Your CRM Contact Data is the Key to Drive Sales Efficiency. Here’s How.
Your CRM Contact Data is the Key to Drive Sales Efficiency. Here’s How. Sales Activity Capture Driving sales efficiency remains the ultimate goal for most businesses. Going after the right deals, building long-lasting relationships with multiple buyers in an account is key. This evolving landscape demands sales teams to be agile, strategic, and, most importantly, armed with the right data. And at the heart of this data-driven revolution lies B2B contact data – a crucial element in the arsenal of sales teams striving for success. Having access to contact data can open several doors for sales teams. Organizations already have a wealth of contact data. Unfortunately, they are trapped across various applications and tools in siloed Go-to-market (GTM) systems. Think of crucial data trapped in phone calls, emails, meetings, calendars and countless other tools that your reps use. The CRM, intended as the central hub for this information, often becomes a repository of incomplete, inaccurate, or rapidly decaying data. Manual updates are sporadic, and the consequence is a compromised ability to engage effectively with prospects. The result? Critical data about prospects and buyers never make it to the CRM. And your sales team ends up targeting the wrong people and chasing the wrong deals. That’s the opposite of efficiency. Merely having a vast pool of contact information is not enough. Tracking the dynamic relationship between sales teams and prospects is table stakes. Every interaction – phone calls, demos, emails, and notes – needs to be meticulously recorded. And shared in a unified manner for sales and marketing teams to be on a common page. Enter AI-led Contact Data Automation The solution lies in automating contact data capture into CRMs and deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) for real-time actionable insights. This not only streamlines the process but also ensures that the data is consistently accurate. AI provides a unified, comprehensive view of prospects, enabling sales teams to deliver an exceptional buyer experience at every stage of the journey. Benefits of AI-led Contact Data Automation Introducing AI-led automation into your contact data strategy can yield several benefits across the buyer’s journey. Let’s look at the top ones: 1. Clean, Complete, and Up-to-Date CRM Data AI can automate the process of collecting, cleaning, and updating contact data, ensuring that your CRM is always equipped with accurate and current information. This improves the reliability of your data and allows for more effective communication with leads and customers. 2. Automated Manual Tasks AI can take care of time-consuming tasks like data entry, freeing up valuable time for your sales team. This allows them to focus on more important tasks, such as building relationships with leads and closing deals. 3. Actionable Insights AI can analyze contact data and provide actionable insights about leads and buyer behavior. This can help sales teams understand their target audience better, tailor their sales strategies, and improve the effectiveness of their campaigns. 4. Predictive Analytics AI can use historical data to anticipate future trends and behaviors. This allows sales teams to stay ahead of the competition by identifying potential opportunities and risks in advance. 5. Unified View of Deals and Activities AI can provide both sales and marketing teams with a unified view of data, allowing for better collaboration and alignment. This ensures that both teams are working with consistent and accurate data, leading to more effective campaigns and sales strategies. Use Cases for Sales Efficiency From the first point of contact to nurturing long-term customer relationships. AI-led contact data automation can address various gaps in the sales process. And real-time insights into deal status and buyer behavior can become the foundation for driving sales efficiency. Let’s look at some of our top use cases that contact automation can drive for sales: 1. Contact-Level Engagement Insights for Effective Multithreading Pushing deals from creation to closed-won requires strategically engaging every member of the buying committee. Quite often, sales leaders do not have visibility into who their sales reps are engaging in every deal. They rely on a download from the deal owners during the pipeline review calls. But almost always, most deal owners simply talk about champion and/or economic buyer engagement. It’s rare to discuss buying committee coverage, which can have 10-30 members involved if we consider enterprise deals. What makes this worse is that the opportunities in CRM would also only show 2-4 contacts. Sales leaders and managers continue to be in the dark. They don’t know what they don’t know. By automating contact data capture, sales leaders instantly get visibility into buying committees. Combining this with good Salesforce reporting, they can gain visibility into the depth and breadth of engagement with each member of the buying committee. Such insights enable sales leaders to guide deal owners to execute more effectively. While this is the age of AI, the truth remains that people buy from people, especially in high-touch B2B sales. This mandates reliable visibility into the strength of buyer-seller, or rather buying committee-seller relationships. Each buying committee member is like a door. All doors lead to the same destination, in this case, that destination is ‘closed-won’. But the path to closed-won can vary behind the door. Some doors can open long paths, some short. So every door must be opened because you never know which door has a shorter and quicker path to achieving a closed-won deal. 2. Sales-Marketing Harmony for Account-Based GTM If you’re a sales leader or an operations leader planning an account-based GTM strategy, ask your marketing counterparts if they have unprecedented access to clean and complete contact data. There’s a very high chance that their response will be ‘limited’. And don’t be surprised or offended if they blame your sales reps for not adding contacts to the CRM. Your marketing teams are forced to rely on third-party data vendors for contact data, when in reality, there’s an abundance of those in your sales reps inboxes and calendars. The result? Irrelevant marketing campaigns due to poor audience targeting. This is where sales reps start blaming the marketing team for poor air-cover.