As you search for the perfect sales tool, keep in mind that your business software must serve your customers and your sales team. Before making a decision, honestly assess your needs and processes, and be willing to test your options.


Sales tools assist salespeople in determining which prospects are most likely to be successful with their product or service, when to contact those prospects, and what to discuss with them. They save time on time-consuming administrative tasks and can focus on what is most important: providing value to people and businesses.

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Sales Tools for Modern-day sales reps


A sales forecast is a projection of future sales revenue and a prediction of which deals will move through the sales cycle. Sales forecasts drive short-term spending decisions and impact decisions on key deals.  A sales forecast, put simply, is a prediction of how a market will react to a company's marketing initiatives.

# Why is sales forecasting important? 
Sales forecasts have two benefits. One is that you can hire extra workers, buy merchandise in advance, and reduce delays that your company might otherwise have if you can predict that you're going to meet or even surpass your sales target for the given quarter or month. Two, knowing how you're going to perform in a given period will have significant advantages in your organization across job functions. If you run your forecast accurately and see that you might not hit your number, you can proactively execute remediation plans. For example, you can find more leads or generate more revenue from specific accounts. 
Finance relies on forecasts to develop budgets for capacity plans and hiring, and production uses sales forecasts to plan their cycles

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# Benefits of an accurate forecast 

### **Cash Flow**
Knowing when and how much you plan to sell is one of the key advantages since it allows you to manage cash flow effectively. Many companies experience erratic sales throughout the year. An organization can plan to set away money during their peak season so that there will be money to cover expenses during slower periods if they are aware of predicted monthly or quarterly revenue. This preparation avoids running out of money to cover payroll, pay bills, and pay taxes. You will be able to keep up strong ties with suppliers and staff by avoiding these situations.


### **Inventory Control**
A business can more effectively manage inventories with accurate sales forecasts. Overstocking is less likely if you have an estimation of what short-term sales will look like. This reduces the need for material transportation and product storage costs. Accurate sales forecasts also put a cap on the possibility of not having enough inventory to fulfill demand. If the product is accessible when the customer wants to purchase it, customer happiness is likely to be higher. Last but not the least, predictions lessen the necessity for sudden product discounts to lower inventories.

### **Resource Supplies**
Another area that gains from having a sales revenue estimate is the supplier chain. A business can perform just-in-time ordering of the resources they require to produce at the anticipated demand level, similar to inventory management. This reduces carrying expenses. 6Appropriate lead time can be built-in when a material is difficult to obtain.

### **Marketing**
When a corporation anticipates generating larger sales revenue, it might plan more expensive campaigns. During slower times, it might employ less expensive marketing strategies like promotional offers and pushing discounts.

### **Product And Price Planning**
A thorough sales revenue projection can show which products or services are selling the best for businesses that provide a variety of goods and services. It also shows whether your rates are appropriately set. If a product is expected to sell a lot of units but generates little revenue or profit, the company might wish to modify the price.
 
### **Sales Process**
It is possible to determine what is effective or needs to be changed during this particular sales process by monitoring and gathering data for sales profit estimates. The data can show that some procedures need to be changed because they take too long or are unnecessary. The team may opt to concentrate on employing these techniques more frequently if they produce a larger percentage of closed sales than other strategies.

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# How to accurately forecast sales

### **Assess historical trends**
Analyze the prior year's revenue. Sort the data according to price, product, rep, sales time, and other important factors. Create a "sales run rate" based on them, which is the amount of anticipated sales per sales period. Your sales prediction is built on this.


### **Incorporate Changes**
- ***Pricing:*** Have any of your product pricings changed? Are there any existing rivals who could pressure you to alter your pricing strategies?
- ***Customers:*** How many brand-new clients are you hoping to bring in this year? How many did you add the year before? Have you employed new reps, boosted your chances of attracting new clients, or received quantifiable brand exposure?
- ***Promotions:*** Are you planning to launch any new promotions this year? How did the past promotions compare in terms of return on investment?
- ***Channels:*** Are any new channels, regions, or territories being launched?
Product changes: Are you making adjustments to your product lineup or launching new products? How long did it take for the market to accept the previous products?

Tweaking the business model from the insights the company can get by answering the following questions can go a long way in increasing growth and sales rate.


### **Identify Market Trend**
Project all the market events you have been following right now. Are you or any of your rivals planning to go public? Do you plan on making any purchases? Will new legislation alter how people view your product?
 
### **Monitor Competitors**
You probably already do this, but pay attention to the offerings and marketing strategies of rivals, especially the industry leaders. Additionally, keep an eye out for any potential entry of new rivals into your market.

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# Key to an accurate forecast 

- ***Collaborative:***  Leaders should combine ideas from various sales roles, company units, and geographical areas. Frontline sales staff can be quite helpful in this situation by offering a viewpoint on the market you hadn't previously considered.

- ***Data-driven:*** Subjectivity, which is frequently more retroactive than prospective, can be lessened by the use of predictive analytics. Alignment will be promoted and time will be saved by using standard data definitions and baselines.

- ***Single source, several perspectives:*** You have excellent insight into rep, region, and company performance when the forecast is generated as a single source of data, which helps align different business functions across the organization.

- ***Progressively better:*** Utilize the knowledge gained from an improved sales forecasting process to produce future predictions that are more precise and whose accuracy increases with time in comparison to a set of accuracy objectives.

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## **Bottom-up and Top-down forecasts**
Bottom-up predictions and top-down forecasts are the two main categories of sales forecasting methodology. In bottom-up forecasting, the number of units a company is expected to sell is first projected, and the average cost per unit is then multiplied by that number. The number of sites, sales representatives, online interactions, and other analytics can also be built in.  
In a top-down financial analysis, the entire market in which the company competes is analyzed. Prior to making predictions about how the business would do in the market, it first determines the size of the market that is now accessible to the company while taking into account current market trends. The business' advantages and disadvantages are then assessed in light of the possibilities of the larger market.  

A bottom-up analysis places more of an emphasis on the product or service itself and the operations of the company, paying less attention to the larger market. Bottom-up forecasting involves evaluating variables like production capacity, marketing expenses, recruiting expenses, and more - every action or variable that could have an impact on finances is taken into account.
It's crucial to combine the two approaches when forecasting sales. Start with a top-down strategy, then check the viability of your first estimate using a bottom-up approach, or perform the two independently and compare how well they agree. Companies should do both types of forecasts, then make adjustments to each until they yield the same result in order to produce the most accurate forecast.


Forecasting is a pretty old term in the field of sales, but still many of the businesses struggle to make an accurate sales forecast. It can be due to lack of tools or cognitive biases among the SDRs or anything else. But if you follow the right process, you don't need to worry about any of the problems. Read about the step by step process in the blog.

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Making an accurate sales forecast

Guides, announcements and articles about Clientell, Sales, Revenue and lot more.

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It's no secret that artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the way we do business. From automating tedious tasks to providing valuable insights, AI is a valuable asset in the sales world. But with all the hype surrounding AI, it can be hard to determine which tools are worth your time and investment.

Enter Revenue Intelligence and Generative AI platforms such as those used for writing emails and social media outreach. These AI-powered tools are designed to help businesses optimize their sales efforts and increase conversions. And while they may not have the same level of buzz as chatbots or conversational intelligence, they are quietly making a big impact in the sales world.

Revenue Intelligence, for example, uses machine learning algorithms to analyze customer data and provide valuable insights on how to approach leads and close deals best. And email writing tools use natural language processing to help salespeople craft personalized, effective emails that stand out in crowded inboxes.

So if you're looking to boost your sales conversions, it's worth considering the role AI-powered tools like Revenue Intelligence and Generative AI can play in your business. Not only can they save you time and effort, but they can also help you make more informed decisions and improve the customer experience. So, it's time to get on board and leverage the power of AI to take your sales efforts to the next level.

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# AI tools you should consider adding to your sales stack

## Revenue Intelligence- The next step to success in sales

As a salesperson, you know that your time is valuable. Every minute you spend on tasks like data entry is a minute you could be spending on selling. That's where revenue intelligence tools come in. By automating the process of CRM data ingestion, these tools can save salespeople countless hours and allow them to focus on what they do best: closing deals.

But the benefits of revenue intelligence tools don't stop there. Having clean, up-to-date CRM data is crucial for the success of any sales organization. It helps ensure that salespeople have all the information they need to engage effectively with leads and customers and enables faster go-to-market execution. In short, better CRM hygiene leads to increased sales conversions.

So, how does revenue intelligence automate CRM data ingestion? Essentially, these tools use machine learning algorithms to analyze customer data and provide valuable insights on how to approach leads and close deals best. This saves salespeople time and helps them make more informed decisions about which leads are worth pursuing and which ones aren't.

But don't just take our word for it. There are plenty of examples of businesses that have seen firsthand the benefits of using revenue intelligence tools. For instance, one company cut its sales cycle in half by using a revenue intelligence platform to analyze customer data and provide targeted, personalized recommendations.

Another company saw a 20% increase in sales conversions after implementing a revenue intelligence tool that helped salespeople prioritize leads and focus on the most promising opportunities.
So, if you want to save time and increase sales conversions, it's worth considering the role revenue intelligence tools can play in your business. By automating the process of CRM data ingestion, these tools can help you focus on what really matters: selling.


## Conversational Intelligence- Beyond call transcripts
Conversational intelligence tools are taking the sales world by storm, and for a good reason. These AI-powered tools are designed to help salespeople boost conversions by analyzing objections, following up with call snapshots, and personalizing engagement. But don't just take our word for it - the numbers speak for themselves.

One study found that sales teams using conversational intelligence tools saw an average increase in conversions of 18%. That's a pretty compelling case for giving these tools a try.

So, how do conversational intelligence tools help boost sales conversions? It all comes down to their ability to analyze and understand sales conversations in real time. Using natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, these tools can provide valuable insights and recommendations on handling objections and engaging with leads in a more personalized way.

For example, let's say you're on a sales call with a lead, and they object to the price of your product. Without a conversational intelligence tool, you might struggle to address their concern in a way that's both persuasive and personalized. But with a conversational intelligence tool, you can quickly get real-time guidance on how to respond based on the specific language and context of the conversation.

But it's not just objections that conversational intelligence tools can help with. They can also provide call snapshots that allow salespeople to review and analyze key moments from sales calls. This is especially useful for salespeople who might forget key details or overlook important objections. By providing a conversation record, conversational intelligence tools can help salespeople better understand the needs and concerns of their leads and tailor their approach accordingly.

So, if you want to boost your sales conversions, it's worth considering the role that conversational intelligence tools can play in your business. These tools can help you close more deals and increase your sales success by providing real-time insights and personalized recommendations.


## Generative AI- ChatGPT and beyond!
If you're in sales, you know that personalization is key. Customers today expect tailored, relevant messaging; if you can't deliver, you're likely to lose their attention (and their business). That's where generative AI tools come in. These powerful tools are designed to help salespeople create personalized outreach campaigns for different ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and customers, saving them countless hours of experimentation and helping them close more deals.

So, how do generative AI tools boost sales conversions? It all starts with understanding your ICPs. These are the types of customers most likely to benefit from your product or service, and they should be the focus of your sales efforts. Generative AI tools can help you create targeted, personalized messaging for each of your ICPs, taking into account their unique needs and pain points.
For example, let's say you have a well-suited product for small business owners. A generative AI tool could help you create personalized messaging that speaks directly to the concerns and challenges of small business owners, making it more likely that they'll be interested in your product.

But personalization doesn't stop with your ICPs. Generative AI tools can also help you create personalized outreach campaigns for individual customers. This can be especially useful if you have a large customer base and want to ensure that each customer gets the most relevant and engaging messaging possible.

One sales team we know of saw a 25% increase in conversions after using a generative AI tool to create personalized outreach campaigns for their customers. And they're not alone - plenty of other businesses have seen similar results.

So, if you want to boost your sales conversions, it's worth considering the role that generative AI tools can play in your business. By helping you create personalized outreach campaigns for different ICPs and customers, these tools can help you stand out in a crowded market and win more business.

If you're in sales, you know that personalization is key. Customers today expect tailored, relevant messaging; if you can't deliver, you're likely to lose their attention (and their business). That's where generative AI tools come in. These powerful tools are designed to help salespeople create personalized outreach campaigns for different ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and customers, saving them countless hours of experimentation and helping them close more deals.

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# Final note
In conclusion, AI-powered tools have the potential to revolutionize the way we make sales. From chatbots and conversational intelligence to revenue intelligence and generative AI, these tools are helping salespeople save time and increase conversions.

While it's true that some of these tools are still in their infancy and may not yet be right for every business, the trend is clear: AI is quickly becoming an essential part of the sales toolkit. And as the technology continues to evolve and improve, we'll likely see even more sophisticated and powerful AI tools emerge.

So, if you're looking to boost your sales conversions, it's worth considering AI-powered tools' role in your business. Whether a small business or a large corporation, the benefits of using AI to improve the customer experience and streamline your sales efforts are too good to ignore. So, it's time to embrace the power of AI and take your sales efforts to the next level.


It's no secret that artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the way we do business. From automating tedious tasks to providing valuable insights, AI is a valuable asset in the sales world. But with all the hype surrounding AI, it can be hard to determine which tools are worth your time and investment.

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Leverage AI-based tools to boost conversion rates

Forecasting is crucial to business management, as it helps companies anticipate and plan for future demand and resource needs. However, as a company grows and changes, it's essential to ensure that the forecasting systems and processes are still effective and aligned with its goals and needs. Here's a guide on how to align your forecasting systems with company growth.

First, it's essential to understand why forecasting systems need to be aligned with company growth. As a company grows, its operations and needs become more complex, and the forecasting systems in place may no longer be sufficient to anticipate and plan for future demand accurately. This can lead to many issues, including over or under-hiring, inefficient resource allocation, and missed growth opportunities. By aligning your forecasting systems with company growth, you can ensure that they can keep up with the changing needs of the business and support its growth.

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# How do you go about it?

1. Review and assess your current forecasting systems and processes: Take a close look at how your current forecasting systems are set up and how they are being used. Consider factors such as the data sources being used, the accuracy and reliability of the forecasts being produced, and the level of involvement and buy-in from different stakeholders. Identify any weaknesses or areas for improvement.

2. Define your forecasting goals and objectives: Clearly define what you want your forecasting systems to achieve and how they should support the overall goals and objectives of the company. This will help you prioritize which areas to focus on and ensure that your forecasting systems are aligned with the needs of the business.

3. Choose the right forecasting method: Different forecasting methods suit different businesses and situations. For example, some companies may benefit from statistical forecasting methods, while others may be better served using judgmental or qualitative forecasting methods. Determine the best approach for your business based on your goals and objectives and the data and resources available to you.

4. Incorporate relevant data sources: As your company grows, you will likely have access to a broader range of data sources that can be used to inform your forecasts. Consider incorporating data from a range of internal and external sources, such as sales data, market research, customer feedback, and economic indicators. Make sure also to consider the data's quality and reliability.

5. Involve key stakeholders in the forecasting process. Ensure that key stakeholders, such as sales, marketing, and operations teams, are involved in the forecasting process. This will help ensure that the forecasts produced are aligned with the needs and expectations of different departments and that they have buy-in and support for the forecasting systems.

6. Regularly review and update your forecasting systems. As your company grows and changes, it's essential to regularly review and update your forecasting systems to ensure they are still effective and aligned with the needs of the business. This may involve adjusting your forecasting method, incorporating new data sources, or making other necessary changes.

By following these steps, you can ensure that your forecasting systems are aligned with company growth and can support your business's changing needs. This will help you make informed decisions, allocate resources efficiently, and stay ahead of potential challenges and opportunities as your company grows. This guide on the choosing the most scientific guide on forecasting can help you start now!


it's essential to understand why forecasting systems need to be aligned with company growth. As a company grows, its operations and needs become more complex, and the forecasting systems in place may no longer be sufficient to anticipate and plan for future demand accurately.

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Aligning your forecast systems with company growth

One of the primary responsibilities of a sales manager is to ensure that the team is meeting its quota and hitting its sales targets. To do this effectively, it's important to clearly understand how the team is progressing toward its quota and where there may be opportunities for improvement.

One way to track quota attainment is through rich sales data. By collecting and analyzing data on various aspects of the team's sales activities, you can gain valuable insights into how well it performs and identify improvement areas.

This blog post will explore the importance of tracking quota attainment and how rich sales data can help you do so effectively. We'll also discuss how to collect and analyze rich sales data and offer tips for using this data to drive better sales results.

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# Why Tracking Quota Attainment is Important

Tracking quota attainment is important for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, tracking quota attainment allows you to ensure that your team is meeting its sales targets and contributing to the organization's overall success. By regularly monitoring your team's progress towards its quota, you can identify any potential issues or challenges hindering their ability to meet their goals and take steps to address those issues.

It is also important to keep your team motivated and engaged. By regularly reviewing their progress towards their quota, you can provide your team with a clear understanding of how they are doing and what they need to do to achieve their goals. This can help keep them motivated and engaged, which can, in turn, lead to better sales results.

Finally, tracking can help you identify areas for improvement in your team's sales processes. By analyzing data on various aspects of your team's sales activities, you can identify trends and patterns impacting their ability to meet their quota. For example, you might discover that your team is having difficulty closing deals with a certain type of customer or that they are spending too much time on low-value tasks. You can help your team increase their sales productivity and efficiency by identifying these issues and implementing changes to address them.

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# Sales Data Helping Track Quota Attainment

## Identify trends and patterns 
By analyzing data on various aspects of your team's sales activities, you can identify trends and patterns impacting their ability to meet their quota. For example, you might discover that your team is having difficulty closing deals with a certain type of customer or that they are spending too much time on low-value tasks. By identifying these issues, you can take steps to address them and help your team increase their sales productivity and efficiency.

## Identify areas for improvement. 
Rich sales data can also help you identify areas for improvement in your team's sales processes. For example, you might discover that your team is not using certain sales tools or techniques effectively or that they are not leveraging certain sales strategies as effectively as they could be. By identifying these areas for improvement and implementing changes to address them, you can help your team increase their sales productivity and efficiency.

## Set realistic quotas 
Rich sales data can also help you set realistic quotas for your team. By analyzing your team's past sales performance and other relevant factors, you can determine a realistic quota for your team and help ensure they can meet their goals.

## Monitor individual performance 
Finally, rich sales data can help you monitor the performance of individual team members and identify any potential issues or challenges they may be facing. By regularly reviewing this data, you can provide your team with the support and guidance they need to achieve their sales targets


One of the primary responsibilities of a sales manager is to ensure that the team is meeting its quota and hitting its sales targets. To do this effectively, it's important to clearly understand how the team is progressing toward its quota and where there may be opportunities for improvement.

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Track quota attainment by rich sales data

As a high-growth startup, a company should always strive for modern techniques to enhance its sales processes. But the SaaS sales market is highly flooded with sales tools, all of which seem to be useful. Tracking sales conversations sounds fascinating to all the sales managers and VPs, but doing it all manually can be the worst nightmare for the sales reps. This article will explain the use cases and best techniques in the current conversation-tracking world.

# Why track sales conversations?

## Improved sales techniques   
By tracking sales conversations, you can identify patterns and trends in your team's sales techniques and identify areas for improvement. For example, you might discover that certain types of questions or objections are more common than others or that certain sales techniques are more effective than others. By analyzing this data, you can help your team refine their sales techniques and improve their overall effectiveness.

## Enhanced coaching and development   
Tracking sales conversations can also provide valuable insights into the strengths, and weaknesses of individual sales reps, allowing you to provide targeted coaching and development to help them improve.   
_For example, you might discover that a particular sales rep has a knack for building rapport with potential customers while another excels at overcoming objections. You can provide targeted coaching and development to help your reps reach their full potential by identifying these strengths and weaknesses._

## Improved customer relationships   
Tracking sales conversations can also help you better understand the needs and preferences of your potential customers, allowing you to tailor your sales approach to better meet their needs. For example, you might discover that a particular customer values a more personalized sales approach while another prefers a more data-driven approach. By tailoring your sales approach to the needs and preferences of your potential customers, you can build stronger, more meaningful relationships with them.

## Enhanced sales productivity   
Tracking sales conversations can also help you identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your sales process, allowing you to streamline and optimize your sales efforts. For example, you might discover that a particular type of sales conversation is taking longer than necessary or that certain tasks or activities are not adding value to the sales process. Identifying and addressing these issues can help your team be more productive and efficient.

## Greater visibility into sales performance   
Finally, tracking sales conversations can provide greater visibility into your team's sales performance, allowing you to understand better what's working and not. By analyzing data on sales conversations, you can identify trends and patterns in your team's performance and identify opportunities for improvement.

---

# How to effectively track sales conversations

- **Choose the right tools:** Various tools and technologies are available for tracking sales conversations, including customer relationship management (CRM) systems, call recording software and sales conversation analysis platforms. Choose the tools that best meet your organization's needs and make it easy for your team to track sales conversations.

- **Establish clear tracking guidelines:** To ensure that your team is tracking sales conversations consistently and accurately, establish clear guidelines for what should be tracked and how it should be tracked. This might include guidelines for what types of conversations to track, how to take notes on sales conversations, and how to record and analyze data.

- **Train your team on tracking best practices:** Ensure your team is fully trained on the tracking tools and guidelines you have established. Provide ongoing support and resources to help them track sales conversations effectively.

- **Regularly review and analyze data:** To get the most value from tracking sales conversations, it's important to review and analyze the data you are regularly collecting. Look for patterns and trends in your team's sales techniques and performance, and use this data to identify areas for


SaaS sales market is highly flooded with sales tools, all of which seem to be useful. Tracking sales conversations sounds fascinating to all the sales managers and VPs, but doing it all manually can be the worst nightmare for the sales reps. This article will explain the use cases and best techniques in the current conversation-tracking world.

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Why should you track sales conversations?  Road to conversions!

The most important part of a sales organization is forecast accuracy. 

To ensure that your sales engine operates at peak efficiency, it's essential to stay up to date with your team's forecasts, have a good understanding of pipeline health, and gauge varying risk levels with opportunities.

Several negative effects result from missing your projection, of which losing revenue is the primary one.

There are several reasons why companies miss their forecasts, but there are a few major ones, which we will discuss in this blog.

## 1) Incomplete and Inaccurate CRM Data -

Several factors can cause inaccurate CRM data, but it mainly occurs when data is entered manually, and mistakes are made. 

It can also occur when data is imported from external sources and incorrectly formatted or validated. Additionally, CRM data can become inaccurate over time as customers' information changes, such as their contact details or preferences.

Also, because manual entry is a pain and time-consuming, reps generally do it half-heartedly, rendering the data incomplete.

When the data based on which you are supposed to forecast is incomplete and inaccurate, how will your forecasts turn out? It’s a no-brainer, totally unsatisfactory, right?

## 2) Going with your ‘gut feeling’- 

Forecasting cadences without data to bank on generally results in going with what is believed to be correct. The rep may say depending on their prior engagement in a particular deal; they feel a certain way about it converting or not. 

But let's take an example of a deal that has been going on for 8 months. Initially, the potential client showed interest, which dwindled but got reignited again, and this cycle continued a couple of times at monthly intervals.

So what kind of feeling would a rep have about this deal? Could this intuition and inclination, although an important factor, be trusted as the only source on to base your forecasting decision?

You know the answer, and that is no.

## 3) Lack of metrics and insights- 

To have an accurate forecast, you need accurate and complete data. But this clean data can only be helpful if used correctly. So how do you use it correctly? Through correct metrics and insights.

You need to know your sales process and what metrics would work for it. 

A couple of essential metrics are the Risk Score and Engagement Score. As the name suggests, these tell you the risk associated and the kind and amount of engagement a deal has gone through.

Pipeline coverage and pacing are other metrics that give valuable information and insight. The latter helps you see at what speed a deal is progressing and the former shows you how much pipeline you have, which can give you an idea of how many deals will expectedly convert.

Leveraging your company's and industry's historical data with deals of various kinds(different ticket sizes, geography), you can use these metrics to give you accurate answers about what would happen with your forecast.

## 4) Having a cadence blueprint-

Most companies that don’t have the features mentioned above in their forecasts also tend to have a haphazard way of conducting them.

This is so primarily because little specific data or anything tangible guides them. This causes them to inspect each deal and ask questions about them.

This is fine until there is time, but when time starts running out, they hurry their cadence.

Instead of doing so, prioritized deals (deals prioritized by data available on them) could be discussed, and others could be segregated into different groups, or maybe some other blueprint could be followed.

There must be a well-laid process to go about the cadence, knowing when and how to discuss various things instead of brute-forcing it. Only then can cadences show effect and forecasting be accurate.


To get effective forecast numbers, consider all these aspects and read this extensive guide to accurate forecasting.

To ensure that your sales engine operates at peak efficiency, it's essential to stay up to date with your team's forecasts, have a good understanding of pipeline health, and gauge varying risk levels with opportunities.                                                                                                                                                                                                     

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Why are your forecast numbers always wrong?

As a RevOps professional, you know that accurately forecasting revenue is crucial to the success of any business. But in market downturns, accurate revenue forecasting becomes even more important. Market downturns can catch businesses off guard, leading to unexpected losses and financial difficulties. However, with accurate revenue forecasting, you can weather the storm and come out on top when the market recovers.

# Forecasting in Downturns
Why is accurate revenue forecasting so important during market downturns?

- First and foremost, accurate revenue forecasting allows you to identify potential risks and opportunities. You can identify potential risks that may impact your revenue by analyzing past performance and current market trends. This includes everything from economic downturns to changes in customer demand to competition. With this information, you can make informed decisions about mitigating those risks and taking advantage of any opportunities that may arise.

- It also helps you to optimize your resources and allocate them effectively. During a market downturn, it’s important to make every dollar count. By accurately forecasting your revenue, you can allocate your resources more efficiently and ensure you’re getting the most out of every investment. This could include reallocating resources from underperforming areas to those with higher potential or cutting back on unnecessary expenses.

- And, also helps you to stay ahead of the competition. Market downturns often lead to increased competition as businesses try to weather the storm by cutting prices and vying for customers. By accurately forecasting your revenue, you can identify areas where you may be able to gain a competitive advantage and take action accordingly. For example, you may be able to identify opportunities to offer unique or high-value products or services or to differentiate your business through customer service or other means.

However, accurate revenue forecasting doesn’t just happen magically. It requires a strong foundation of accurate data. To forecast revenue accurately, you need reliable data on your past performance, current market trends, and customer behavior. This includes everything from financial data to customer feedback to market research. Without accurate data, your revenue forecasts will likely be off the mark, leading to poor decision-making and potential financial losses.

# Ensuring Data Accuracy

One of the most important things you can do is to establish a consistent and reliable data collection process. This could involve using standardized data entry forms, implementing a robust customer relationship management (CRM) system, or using data analytics tools to track key performance indicators (KPIs). Whatever your data collection process looks like, it’s important to make sure it’s consistent and reliable so that you can trust the data you’re working with.

Another important aspect of data accuracy is data quality. This refers to the accuracy and completeness of your data. To ensure data quality, it’s important to have a system to verify and validate your data on an ongoing basis. This could involve using checksums or other validation tools or simply having someone manually review the data to ensure it’s accurate.

Finally, it’s important to have a system in place for data management. This includes everything from organizing your data logically and consistently to storing it securely and backing it up regularly. By having a strong data management system in place, you can ensure that your data is always accessible and accurate, even in times of crisis.

Accurate revenue forecasting is crucial to navigating market downturns and coming out on top. By accurately forecasting your revenue, you can identify potential risks and opportunities, optimize your resources, and stay ahead of the competition. However, to achieve accurate revenue forecasting, you need a strong foundation


Market downturns can catch businesses off guard, leading to unexpected losses and financial difficulties. However, with accurate revenue forecasting, you can weather the storm and come out on top when the market recovers.

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How accurate forecasts can save you from market downturns

Each company must have pre-defined parameters and metrics to succeed in optimally understanding and bettering its sales process. If you can’t measure what you’re working on precisely, you can’t work on bettering it.

We now have more sales data in our hands than ever before, thanks to strong AI-based solutions—but simply having access to sales analytics isn't enough. Understanding what to measure and how to interpret the findings to hit sales and revenue targets is critical.

Although different metrics will work for different companies, a few work across all and are paramount to getting strong insights. Here is a list of a few of these.

## ARR or Annual Recurring Revenue
ARR, or annual recurring revenue, is the revenue generated by your company each year. It's an important key metric to track because it tells you how much money you can expect to receive from customers in a given year. ARR can give you important insights about a company's growth and aid in forecasting when its data is leveraged historically.

## Pipeline Coverage
Pipeline coverage tells you how many more deals your pipeline has compared to how many you wish to convert. This is the simplest yet most critical metric. It gives you an easy idea of how your future will look. A company must keep at least four times the pipeline of the deals it wishes to convert at any given time. 

## Conversion Rate
The percentage of deals closed within a specific period, resulting in converting potential customers, is called the conversion rate. It helps you understand how you are doing concerning the plan you charted and whether or not the pipeline coverage you have is enough to achieve that. It also gives you insight into how your sales reps perform and if any necessary coaching is required to alter their results.

## Quota fulfillment
Quota fulfillment refers to the number of deals a sales rep can close concerning the quota given to him. As you can see, this metric helps you understand the performance of sales reps cumulatively and individually.



_If you see all underperforming, you need to change something in the system, like maybe providing more coaching or investing in a better sales tool. But if some are and some are doing well, then you need to address that by effectively taking up individual issues the reps who aren’t performing well are facing._

## Deal Slippage
Deal slippage refers to the number of deals in the commit stage that do not close within the expected time frame. A slip occurs when a deal committed for Q1 is pushed to Q2 for various reasons, such as project stalling or budget freezes.
_
The widespread belief is that any slippage is bad. In reality, every 
company experiences deal slippage. What matters is that you understand your average slip rate to plan accordingly._

## Churn Rate
The number of customers who cancel or do not renew their subscriptions during a given period is called the churn rate. Customer churn is important to know whether you can hold customers back. 

_If you get some and lose some simultaneously, you need to change your strategy, provide reps effective coaching, or do something different (which you have to identify) to prevent this further._

## Net Retention
Net retention refers to the number of customers who are retained. This is a great indicator of customer satisfaction. It tells you whether your relationship with your customers is healthy, if they’re happy with your product and services and whether you can keep their content.

These are a few metrics we feel are important for any sales process to form a strong base. With Clientell’s Revenue Intelligence platform, you can easily track these indicators in real time with pragmatic visual insights. To see this in action, book a demo below:


Each company must have pre-defined parameters and metrics to succeed in optimally understanding and bettering its sales process. If you can’t measure what you’re working on precisely, you can’t work on bettering it.

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Best sales metrics to prepare you for 2023

It is crucial it is to be able to estimate your forecast number accurately and consistently.

One of the most effective ways to look into the future, and a critical metric for any long-standing organization, achieving effective forecasts is a mix of having the correct tools, processes, and practices.

We’ve discussed the major reasons companies get their forecast numbers wrong and what to remember for your forecasts.

However, an effective forecasting cadence is a significant part of the forecasting process. To run your forecast machine efficiently, you need to have effective takeaways from your forecasting cadences. Here are a few tips to make sure your cadences turn out productive:

# Choose Attendees

Never have a cadence with too many members, or leave out any important ones. You need to know who to include and who not to. 

At the very least, important members of the sales and revenue teams, sales and revenue managers, and leaders must be included.

However, aim for more stakeholders and those from different teams to be on the same page. This would be beneficial also because these stakeholders could give inputs from their meetings which could help tune the forecast better.

# Inspect Deals Strategically and Rigorously

Your cadence shouldn’t be one in which you are inspecting deals individually, one by one. You need to prioritize, segregate, club, and be efficient in choosing what to discuss when to take away the most from your cadence and be good with handling time.

A few questions to keep in mind while inspecting a deal are:

- How many stakeholders are involved from the client’s side? Are they enough, or are more needed? Is a decision-maker involved? 
- When was the last meeting/call with the client? 
- When is the next meeting/call with the client?
- What’s the next step based on the risk and engagement the deal is showing?


# Prepare for the meeting

Sales reps and managers must know inside out what’s happening with all deals in the pipeline. They may not be needed to give an update on every one of them, but if push comes to shove and some discussion is required about some deal they hadn’t initially planned, they should still know all about it to ensure the cadence is fruitful. 

Things like when the deal is expected to close, if it may be accelerated or pushed to another quarter if any issues hamper its progress must all be at finger tips for discussion.

Using all this information, the plan for the future and what is the best next step can be determined. Targets and deadlines can be determined to ensure things are flowing smoothly, helping effectively plan ahead.

# Identification of cadence frequency

What’s the ideal frequency to hold your forecasting cadences? It depends on team size and how many deals are in the pipeline. Most companies do it once a week, some others less frequently. 

You could do it once in two weeks if you’re a new company without many deals. But a good rule of thumb is to do it every week, as this ensures regular knowledge of what’s happening in your business and keeps a tab on your reps to ensure they’re regularly working.

# _Clientell for Forecasting_ 

With the help of Clientell, sales leaders can assess risk across their pipeline and achieve 95% accuracy on their quarterly forecasts. 

It helps create a culture of data-backed forecasting and transparency using both bottom-up and top-down processes. With AI-driving features such as natural-language processing, risk & pipeline analysis, and leveraging historical data, prospect sentiment can be well analyzed, yielding trustable insights to help you forecast better.


One of the most effective ways to look into the future, and a critical metric for any long-standing organization, achieving effective forecasts is a mix of having the correct tools, processes, and practices.

Conducting Effective Forecast Calls

Sales leaders spend hours analyzing funnel data from the CRM weekly, and salespeople spend even more time filling in this data. But with 40% of the organizations, even after meticulous processes, regular cadences and 6 hours spent every week the data is still not entirely accurate. 

Revenue Leaders have a simple objective regarding optimizing their funnel- Finding areas to improve and prioritizing opportunities to go after. 

Most leaders understand that CRMs are not user-friendly, and reps want to focus on selling rather than data entry. This leads to multiple silos across google sheets, marketing tools, emails, calendars, and task planners. Imagine a scenario where a company that rejected you due to a lack of budget raises funding in the following months. Are you confident that your reps will reach out to them again?


Having a Revenue Intelligence system in place can help you capture critical contact and activity data and go even further in sealing the cracks in your sales process and improving your team's productivity. 

#  What is Revenue Intelligence?

Revenue intelligence is the process of deriving actionable insights to drive revenue growth. A simple investigation into your CRM and sales funnels can help gauge areas where revenue might leak. 

For instance, understanding the risk associated with every deal based on engagement via calls, emails, and meetings can give you a comprehensive understanding of your coaching efforts. 

Revenue intelligence, as the name suggests, integrates Artificial Intelligence with your tech stack across sales, marketing, and customer success. AI allows the automated capture of critical contact, activity, and other first-party data in a single source of truth. 

Revenue-generating teams can use this data to coach effectively, identify buying signals from prospects, understand the risk in the funnel, and forecast with over 95% accuracy. 




# What’s the data that’s missing?
The increasing number of GTM tools has created a disconnect within teams and silos of data. From CRM to conversational intelligence to marketing attribution data, each needs to be entered into or integrated into the CRM separately to get a complete picture of the RevOps funnel. Even basic things like contact numbers from email signatures must be updated separately in the CRM. 

For example, suppose you have a qualified opportunity where you’ve had a few interactions. Suppose a decision maker is added to the email chain but not to your CRM. You could close the deal faster if you include the decision maker in the next few meetings and update emails. An AI-powered platform seamlessly identifies decision makers, includes them in your plan of action, and even surfaces deals where there’s a lack of one, even at the later stages. 

The previous example is a nuanced yet critical insight into closing deals faster. AI can also, in one place, organize and structure your calls, meetings, and emails and combine this with behavioral intelligence data such as website visits. This creates a knowledge cloud around every opportunity to sell, highlighting areas where there was perceived to be none. 

Such automation saves up to 30% of your reps’ time which can be used to plan strategies, research, and close deals. It also takes care of situations where a rep suddenly leaves your company and forgets to log in their opportunities or cases where the lead may convert to an opportunity in the future. 

# Revenue Intelligence beyond “Data Ingestion”

Data ingestion is just the beginning of Revenue Intelligence. The next immediate step is to derive actionable insights from the data. Things like engagement risk is a good measure of your engagement with your prospect. It factors in things like how many times you’re competitor was mentioned, or what key objections came up. Engagement risk often includes behavioral insights like when your prospect is most likely to respond or who amongst the buying team is the decision maker. 

Engagement may be better than expected, but that does not indicate whether the deal will close. External factors such as buyer intent, duration in a particular CRM stage, or even the company's budget can hamper the conversion of a deal. Leveraging AI by integrating with multiple such data sources can improve the accuracy of your forecasts to 95% and above. 

Imagine having the data confidence to say where you’ll land at the end of the quarter, with 95% accuracy. That would enable you to make data-driven decisions about forecasting, opportunity qualification, and even which areas of the funnel need improvement. 

Traditional forecasting is simply sales leaders submitting their numbers based on basic excel calculations or intuition-driven assumptions. Indicators such as conversion rates and assumptions on industry benchmarks are the backbone of such processes. This process is inaccurate as external market and competitive scenarios evolve. Still, it’s also not inclusive, as the front-line salespeople who know what’s happening at the deal level are not included. 

This is where Revenue Intelligence adds the most value as AI can, in real-time, calibrate forecasts based on over 400 leading indicators. A combination of such AI-powered and bottom-up manual forecasts can build the data trust required for sustainable and inclusive growth. 


# How do you get started?
You don’t need to start with full-blown Revenue Intelligence software!

You can start by first understanding the various types of data each of your existing tools provide and how they can be integrated within your CRM. Start with meeting with each team to understand their decisions and ask whether they are data-backed. If the answer is yes, then understand what more data would make this decision faster. 

> _The best process is no process _ 
> - Elon Musk

The number of processes and data can be overwhelming across teams. So start with eliminating manual work and see if automation can be done. Your team will thank you for this; you won’t need to hire expensive data scientists and bear high costs. 

Once you have a breakdown of all the processes and data available across multiple tools and have eliminated unnecessary processes, work on building data stories. Data stories are simple dashboards that sequentially break down various metrics and KPIs. 

For example, if you want to understand which channel to spend on in demand generation, start with understanding the ratio of qualified leads to closed won just for that channel. Break it down by geography, business unit, or teams. The channel which is the cheapest may not be the best for a particular team, say in North America, but it may be the one for APAC. The more granular you go, the more answers you find. 

Once you’ve done this for a few weeks, the gaps in your GTM will surface, and you’ll notice areas where your team members view data as a task, not a habit. This is the time to bring in your Whatson, as every Sherlock needs one. Invest in a Revenue Intelligence solution and make sure it integrates within your workflows seamlessly. The last thing you want is another tool to solve the problem caused by multiple tools. The choice of tool needs to have customizable forecasting and automated workflows. This combination will give you the data confidence to focus on execution over planning. 



Sales leaders spend hours analyzing funnel data from the CRM weekly, and salespeople spend even more time filling in this data. But with 40% of the organizations, even after meticulous processes, regular cadences and 6 hours spent every week the data is still not entirely accurate. 

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How to enhance your CRM data with Revenue Intelligence

Lost deals are a fact of sales life. One-off deals happen all the time. They are occasionally ephemeral. But lost deals are not always one-offs. In fact, they can be very consistent in nature and patterns may emerge over time that you can use to predict closing wins and sell more closed-won deals with your team and clients.

After analyzing data from across industries and speaking with hundreds of sales leaders we’ve compiled these notes on how to define, identify and learn from lost deals. 

# Defining when a deal is lost is crucial to your forecasting strategy
Any opportunity that comes into your CRM should only end up in two places either closed-lost or closed-won. Do you use communication from wins to coach your reps?
If your answer is “no”, focus on understanding the impact of various stakeholders to make a deal happen. Do this for every ICP and for every product that you sell. 

Ask your reps at what point decision-makers enter your funnel and what difference it makes to your deal progression. Going as far back as a few years to look into this will highlight the deeper indicators of closing a deal. Whether you use MEDDICC or BANT or any other scoring process make sure you include this new list of successful traits into your mix. 

Revisit this exercise as often as you can to understand whether purchase behavior has changed. Listen to all the recordings from lost deals and understand whether the opportunity was qualified in the first place. It’s even important to take “exit interviews” or ask for 15 mins from your lost deals to understand what part of the buying process needs improvement. It’s often as simple as conducting a survey or offering a 15$ amazon gift card in exchange for a few minutes with your prospect but can go miles for your selling process. 

---

# Lost deals have fewer contacts engaged and lower email communication

As deals get more complex and deal sizes increase the number of email touchpoints required to realize value with stakeholders goes up 2-3x. Closed-won deals saw over 40% more communication towards the end stages with multiple contacts. Understanding these leading indicators is important to gauge the direction of your deal. 

Prospect responsiveness is a comprehensive indicator of your deal. Spend time with your ops and data teams to understand these trends across ICPs and teams as you may have situations where a prospect responds every few weeks or maybe every few days. Including these indicators while building your forecasts will significantly increase forecast accuracy and prevent revenue leakage.  Here are three things you can do right away:

- Set Agendas for every meeting:  
Sending an agenda in advance of a meeting helps show your team's planning abilities and establishes the meeting's objective. Be honest about the agenda; if your reps are more interested in discussing price, put it on the list. It might seem like a deliberate pressure strategy to leave something so important off the table as pricing just to surprise your prospects with it later.
- Discuss the next steps before ending every meeting:  
Reps often forget or leave setting the agenda for the next interaction to email threads and follow-ups. This can lead to prospects becoming uninterested or unresponsive often due to simple reasons like personal leaves, strategy changes, or internal roadblocks. Keep some time towards the end of every meeting to clearly summarize the conversation and set the agenda for the next meeting. Successful reps book the next meeting on the call itself and it’s much easier than following up later with multiple emails. 
- Push for including decision-makers from the beginning:  
Don’t be rude and ask your prospect if they are the decision-makers. Ask if they’d like to include their colleagues in the process and ask if you could share a demo or a quick brief to make their life easier when fighting for you internally. This is also a good indicator to gauge their seriousness from day one. 
- Send follow-up emails:  
Answer any queries that could have come up during the call or the meeting with your prospects. Some claim that a prospect has to have five contacts with you before you can consider them a real lead. However, based on our data, we can tell you that salespeople who were successful in closing transactions of any size sent 40 emails to prospects on average. Do this after every interaction whether, on the phone or in a meeting, it doesn’t matter. You have to always be on top of their minds!


## Lost deals have fewer decision-makers and it may be time to look at your qualification 

Lost Deals on average have 30% lesser contacts engaged as compared to won deals. Indicators like the number of contacts engaged or identifying the key decision maker are crucial to winning deals. Have your team do this manually or use Revenue Intelligence tools to always be on the lookout for decision-makers, and objections related to adding stakeholders and gatekeepers. 

We found that lost deals take over 40 more days to realize in your CRM as reps are always waiting for that one confirmation email or call. 40 days can be a long time to stress on a deal no matter the size and the time can be spent on building more pipeline. Evaluate every deal on a weekly basis to score and qualify and identify the indicators mentioned above at every stage to see how you’re doing compared to past won deals. 

---

# How to leverage lost deals for future wins:
## Start tracking  
The first step to setting your team up for success is moving from intuition to data-driven decisions. For a few weeks measure as many leading indicators as you can, implement deal scoring, and move from sheets to systems like CRMs, conversational intelligence, RevOps, and CDPs. Identify key trends at every stage, for every team, and for every product, and go as granular in your investigation as you can. Identify trends and improve each step iteratively. You don’t need a data team to get started on basic CRM analytics or purchase a RevOps solution. 
## Have your teams create historical reports  
If you’ve had a CRM in place for a while you can quickly pull up deals as far back as a few years to start building reports. Most often you’ll find missing data or outdated records. This is your starting point to align your team and understand why you have broken data even after reps spend hours filling CRMs. Move on to quicker data solutions and CRM enrichment systems. There’s no better place to be than have everyone in your team transparently acknowledge their shortcoming and collectively improve. 
## Constantly evaluate your qualification process  
This is the holy grail of deal prioritization and winning more. It can be as simple as meeting with your reps every Monday to evaluate their individual deals or as complex as a full-blown RevOps solution. No matter what you chose sticking to a process consistently will help you increase quarter on quarter. 
## Build a consistent prioritization system and set your reps up for success  
The biggest enemy of sales ops is spending too much time planning rather than executing. You don’t need battle cards and fancy 3rd party intent data to understand which deals you should focus on. Something as simple as looking at the number of emails can be a key to prioritization. Relying on systems over intuition and sheets should be your first priority and you can refine them iteratively over time. 




These notes share actionable advice for refining your sales funnel and learning from lost deals. The predominant theme across winning teams is their ability to measure and track data in their CRMs. All it takes is a few tools, a consistent process, and alignment within your team. Factors as simple as recording the average number of decision-makers for every ICP do not take a data scientist but rather a data-driven sales leader. Success stories in modern sales are built of patterns, insights, and secrets that come out from your data. Follow these steps, include your team at every step, and be the protagonist of your sales story. 


Lost deals are a fact of sales life. One-off deals happen all the time. They are occasionally ephemeral. But lost deals are not always one-offs. In fact, they can be very consistent in nature and patterns may emerge over time that you can use to predict closing wins and sell more closed-won deals with your team and clients.

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Do you know where your lost deals are going? We know!

One of the primary goals of a RevOps team is to increase the efficiency of the sales team as much as possible. This not only helps to reduce the workload on the team members, but it can also lead to significant improvements in overall revenue and profitability. In this blog, we'll delve into the concept of "pipeline revenue leakage" and discuss how addressing this issue can help you boost the efficiency of your RevOps team by up to 60%.

First, let's define pipeline revenue leakage. This term refers to potential revenue loss when opportunities within the sales pipeline are not correctly managed or pursued. This can happen for various reasons, including failing to follow up with prospects, inadequate team communication, or transparent processes. 

Pipeline revenue leakage can be a significant issue for any organization, but it can be particularly problematic for RevOps teams. This is because the RevOps function manages the entire revenue generation process, from lead generation and qualification to conversion and renewal. This process can lead to lost opportunities and reduced revenue if there are gaps or inefficiencies.

So, how can you increase the efficiency of your RevOps team and reduce pipeline revenue leakage? Here are a few strategies you can consider:

### Implement a CRM system
A customer relationship management (CRM) system can help you track and manage all of the interactions with your leads and customers and the various stages of the sales process. This can help you identify bottlenecks or inefficiencies in your pipeline and make the necessary adjustments to improve efficiency.

### Enhance communication and collaboration
Effective communication and collaboration are crucial for ensuring that opportunities are correctly pursued and managed. Consider implementing tools and processes that facilitate better communication and collaboration between teams, such as regular meetings and cross-functional project management tools.

### Establish transparent processes and procedures
Having clear processes and procedures in place can help ensure that all opportunities are pursued and managed consistently and effectively. This can include everything from lead qualification and follow-up to contract negotiations and renewal.

### Train and develop your team
Providing data-driven training and development opportunities can help your team members stay up-to-date on the latest best practices and techniques for managing the revenue generation process. 

### Regularly review and optimize your pipeline
Reviewing and monitoring your pipeline can help you identify areas where revenue is lost and make the necessary adjustments. This can include analyzing the performance of different pipeline stages and looking for trends or patterns that may be contributing to lost opportunities.
To 

By implementing these strategies, you can help increase the efficiency of your RevOps team and reduce pipeline revenue leakage. This can lead to significant improvements in overall revenue and profitability, as well as a more productive and efficient team. So, take the time to assess your current processes and identify areas for improvement, and you'll be well on your way to boosting the efficiency of your RevOps team by up to 60%.

One of the primary goals of a RevOps team is likely to increase the efficiency of the sales team as much as possible. This not only helps to reduce the workload on the team members, but it can also lead to significant improvements in overall revenue and profitability. In this blog, we'll delve into the concept of "pipeline revenue leakage" and discuss how addressing this issue can help you boost the efficiency of your RevOps team by up to 60%.

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Increase the RevOps team efficiency by up to 60%

Do you have a complete picture of how a dollar spent on your revenue-generating efforts moves through the funnel?

For most leaders, the answer is a combination of marketing spends, software products, and salaries. But what about the opportunity cost of wasted efforts, sales lost due to negligence, and missing data? 

On your road to profitable growth, macro indicators or high-level KPIs such as CAC or Net dollar retention may misguide you. Your overall numbers may be great, but as we just saw the story unfold at Twitter, you may have overhired or over-invested in certain channels. If your goal is to understand exactly where each dollar is spent, follow the steps undermentioned. 

The famous Pareto principle highlights how just 20% of your efforts may be generating 80% of your pipeline. But as a business leader, your objective is to de-risk your GTM and increase the spread so that you are still competitive when certain channels stop working. In this blog, we explore how to set up a working RevOps model by understanding where your Pipeline Leakage lies or where you are losing revenue. 

# Spending beyond just sales and marketing
For most RevOps leaders and CROs, the challenge with increasing pipeline begins with having too many data silos across teams. These can be due to multiple spreadsheets, too many software tools, or incomplete CRMs. The next obvious challenge lies in looking at the wrong or surface metric instead of more granular leading indicators. 

One example that comes to mind is evaluating trying to optimize MQL to SQL conversion rate without looking at the qualification process in depth. You may be following MEDDICC, BANT, or any other sales methodology but say you only qualify leads successfully 20% of the time. Even if your MQL to SQL conversion rate is 30%, you’re still missing out on 80% of MQL that never made it to later stages due to poor qualification. Or, say if 40% of the SQLs come from a particular channel, is it better to double down on spending on this channel versus optimizing a channel that only brings 10% of the leads? 

Questions like these need to be answered by going both Top down and Bottom up in your analysis. These metrics need to be evaluated separately for each team, geography, and maybe even product. The first step to the solution is setting up a RevOps process and team-which most leaders understand. What’s not obvious is that RevOps is a broad term and needs to be strategically built as a function for your business. 


# What everyone gets wrong about RevOps
RevOps is not a quick solution, so don't use it in response to symptoms. Nothing will be resolved or improved by merely handing over control of your marketing automation platform, CRM, territory management, etc., to a "dedicated revenue operations division." Nobody hates to admit that, but it is much more probable that doing something and doing it incorrectly would make matters worse.
Operations involving income are not miraculous. The structure, strategy, and disciplines that RevOps may provide are what make them magical. Looking at RevOps through the lens of just “operations” and not revenue can lead to wasted efforts. The focus must be on increasing revenue by optimizing parts of the funnel, preventing revenue leakage, and boosting the speed of GTM execution.

# RevOps beyond the tech stack
Enabling the tech stack is the first step to making RevOps efforts successful. Having more data in the CRM is not the end goal here, but to derive actionable insights that are intuitive to your team. This can be achieved by leveraging a combination of AI and manual yet robust processes. 


The second step to an efficient RevOps process is ensuring all teams are aligned with the data or having everyone on the same platform. Once you’ve integrated your entire tech stack, you have a complete picture of how every opportunity moves through the funnel. You can identify areas of focus, your teams’ strengths, and your road to reducing unnecessary spending. 


# Finding your Revenue Leakage
Now that you have a RevOps process, it's important to start bottom-up, whether you’ve hired the right people or bought the right software. Start with identifying the most common traits amongst the deal you lose. Is it because you’re not following up with prospects, or because you don’t have an objection handling at the consideration phase, etc.? 

Using these Revenue Leakage points, you can benchmark against your competitors to understand whether it’s only your problem or whether the overall market is facing the same. Look at the email and call transcripts in deals you’ve won to identify how you handled objections and what made the opportunity go faster than average. You can go on for hours just listening to call recordings, but the objective is not to get busy. 

Avoiding getting busy is the toughest job for a RevOps leader. There’s just so much data and tools and dashboards to look at. Start by prioritizing focus areas in the funnel and get granular insights into each. Not only will this help you focus on immediate actions, but it will also keep you focused on the long-term objective. A good starting point in the sea of information could be a simple yet effective calculator to calculate “Revenue Leakage.” You can use [this one](https://www.getclientell.com/RevLeakageCalc) or build something similar. 

A major concern for the spendingscan be the structure of your RevOps team. RevOps teams are desined to increae the efficiency of the sales and marketing teams, but what's the point if they themselves are not efficient. Th structure will be diffrent for every organization depending on the requirements of the sales pipeline and coversion rates. If you want to design your RevOps dream team, you an use [Clientell's RevOps Team Size Calculator](https://www.getclientell.com/RevOpsTeamCalc) or hire few experts to do the same. Regardless of what you choose, get started today.  

Do you have a complete picture of how a dollar spent on your revenue-generating efforts moves through the funnel? For most leaders, the answer is a combination of marketing spends, software products, and salaries. But what about the opportunity cost of wasted efforts, sales lost due to negligence, and missing data? 

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Are your revenue team spending more than the value created

Revenue may be any company’s problem for a variety of reasons - the team may not be working hard enough, there may be logistical problems or many other issues.

However, one problem which is right there in front of you, but goes unnoticed generally, is that of siloed data.

# What is siloed data?

Information coming from revenue-generating operations like sales, marketing, or customer success is kept in separate tech stacks and depositories, making it inaccessible to other teams and people. This is siloed data. 

For example: The sales team might use the data from their own tech stack to nurture and convert a lead. This information is unrelated to marketing or customer success information. 

As a result, these departments continue to operate alone, without sharing data or finding ways to assist one another. 

CS will not get a comprehensive picture from sales about the lead and the effort of sales to convert the lead may not get translated to custom retention.

These divisions cause a lack of smoothness in transition between teams, hampering the goal of maximizing revenue, as data is not fully available to act on.

But why does siloed data develop in the first place?

## Difference in departments   
Different departments like sales, marketing and customer success have their own way of working, their own tech stack, and their own nuances. They have their own goals to achieve. 
Marketing has to run certain campaigns, sales has to nurture and convert and CS has to be there post-conversion and retain. All that’s fair, but these are individual goals.

The cumulative goal is to work for the organisation’s betterment and benefit and maximize its revenue. Keeping tab of individual goals, employees lose track of this and forget its their responsibility to ensure seamless transfer of data in optimal workflows with other teams. They think once they’ve done their individual job, its not their problem anymore, and that shouldnt be the case.

## Separation of tech stacks   
Each team has its own tech stack, to focus on individual goals. With technology evolving and companies growing, more tools are added.

This is okay, but there needs to be a process where data is easily accessible from one tech stack to another team’s, so that they can use it easily. Most organisations do not have such integrations in place.

## Resistance to change   
The data problem requires technology. Tools and code can solve this problem efficiently.

However, most important positions in companies are occupied by people who aren’t exposed to the power of tech in the data space, given that these developments are relatively new and these positions are for more experienced folk.

This causes a certain resistance to change, to try new tools, products and softwares to solve your problems.

This is how siloed data is created and this hence affects your revenue engine adversely.

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# How will it affect your revenue?

## Inaccurate Revenue Forecasts   
If your data is inaccurate, you don’t know what to forecast on the basis of. You’re basically shooting in the dark, guessing that a certain deal or a certain customer will behave in a certain manner, as you don’t have tangible data on their behaviour. 

You have to work to combine data in different stacks and depositories to get a forecast firstly, and that too not accurate.

## Shabby customer experience   
The journey from a lead gotten by marketing to one nurtured and converted by sales and then handed over to customer success for queries and retention is a long one. 

Since there are so many touchpoints on the way, and data is not transferred accurately through them, the customer’s experience gets very diluted. 

For them, it’s like they were having a different conversation with sales but suddenly that doesn’t make sense anymore because customer success doesn’t know what they were talking about with sales priorly. 

This causes a shabby customer experience.

## Untapped business potential   
Data siloes also cause business potential to remain untapped. If data is available across teams, experts from different domains can see the lead’s journey and together give inputs on qualifying and nurturing prospects.

There may be something marketing can add to a lead, which sales cannot, given their behavior, and vice versa. But if the leads’ data and journey with different touchpoints is not clearly visible to everyone, the potential to convert them reduces, hence losing out on business.

Thus, the cost of siloed data is greater than what you would assume. Its time organisations started paying attention to this and working on it.

If you wish to get rid of your data silo problems, get Clientell. Book a demo to see what we do and how we work!


Having siloed data across multiple sales tools can definitely hinder pipeline growth. When data is siloed, it means that it is isolated and not easily accessible to other parts of the organization. This can make it difficult for sales teams to get a complete view of their pipeline and customer interactions, which can impact their ability to effectively nurture leads and close deals.

Siloed data across multiple sales tools hampering pipeline growth

Inaccurate customer relationship management (CRM) data can have a significant impact on a company's ability to effectively execute its go-to-market (GTM) strategy. GTM is a critical component of any business's success, as it determines how a company will reach its target audience, promote its products and services, and ultimately drive revenue. When CRM data is inaccurate, it can lead to slower GTM execution and ultimately hinder a company's ability to achieve its business objectives.

# Why is CRM data crucial?
CRM data is used to track and manage customer interactions, sales, and marketing activities. It is a central repository for customer information, including contact details, communication history, and sales data. This data is crucial for understanding customer behavior and preferences, as well as for targeting marketing campaigns and identifying potential sales opportunities.

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# What inaccurate data can do?
When CRM data is inaccurate, it can lead to a number of problems. Like..
- If a company's CRM database contains incorrect contact information for its customers, it may be unable to reach them through email or other communication channels. This can result in missed opportunities for engagement and sales.

- Inaccurate CRM data can also lead to poor targeting of marketing campaigns. If a company's CRM database contains outdated or incomplete information about its customers, it may be unable to accurately segment its audience and create tailored marketing messages. This can result in marketing efforts that are less effective and may even alienate potential customers.

- Furthermore, it can hinder a company's ability to effectively track and measure the success of its GTM strategy. If a company's CRM database contains errors or inconsistencies, it may be difficult to accurately track the performance of marketing campaigns and sales campaigns. This can make it difficult to identify areas for improvement and optimize the GTM process.

## CRM Data and sales tech stack
67% of sales teams use between 4 and 10 digital selling tools as part of their sales tech stacks. But 42% of sales teams fail to see a clear ROI on these tools. 
Inaccurate CRM data is a major reason for your sales tech stack failure, here’s how..

1. Lack of accurate data-driven insights
2. Rep’s work hours wasted in data verification
3. Data silos after juggling with multiple tools
4. Misalignment of marketing and sales

Overall, inaccurate CRM data can significantly slow down a company's GTM execution and hinder its ability to achieve its business objectives. To avoid these problems, it is important for companies to regularly review and update their CRM data to ensure its accuracy and completeness. This can help ensure that the data is reliable and can be used effectively to support GTM activities.

# How to deal with it?
Inaccurate CRM data can be caused by a number of different factors. For example, it can occur when data is entered manually and mistakes are made. It can also occur when data is imported from external sources and is not properly formatted or validated. Additionally, CRM data can become inaccurate over time as customers' information changes, such as their contact details or preferences.

To avoid the negative effects of inaccurate CRM data, companies can take a number of steps to ensure the accuracy and completeness of their data. For example, 
- Implementing strict data entry protocols and using data validation tools to prevent errors when data is entered manually. 
- Investing in data integration and cleansing solutions to ensure that data from external sources is accurately imported and properly formatted. 
- And implementing processes for regularly reviewing and updating their CRM data to ensure that it remains accurate and up-to-date.

All these steps may or may not work depending on the sales processes of the organization, plus they again put a toll on the sales reps which again is not a good sign for the company. A better solution can be something which can make the data filling process easier, as automating the whole process will not make sense due to low scraping accuracy. Some factors you should always check in these tools:
- Actually solves the problem
- Easy to integrate
- Easy to use

To know more about the tool which can actually make a difference in rep’s data filling experience and save 4+ hours every week of each rep. You must see Clientell’s [TrackTable](https://www.getclientell.com/solutions/use-cases/tracktable) in action

Inaccurate customer relationship management (CRM) data can have a significant impact on a company's ability to effectively execute its go-to-market (GTM) strategy. GTM is a critical component of any business's success, as it determines how a company will reach its target audience, promote its products and services, and ultimately drive revenue. When CRM data is inaccurate, it can lead to slower GTM execution and ultimately hinder a company's ability to achieve its business objectives.

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Inaccurate CRM data leading to slower GTM execution

To calculate revenue leak in your sales pipeline, you need to first identify the total potential revenue that is currently in your sales pipeline. This would include the potential revenue from all the deals that are currently in progress, as well as any deals that are likely to close in the near future.

# Reasons of revenue leakage
There can be many points of revenue leakage in your sales pipeline, we have classified them in following categories:

- **Winning Less Deals**   
Due to lack of organized historical data insights, both MQL and SQL does not actually filter out good leads. Due to this, a major portion of SQLs is not of great use. Leveraging historical data to modify the ICPs can work well in favor and provide a great sales ROI.

- **Slipping Deals**   
Even with good qualified leads, are your reps really converting? Surely not up to the mark, because after lead qualification only the real sales starts. Not prioritizing important deals, not including decision makers or not following up on time, there can be many reasons as to why the deal was lost. But is there a solution? Yes there is, implementation of real-time risk analysis and conversation insights. With this in place, a rep can easily identify all the possibly converting deals and what should be the next best steps for them to get a positive result.


- **Low Sales Productivity**   
This is a problem spread all across the organizations, irrespective of team size or industry, all companies face the problem in sales productivity. More than 30% of a rep's time is wasted in CRM data filling which is not at all a good sign for a company's growth. To solve this issue, many companies are now implementing numerous automation tools, but the problem still persists as the automations are not all accurate and the reps again have to waste their time in verifying the information. In place of all this, you should look for some CRM utility tools which can improve the data filling experience without changing the rep’s work dashboard. 
Check out Clientell’s chrome extension TrackTable, it will make you forget that CRM updation was even a task.

- **Retaining Less Customers**    
Losing the existing customer can be a huge indication for you to review the product offerings and pricings along with revamping the competitive strategy. Losing a customer means all the CAC investment is wasted and a drop in operational cash flow which directly impacts the revenue team spendings hence, to revenue leakage.

- **Not Able to Expand Existing Customers**   
Importance of customer retention can be easily seen by the fact that the CAC in cross-selling is 60% less than that of a new customer. Start improving your customer retention rate by seamlessly transferring sales data to the customer success teams.

# Factors used in revenue leakage calculation
Those marked with a “+” have positive influence in the leakage number and similarly “-” ones have negative impact.

- **Deal Cycle Length(+)**    
Shorter deals are less predictable while longer deals are less likely to convert and are lying in CRM just increasing the pipeline numbers. Judge the right deal length for your company and industry and try to reduce deals which extend much longer than the defined time.

- **Average Annual Pipeline(+)**   
The pipeline should give you the estimate of the amount you can convert at the end of the quarter  or the year. But not viewing the number correctly during forecast can lead to huge deviations in the forecast numbers and hence the poor resource allocation and revenue leakage.

- **Average Deal Size(+)**   
Your deal size when compared to the industry averages can be really helpful to see if the GTM strategies are working fine or not. This can be a major factor while expanding existing customers or even winning more new deals.

- **Sales Team Size(+)**   
Productivity is directly related to the team size, if the team size is more than what is required then productivity is deemed to decline as the probability of error increases.

- **Customer Base(+)**   
Number of customers directly shows how many cross-sell or upsell opportunities you are giving up and hence showing the revenue leakage due to it

- **Average Win Rate(-)**   
Having a low deal win rate is an indication of low lead qualification accuracy and lack of sales training, this can highly impact the revenue leakage due to slipping deals and winning less deals.

- **Average Customer Retention Rate(-)**   
As stated above, the inability to retain customers can cause immense revenue leakage so the retention rate should always be taken into account as higher the retention rate lower the revenue leakage.


Keeping all the above factors in mind you can build formulas around different sales theories. But wait, you aren’t really gonna do that, we know. So, we have already built the [calculator](https://getclientell.com/RevLeakageCalc) on our website which will provide you with..
1. Detailed view of revenue leakage in your current sales pipeline
2. Tips which can reduce the leakage by 15% from the next day itself
3. Free Revenue Intelligence Consulting, so you can realize the true potential of your pipeline

[Revenue Leakage Calculator by Clientell](https://getclientell.com/RevLeakageCalc)

Preventing revenue to leak through the pipeline is the first task assigned to every RevOps team. But to reduce, you first need to have a clearer picture of the leakage and the factors affecting. This blog will provide you with all the necessary information you'll need to calculate the revenue leakage in your current sales pipeline.

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How to calculate revenue leakage in your sales pipeline

Revenue operations is a relatively new field that has emerged in recent years as a way to bridge the gap between sales and other business functions. The main goal of revenue operations is to optimize the sales process and drive revenue growth by implementing effective systems and processes, analyzing data, and aligning the sales team with other departments.

Every member of the revenue operations team is constantly looking for ways to improve their   sales process and drive revenue growth. One key aspect of this is ensuring that the sales and marketing teams are aligned and working towards common goals.


# Tasks of the RevOps team

Focus on implementing effective systems and processes for managing the sales pipeline, analyzing customer data, and tracking performance metrics. This will allow you to identify   trends and opportunities, and make data-driven decisions to optimize the sales efforts.

The RevOps team should also work closely with other departments, such as finance and customer success, to ensure that the sales process is aligned with the overall business strategy and objectives. This collaboration provides a seamless customer experience, and drives long-term value for the clients.

Some specific tasks that revenue operations professionals might be responsible for include managing the sales pipeline, analyzing customer data and tracking performance metrics. This helps them to analyze the sales data and take necessary actions to prevent revenue leakage before it happens.

# RevOps in your sales processes

Every company have their own sales processes, their own way to deal with clients and their unique sales team structure. So the process of introducing RevOps will also be different, agreed? The answer in "NO!" the process will be same irrespective of the company the steps will remain the same.

## 1. Identify the correct RevOps team structure
The first steps should be to identify the needs of your sales teams along with the goals of the organization. Budget is also an important constraint to consider while creating a team, and the ever increasing job profiles in RevOps make it very challenging to create a cost efficient yet comprehensive team. When creating the team, always consider these factors before all the constraints
- RevOps should cover all the fronts of your sales pipeline (CS, Pre-sales etc.)
- RevOps Analysts can be later assigned to any team so it’s always better to hire a RevOps Analyst when you don’t know which team you should focus on
- Business Insights is an important profile you should always have
- If you want to skip all these steps in a few minutes, we have created a “RevOps Team Creator” for you. Use it to create your RevOps Dream-Team

## 2. Find the right tools to support your team
Sales tools are the backbone of any RevOps team irrespective of the size and you should always give time to proper research before deciding your RevOps tech-stack. Some questions to ask yourself while doing the research are:
- **Features** - How many features the tool can cover by itself?
- **Integrations** - Can it integrate with your current sales tech stack?
- **Flexibility** - How much can it adapt to your sales processes?
- **Pricing** - Are there alternatives which offer similar features at a low cost?



## 3. Setup forecast processes designed specifically for your organization
Forecasts are and always will be an important bridge between the organizational goals and sales performance. But, most of the organizations can’t even forecast up to 80% accuracy. First, you should choose a forecasting methodology according to the size and complexity of your revenue streams. Ranging from google sheets to AI based forecasting you should move forward as the team grows.


## 4. Hold review meetings on regular basis
After setting up everything in place, you should not forget that nothing can be forever perfect and so you should always keep improving your sales processes. But again, how should we conduct these meetings effectively?
- Develop a single-source-of truth dashboard you can always refer during meetings
- Keep track of employee performance to help with training and compensation
- Have a detailed view of pipeline and its bottlenecks to empower resource allocation decisions with the stakeholders


RevOps is still fairly new part of the revenue teams. But in SaaS industry, the impact is huge. High-Growth companies are leveraging revenue operations to there fullest. But again, there are still a few companies who are yet to discover the depths of revenue operations. If your company is one of them, then this is a MUST READ for you. This is a guide to introduce RevOps in your sales processes without disturbing the current sales cycle.

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How to implement Revenue Operations in your current sales processes




The process of creating, planning, overseeing, and regulating the entire process of selling your company's products or services is known as sales management. It also includes all pre-sales, sales, and post-sales activities and covers hiring, training, and managing your sales personnel.


# Sales Operations

The fundamental goal of sales operations is to provide strategic direction, reduce friction in the sales process, and assist frontline sales teams in selling more successfully and efficiently. Sales ops does both strategic and tactical tasks to achieve this.

A sales operations helps in:

- ***Accurate revenue forecasting:***  Sales operations handle and examine the information from your sales funnel, giving you a precise revenue estimate that will help you better plan for the future.

- ***Faster company and revenue growth:***  Companies that spend at least three hours each month reviewing each sales rep's personal pipeline see growth rates that are 11% greater than those of businesses that do not. 

- ***Data driven decision making:***  Sales operations examine metrics on all facets of the sales force, the sales funnel, and the performance of individual reps in addition to revenue forecasts

- ***Easier scalability:***  Sales operations make it easy to scale your sales team because they help ensure reps follow a formal sales process.

- ***Improved recruiting and hiring practices:***  When hiring and developing new talent, it is common for sales operations teams to be asked to interview candidates for unfilled positions, onboard and train new hires on your company's sales processes, and instruct them on your niche market.

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# Sales Strategy 

A sales strategy is a plan by a person or a business to sell goods or services in order to create and boost revenue. It makes it possible for you to consistently and profitably sell your goods or services. This tactic is consistently put to test, reviewed, and improved to provide the desired outcomes.

A sales strategy helps in:
- ***Understanding the Target Market:***  Targeting potential customers based on demographic data is an essential component of any business's sales strategy. Not every member of the public will purchase your goods or service.

- ***Appropriate Budgeting and Cash Allocation:***  Any sales strategy needs to have a budget that is clear. Brand recognition is necessary to create funnels and credibility even if the sales team is paid strictly on commission. It also needs to monitor the success metrics. This entails keeping track of which marketing initiatives result in leads, how many leads there are overall, and what proportion of leads really close. To determine which marketing tactics are more effective, compare them to one another.

- ***Consider Competitive Advantages:***  The company's competitive advantages are a key element of a sales strategy. It is crucial to explain to customers why they should choose your company over a rival, particularly in sectors where there are a lot of options available.

- ***The Consumer Experience:***  The consumer who is purchasing the good or service must always be considered in a sales plan. Understanding who your ideal customers are is not enough. The sales strategy considers the purchasing behavior of those customers as well as their shopping experiences. Younger consumers like online transactions with user-friendly features like automated tracking. Older purchasers like in-person meetings to obtain all the information they require before making a selection.

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# Sales Analysis

Sales analysis gives you the insights you need to dissect every aspect of your sales process.You can delve deeper into variables like clients, goods, margins, sales, volumes, budgets, targets, sales representatives, regions, orders, delivery, invoices, and forward order books.
This level of sales data at your disposal will help you maintain far better control over your company's profitability and general performance.

A sales analysis help in:
- ***Missed opportunities:***  The corporation can determine where it lost an opportunity by analyzing the data at hand and whether or not that opportunity can be claimed. The field force will prove to be of great aid in educating the practicalities of the situation, while market research will play a vital part in presenting data to compare.

- ***Decision Driver:***  Sales information will assist a business in making decisions about its inventory management, marketing initiatives, upcoming promotions, and, if necessary, adjustments to its manufacturing procedures. Major choices like whether to keep selling a product or stop selling it are made based on sales statistics.

- ***Market Trends:***  The organization will also see current market trends through the sales study. Sales Analysis would reveal a sharp rise in sales of the earlier product following an activity, indicating that lack of awareness rather than the product was the obstacle to realizing sales even though the company might be getting ready to launch a new product. Additionally, sales of a certain product may soar during a festival or fall off seasonally.

- ***Customer Analysis:***  In essence, customer analysis is what sales analysis is. Answering the question of why a specific client purchased a product in a specific month may reveal vital consumer insights that will aid in business planning.

---

## **Effective Sales Management Tactics**

- **Find the right people**  
The HR division is in charge of staffing. But in order to hire the proper personnel, the management must communicate the vision and requirements to incoming staff.  
However, "right" does not necessarily imply "best." Avoid trying to find a jack of all crafts. Job descriptions that are too lengthy are ineffective. Decide on 2 or 3 pertinent main points, then start looking for potential sales representatives.

- **Avoid making generalized decisions**  
It's important to avoid oversimplification and excessive extrapolation while managing people or systems. When growth begins, what works during a crisis could not work at all, and vice versa. Be adaptable and a creative thinker.

- **Hire specialists**  
You will need to assign tasks to different people if your business expands. Multiple roles cannot be performed by one employee. Hire new pros as soon as you believe your current staff cannot handle the workload.

- **Contribute to the growth of each sales representative**   
Due to their expertise, character traits, luck, or any combination of the three at once, the best salesmen bring your business the most deals. However, if the team's imbalance increases quickly, you face numerous deferred risks:
- Internal tension
- Decline in motivation
- Unreplaceable workers.

> Here, the manager's job is to calm things down by figuring out why one sales agent performs so much better than the others. Finding growth areas for each team member is the goal here, not equating everyone.

---

## **Sales management tools**

Sales managers are looking for tools that can analyze data, identify patterns and areas for improvement, and offer insightful analysis. Tools that can help you learn more about your prospects, such as the optimal time to contact them or any common hobbies you can utilize to build rapport. Tools that create new sales management approaches or tools that enhance conventional sales management strategies. Then there are tools that just reduce tedium and save time.   
Some of the best sales management tools are:
- HubSpot
- SalesForce
- Pipedrive
- FreshSales
- Zoho CRM
- Clientell
- Bitrix24


Sales management tools are something all sales managers are looking for, something that can analyze data, identify patterns and areas for improvement, and offer insightful analysis. Here is a detailed analysis of the process and the tools which can help you through that.

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Inside sales management

# CRM and its components

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) combines business strategies, software, and processes that help businesses develop, retain, and acquire customers. When individuals mention CRM, they typically mean a CRM system, a tool that helps in productivity, sales management, contact management, and more.
CRM systems have had a lot of extra features added to them throughout time to increase their utility. Some of these features include the ability for managers to monitor performance and productivity based on data logged within the system, as well as the ability to automate various workflow processes, such as tasks, calendars, and alerts, depending on system capabilities. Other features include recording different customer interactions via email, phone, social media, and/or other channels.


## Here are some of the critical components of CRM

- **Marketing Automation:**   
At various stages of the lead generation lifecycle, CRM platforms with marketing automation features can automate repetitive operations to improve marketing efforts. For instance, when a sales prospect enters the system, it may email marketing content to convert a sales lead into a paying customer.

- **Sales automation:**   
Sales force automation tools keep track of customer interactions and automate some sales cycle tasks essential for following up on leads, acquiring new clients, and building a loyal customer base.

- **Customer Service:**   
Nearly all primary departments, including the sales department, marketing team, and management staff, are required to take action to increase their awareness of and comprehension of the wants and concerns of the customers. This unquestionably enables the business or company to provide clients with quick, accurate help and answers as well as meet their desires, which raises the dependability and confidence of the public in the company

- **Analytics:**   
Analytics is a crucial component of customer relationship management since it enables in-depth analysis of the data needed to determine the business's growth.
While many marketing strategies are developed to draw in more clients, data warehousing and analytical tools assist businesses in keeping clients through improved client relations and communication. 

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# How does a CRM work?

Client management platforms like CRMs, integrate all of the data from your customers and sales prospects in one location. It compiles all correspondence (form submissions, phone calls, emails, texts, and meetings), documents, quotes, purchases, and tasks connected to each lead and client. When it's time to clinch a deal or provide exceptional service, your entire team can access that information.   

A spreadsheet is fantastic if you track static information, such as name, email address, phone number, company name, website, or if you have fewer than 100 contacts. A spreadsheet falls short of a CRM when recording more complex, dynamic data like which emails a contact has opened, which pages they've viewed on your website or the date of their most recent purchase. When prospects and customers take action, your CRM automatically updates, whereas a spreadsheet loses its freshness when you stop manually adding to it.  

A set of features, including lead qualification, opportunity management, forecasting, and deal closure, are made available to sales and marketing teams by CRM software. Adhering to pre-established procedures for excellent customer care enables customer service teams to manage customer requests and automate service operations.  

CRM systems are stacked with tracking tools that keep track of multiple online interactions with customers. CRM also streamlines repetitive tasks and gives managers access to resources that let them monitor and assess the productivity and performance of their organizations. For instance, CRM software might alert you to tasks that must be finished by a specific date and time. You can program it to carry out pre-planned functions like making phone calls and sending emails. The CRM keeps track of everything you do, giving you time to develop more robust action plans to close any prospective sales. Some CRMs additionally have analytics features, enabling users to monitor the effectiveness of different marketing initiatives to produce leads and conversions.

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# How does CRM matter to your company?

The several spreadsheets, databases, and apps that many organizations slap together to maintain customer information are replaced by a CRM. The end effect is improved time management, organization, and client satisfaction.  
CRM system used to be only about sales but not anymore. Now it can benefit almost every department of the organization, from customer service to recruiting, marketing, and business development. Good CRM software improves the management of external relationships. 
CRM makes it much easier for users to collaborate on various processes and increase productivity because it provides easy access to data. Another compelling argument in favor of CRM is that it is appropriate for businesses of all sizes.  

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# Here's how CRM can help your business today and in the future

- **Identify and Categorize leads**   
A CRM system can help you easily and quickly identify and add new leads and accurately categorize them. Sales can prioritize opportunities that will close deals by focusing on the right leads, and marketing can identify leads that require more nurturing and prime them to become quality leads.
Sales and marketing can focus their attention and energy on the right clients if they have complete, accurate, and centralized information about them.

- **Rise in referrals from existing customers**   
Cross-selling and upselling opportunities become clear as you gain a better understanding of your customers, giving you the opportunity to win new business from existing customers. With increased visibility, you'll be able to provide better service to your customers. According to some studies, happy customers are more likely to become repeat customers, and repeat customers spend more — up to 33% more.



- **Impart engaging and unbeatable user experience through Hyper-personalization**   
Businesses must ensure that the customer defines each interaction to personalize the customer experience truly. 61% of millennials are willing to share personal information in exchange for a more personalized shopping experience, and this generation is reaping the benefits of hyper-personalization.
Hyper-personalization can refer to customizing products, offering specific products in specific locations based on trending, leveraging omnichannel data to personalize communications, or engaging in real-time engagement. Being treated as a person rather than a number is essential to 84 percent of customers. Hyper-meaningful personalization engagement can improve customer experience, combining user satisfaction with increased sales.

- **AI-powered CRMs can improve decision-making and productivity**   
Artificial intelligence can help businesses make smarter and faster decisions (AI). With 64% of customers expecting tailored engagement based on previous interactions, marketing AI can collate data from interactions to predict the messaging your customers are most likely to respond to. With 71% of customers using multiple channels to initiate and complete a single transaction, using AI to track customers across mediums and devices is critical for sales. Regarding operations, 68 percent of customers would instead use self-service channels for simple questions or issues, such as knowledge bases or customer portals.

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# Is CRM enough for your company?

- CRMs are not intended to assist with back-end operations such as manufacturing, warehousing, shipping, engineering, or finance. CRM tools, of course, cannot manage what they cannot see. As a result, if people work leads or deals outside of the system, it reduces the system's effectiveness for the entire team.
- Due to the blast (and discontinuity) of computerized channels today, CRMs are unequipped for dealing with every one of the basic information a cutting-edge business needs: action on your site and portable applications, email, pop-up messages, support tickets, installment frameworks, and that's just the beginning. 
- More regrettable still, CRM is usually purchased or worked to suit the necessities of a particular division (typically deals) instead of the whole organization. Too frequently, teams are forced to use whatever other software is included in the more extensive CRM suite (usually that software was glued on via acquisition).
- This rushed client service, and promotion applications come up short on usefulness and adaptability to adjust to an organization's novel prerequisites. When we consider top-tier apparatuses, we don't consider CRM suites.
- The truth is that there is no "single sheet of glass" for the whole organization. At the point when each group needs an alternate perspective on the hidden client record, a one-size-fits-all sheet of glass won't cut it.
- Companies in the digital economy must now consistently understand their customers to provide seamless, contextualized experiences across all channels. Businesses must deal with hundreds of customer touchpoints. However, in CRM-enabled organizations, sales teams must still manually enter customer information, resulting in human error, wasted working hours, and a fragmented or incomplete customer view. CRM software is also rigid, forcing IT to choose between purchasing a one-size-fits-all cloud suite and developing dozens of time-consuming, costly integrations.

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## *Challenges to CRM*

- Despite advancements in CRM technology, a CRM system without proper management can become little more than a glorified database in which customer information is stored. Data sets must be linked, distributed, and organized so that users can quickly access the information they require.
- Companies may struggle to achieve a unified view of their customers if their data sets are not linked and organized in a centralized dashboard or interface. When systems contain duplicate customer data or outdated information, problems arise. Due to long wait times during phone calls, improper handling of technical support cases, and other issues, these issues can decrease customer experience. CRM systems work best when businesses spend time cleaning up their existing customer data to eliminate duplicate and incomplete records before supplementing CRM data with information from outside sources.
> To conclude, the right CRM can help your business focus on customers and unite every organization unit on a shared goal to make your customer satisfied.


CRM systems gather customer information from various contact points between them and the business, such as the company's website, phone line, live chat, direct mail, marketing materials, and social media. CRM systems can also give staff workers who deal with consumers in-depth knowledge of their data, purchasing history, shopping preferences, and issues.

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A complete guide to CRM

Assume you're closing deals rapidly—you should be able to meet your monthly quota. But what about the following month? Consistency is essential in sales. You won't be able to predict your sales for tomorrow, let alone next month or quarter, if you don't have a framework for successful sales.


# What is Sales Cycle, and why is it important?

A sales cycle is the repeatable and tactical process that salespeople use to convert leads into customers. It also assist you in replicating your success or determining how to improve.

including everything from the first contact with the prospect to the contract signing. The length of sales cycles varies depending on the industry, business, and product, but the sales process generally follows a consistent pattern and aligns with several clearly defined sales cycle stages. In addition to defining each stage, it's critical to keep track of how much time each customer spends in each stage, as well as the overall length of the sales cycle. The timing of these events can reveal how efficient your revenue operations processes are and provide you with a benchmark against which you can compare yourself.

Businesses with a formal sales cycle process can grow their revenue by 18% more. For your salespeople team to succeed, you need clearly defined sales cycle stages and goals.

Assume you discover that your sales cycle is twice as long as that of your competitors (that is, it takes you twice as long to make a sale). To figure out why, examine each step of the sales process, from lead generation to objection handling. You may then review stage-by-stage conversion rates to see at which points leads are dropping off. If it appears that leads are leaving after you give a sales presentation, for example, it's time to hone your presentation skills or revise your message.

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# B2B v/s B2C Sales Cycle

You'll need to stay on top of your sales cycle whether you're selling to businesses or consumers—but each can look very different. B2C and B2B sales cycles necessitate varying amounts of time, product knowledge, and communication. Here are a few key distinctions between the two:

Duration of the decision-making process: When selling to individuals, the time between when it occurs to them to buy something and when they purchase your product can be quite short. Of course, this isn't always the case (especially if you're selling something expensive, like a car), but in many cases, buyers will pick your product off the shelf, walk out with it, and forget about it. That is not the case when selling to businesses. Before making a sale, the sales cycle may include several months of meetings, pitches, presentations, emailing back and forth, and persuading all stakeholders.

Number of stakeholders: When selling to a single consumer, you only need to persuade one person to buy your product or service. When selling to businesses, that number can quickly grow. For example, if you are selling software, you may need to persuade the CFO, the CEO, or any number of people on the finance or marketing team.

Available leads: B2C sales have far more potential leads than B2B sales because there are far more people than companies. Because there are fewer leads to choose from in a B2B context, learning about your audience—the specific types of businesses your product or service is meant to help—is even more important. You must emphasize how your product or service benefits each business, rather than just a hypothetical customer persona. To adequately answer all of the questions you pose, you may need to have in-depth knowledge of what you're selling.

Make sure to account for these differences in your sales cycle and budget for much longer lead times in B2B situations, or you may run out of cash.


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# Stages of Sales Cycle

There are typically **6 stages** of a sales cycle, but remember that not every sale or customer interaction will follow the same path.  

### **1. Prospecting**
It is also known as finding potential new customers, is the first stage of the sales cycle. During this stage, members of your sales and marketing teams will need to delve into the unique value proposition of the product or service you're selling and identify potential audiences who can benefit from your offerings. This stage may also include the results of lead generation. For example, perhaps you've received inquiries about your product or service via your website. These inquiries should be treated as leads.

### **2. Qualifying leads**
After you've identified your prospects, the next step is to contact them. The communication channel you select will be determined by the nature of your business or prospect. In this stage, you are not giving your full sales pitch but rather making contact with potential clients in the hopes of setting up a more formal meeting.

### **3. Pitching/Demo**
This is the most important stage of the sales cycle and requires the most planning. You should strive to present your goods or services in such a way that they solve a problem for the customer. Prepare to show how using your product will improve your customer's day-to-day operations and how your company does this better than anyone else.

> _Remember that you're also selling yourself during this presentation, so things like body language, mannerisms, and even your appearance can impact a sale._

### **4. Negotiation**
At this point in the sales cycle, your job is to manage and overcome any objections. Even the most enthusiastic prospects will have reservations or objections—the price is too high, the contract is too narrow, or the terms are unsuitable. Don't be afraid to ask for clarification on their objections. Is their hesitation due to a previous issue or interaction? Are they still carrying reservations from a failed business deal? Listen to what the client has to say patiently and let them know you understand their concerns. Reframe your pitch to address and overcome those concerns.
> Consider reframing the information in a shorter breakdowns if the price is causing concern. For example, if your software service costs around $200 per month, you can reposition it as "just over $6 per day." That's less than the price of a fancy nonfat extra-shot vanilla latte.

### **5. Closing Stage**
It's now time to close the deal. The closing stage of the sales cycle is when you either win or lose the sale. Remember that just because the prospect isn't ready to sign the deal after the first meeting doesn't mean it can't be done. A "yes" may require several meetings, email exchanges, or other contacts.

Once the sale is complete, ask the customer if they have any contacts who might be interested in your product. It's also an excellent time to outline and reinforce the customer journey to position yourself for successful contract renewals and expansion opportunities in the future.

### **6. Nurture Stage**
Even after the deal is closed, it is critical to invest time in your new customer. You will not only strengthen customer loyalty, but you will also increase the likelihood of an upsell or referral. Here are some ideas for nurturing the new relationship:

To ensure a smooth handoff, ensure a smooth onboarding process between account managers and new customers.
Speak with marketing to determine what content your new customers might find useful as they use the product or service, and send valuable resources such as how-to guides and demos.
Every one to three months, contact your customer and ask how you can assist them.

# Optimize your sales cycle
- ***Reduce work with little added value***
A typical salesperson spends only 36% of their time selling, and the rest is on administrative tasks. Your employees can easily outsource their service tasks and focus on sales to improve your sales cycle.
- ***Carry out follow-ups carefully***
Unfortunately, lead generation can be time-consuming. And as previously stated, most sales require follow-ups before a deal is closed. That is why your salespeople must develop the habit of perseverance in their activities.

- ***Ask for small commitments***
A foot-in-the-door technique can help you establish a stronger connection with your prospects. With this strategy, you ask for one small favor after another until they agree to close the deal.
Begin by asking for the clients' phone numbers when you contact them via email. After going through a product demonstration, request that the product be introduced to their purchasing team.
- ***Use Social Proof***
Case studies are ideal for providing social proof. Your employees should actively share them with their leads to move the sale forward. Case studies can also be used to counter your leads' objections.
For example, they may be concerned that your product will require extensive familiarization. Use case studies from other customers to demonstrate how quickly the tool can be implemented.

- ***Train Your Team***
Create all the sales documents necessary to guide your team through the sales cycle process. Keep an eye on each team member's metrics. Certain employees may experience difficulties at various stages of the sales cycle. If this is the case, provide them with additional resources and support from high-performing salespeople.

- ***Supplement a Sales Cycle with a Service Cycle***
To meet the growing importance of service and customer care, more and more businesses are beginning to incorporate a service cycle into their sales cycle. The cycles must be coordinated or synchronized in this case.




A complete sales cycle is extremely beneficial because it structures your processes so you always have a clear picture. It ensures planning security while also highlighting flaws in your planning. A sales cycle indicates the extent to which you have met your sales targets. And as a result, you always know how many leads are at which stage of your sales funnel.

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Sales cycle: A structured approach to close sales

Have you ever wondered what do companies do with the information that they survey during the logging in process?  Why does Spotify ask you for your recommendations or why do you need to fill out a short survey before unlocking the answer to your question on an educational platform? The sole purpose of these surveys and forms is to collect user information. Lets understand the need of data and its impact on the market.


# What Is Customer Data Management?


In order to provide large enterprises with quick and effective access to customer data, CDM embraces a variety of software or cloud computing technologies. Instead of being stored in different departments, surveys and data can be centralized and easily accessible throughout a corporation. Customer data management (CDM) includes gathering, analyzing, organizing, reporting, and disseminating customer data within a business. If companies want to keep and gain more customers, they must have a clear grasp of what those customers require. Effective CDM solutions give businesses the tools they need to respond quickly to consumer complaints and get fast feedback. As a result, customer satisfaction and retention might significantly increase.

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## **Ways of managing customer data?**

### **Protect the data**
With the advancement of technology, more and more of customers data is transmitted online. Businesses must protect this information from unauthorized parties.
According to an IBM report the average data breach cost USD 4.24 million in 2021.
Using platforms with robust security features can help you boost your cybersecurity. You should also make sure you have backup systems in place so that business can continue as usual in case of an emergency.

### **Gather information ethically**
Building relationships with your leads and clients requires a lot of trust. Being open and honest about your data gathering practices is the greatest approach to gain trust. At best, it is a breach of trust to keep them in the dark about the data you are gathering; at worst, it is unethical.
Here are a few ways to ethically gain customer data:
Keep the survey simple and to the point
Allow customers to choose whether or not to provide important data
Display the privacy policies before submission of the survey.


### **Do not ask for unnecessary data**
Making a strategic decision on what data to collect is necessary. You must have a reason for collecting the customer data. Decide what information you actually require otherwise the extra data just hinders and delays the decision-making process. Reducing redundant information is achieved by using a methodical, open approach to data acquisition. You can shorten the procedures if you simply collect the data that your company actually needs to close the sale. Lower expenses and an improvement to your overall finances can result from a more organised sales process.

### **Invest in CRM software**
These tools are made to gather and organize crucial information securely and efficiently. They can also offer data-based segmented customer insights, which are a terrific method to spot areas in need of improvement.
Benefits of CRM:
1. Your data is centralized in one location.
2. You can keep tabs on client interactions.
3.You have a unified view of the customer.

### **Centralize data storage**
Your marketing, sales, and customer care teams can only use their individual tools and resources, when data storage is fragmented. Having centralized data helps employees to offer seamless client support. This approach helps close the gap between the 55 percent of customers who believe organizations fall short of providing consistent cross-departmental contacts and the 62 percent of customers who demand these interactions.

### **Keep regular backups**
A data backup and recovery strategy are crucial. In case there is a problem with your system, you should keep a well secured backup of all your customer data. You can safeguard your clients and your company if you take care to choose a reliable fail-safe. A proper backup secures consumer data and establishes your company as a trustworthy partner.

### **Maintain/Update data**
Information that is outdated or inaccurate can damage client confidence and cost your company money. Make sure to routinely examine and eliminate unused information, duplicate records, and inactive contacts to maintain the quality of your data. Tools for automated data validation can aid in this process as well.

### **Train your team**
Big ideas on how to gather and safeguard customer data are meaningless if your team is unable to put them to use. Spend time on education and training so that your staff members are capable of handling and interpreting data. In the long run, your company benefits from developing a data-driven culture.
For instance, following standardized data entry methods can improve data quality, and being aware of potential security risks can assist assure data protection.

### **Work Within Specified Data Laws**
Due to the sensitive nature of data being managed, many industries, like healthcare and financial services, are subject to strict rules. It's crucial that you are aware of the rules that apply to your specific industry.
Make sure you provide an easy mechanism for website users to consent to supplying data, examine the data you have on them, and request that their data be removed, regardless of the unique rules that may apply to your organization.


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# Turning data into actionable commercial insights
 
What is the point of collection of this gigantic data if the company can’t find ways to incorporate these insights to gain competitive advantage. Here are some of the ways to tackle this problem:

Integrating information from several customer engagement tools to aid in salesperson coaching and direction
The information used by the modern selling engine to support selling decisions, priorities, and presentations comes from a variety of channels, systems, and touchpoints. In a number of revenue-enabling systems, such as CRM, Exchange (email and calendar), content management, marketing automation, websites, social media, and customer engagement management systems, the majority of firms are sitting on top of substantial volumes of customer engagement data. Businesses with a competitive advantage are those who can gather and combine customer data, turn it into commercial insights, and then automate cross-functional sales, marketing, and service workflows.

- ***Augmenting CRM profiles with customer behavior data***      
Instead of storing data in separate engagement, enablement, training, and marketing systems, sales enablement teams are using systems that can combine data from numerous touch points, channels, and media interactions into a system of record that stores a common customer profile. The finest of these solutions can automatically and instantly complement CRM systems by syncing customer engagement and seller activity data without data entry by reps, ensuring data accuracy and process consistency.
	 


- ***Giving real-time, directive advice to front-line sellers***   
The majority of firms continue to underuse analytics in front-line selling. Only half of sales representatives have access to the data they require. To prioritize and qualify leads, only a third of companies are employing analytics. AI makes sure crucial information for decision-making, coaching, and prioritizing swiftly reaches sellers at the edge of businesses who must act quickly and engage consumers with the appropriate messaging, solutions, and timing.



- ***Coaching at scale as a learning and development process***   
A real-time, closed-loop information flow can be produced by the ability to record sales interactions and compare them to selling outcomes and best practices through integration with CRM, training, and enablement systems. This enables a sales manager to actively oversee and coach a greater number of salespeople and be there for crucial conversational moments like typical objections, competitive mentions, or attrition signals.



- ***The loop of seller, performance, training and customer experience***    
Advanced analytics are being used by sales leaders to create new metrics that more truly reflect the level of teamwork, enthusiasm, and customer experience that teams are fostering within accounts. To track the behaviors and activities that define team success, they are using sales analytics solutions. They are also stepping up to cutting-edge data-driven customer engagement measures and incentives linked to opportunity potential, account health, and seller performance.


Customer data management (CDM) is the way in which businesses keep track of their customer information and survey their customer base in order to obtain feedback.