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Sales Weekly Roundup: Enablement, Prospecting Rates & Sales Growth

Jamie Shanks
Jamie Shanks

sales-roundup-7.jpgWelcome to your sales weekly roundup for November 27 – December 3. This week we’ve got collaboration in enablement, increasing email prospecting rates, finding growth amid disruption and trends in 2017.

Collaboration in Enablement Part 2: The Impact on Performance

Last week, Tamara Schenks shared several insights on how successful enablement teams approach cross-functional collaboration. This week Schenks released part 2—on how collaboration affects performance. Both posts are based on findings from the CSO Insights 2016 Sales Enablement Optimization Study. Essentially, the more formal your cross-functional collaboration approach, the better your enablement outcomes. Highlights:

  • You can achieve 40% better enablement outcomes with a formal collaboration approach as compared to an informal approach.

  • Only in a formal cross-functional collaboration approach is quota attainment better than average: Quota attainment of 60% compared to the average quota attainment of 55.8% is a difference of 4.2 percentage points, and an improvement of 7.5%.

  • Informal collaboration led to 52.6% quota attainment, which is 3.2 percentage points below the average quota attainment, and a decline of 5.7%.

How I Increased My Email Prospecting Response Rate by 1400%

Pritesh Vora, Co-Founder of Uninstall.io, a mobile-app uninstall insights company, shows how to optimize horrible emails into to ones that hit impressive response-rate numbers. The idea here is hyper-personalize to increase open and response rates. These are his “7 Winning Principles of Sales Prospecting Emails.”

  • Personalize

  • Research

  • Visualize Structure

  • Unique Subject Line

  • Straight To The Point

  • Include a CTA

  • Focus on Benefits/Value

Finding Sales Growth Amid Disruption

Homayoun Hatami, a senior partner who leads the EMEA Marketing and Sales practices at McKinsey & Company, guest blogs for Salesforce UK about how companies can capture growth by riding the wave of disruption. Hatami is also an co-author of Sales Growth. What you need to know:

  • Think three moves ahead. More than half of the fast-growing companies the team interviewed for the book reportedly look one year out, and 10% look more than three years out. These companies create their own luck by investing resources (time, people and positions) in first-mover advantage.

  • Understand digital channels’ threats and opportunities. As many as one million B2B salespeople could lose their jobs to self-service digital commerce by 2020. Best-in-class companies understand these kinds of threats, but also see the enormous opportunities in discovering new ways to serve customers.

  • Embrace analytics and artificial intelligence. Companies that make extensive use of customer analytics have profit improvements that are 126 percent higher than their competitors. In other words, the secret is out: companies who aren’t using AI and automating lead management to free up the time of salespeople are missing a massive opportunity.

Forward-Looking Trends for 2017 and Beyond

Manager Director at Sales Benchmark Index Aaron Bartels chronicles key trends affecting the global economy in the coming year, and how the world’s largest sales forces should respond.

  • Economic Shifts. “By 2025, experts predict China will be home for more large companies than the United States or Europe. In addition, predictions indicate that by 2025, half of the companies with revenues over $1 billion will be headquartered in today’s emerging and developing markets.” If you think your sales strategy needs to adapt to anticipate these changes, check out page 260 of How To Make Your Number in 2017.

  • Technology Innovation. “It took 50 years for the telephone to penetrate half of American homes. Facebook signed up 6 million users in its first year, and grew to 600 million users only five years later. Entrepreneurs and startups frequently enjoy technical advantages over large, established businesses. That is a huge risk to the world’s largest sales forces.”

  • Global Connections. “Faster connections affect everymarket from finance to trade, information and beyond. Instead of having a few lines of communication between the East and West, the global trade market is now a complex, sprawling web. Asia is becoming the world’s largest trading region… All of these developments are unlocking tremendous opportunities. At the same time, pervasive connections are creating a complex system with unexpected volatility.”

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