Enable Growth Through Technology

Effective Technology Use for Growth

Organizations can leverage technology and tools to streamline the sales process and empower their sales teams to work more efficiently and effectively. Sales enablement technology includes tools, techniques and associated strategies to improve sales performance and ultimately increase revenue.

Alexander Group research shows the most common tools that sales operations teams manage and deploy are CRM/SFA (90%), Sales Results Reporting (77%), Business Intelligence (64%) and Account Planning/Management (58%). However, each organization must determine whether they have the right tools to support efficiency and effectiveness.

For example, CRM is the most common enablement tool. An effective customer relationship management (CRM) system is critical to an organization’s ability to deliver customer solutions. In many ways, well-designed and deployed solutions act as the connective tissue linking customers with lead generation, sales, operations, strategists, optimizers and other roles involved in today’s sales process.

Alexander Group can lead you through assessing your current technology and tools and their usage and developing a go-forward plan to enable your sales force better. For example, a typical process for investing in a new CRM system will follow the following steps:

• Designate a champion: The project’s champion needs to own the design and execution of an evolving technology strategy that represents the interests of your business and the users. In addition, this person should engage and rally other business leaders to balance strategic, functional, technical and budget requirements to achieve the strategic vision.
• Identify & engage stakeholders: Next, determine the key stakeholders by understanding who intends to use the tools and for what, then nominate individuals to represent one or more stakeholder groups. These members will provide strategic and front-line perspectives for their group and support implementing and adopting the final solution.
• Establish guiding principles: The champion and stakeholder group representatives can now set the strategic vision for tools by creating a prioritized list of guiding principles, including items such as solutions sale orientation, customer-/user-centric design, compatibility with existing systems, implementation timing and cost.
• Create roles & develop a macro plan: Once the guiding principles are established, detail the various roles that will be involved in this process, including the day-to-day project manager, who will be working with the champion to conduct milestone reviews and ultimately approve the final solution–as well as the team that will design and eventually tests the system.
• Develop business requirements & vendor/partner selection criteria: The next step to ensure that the right foundation for technology is in place is to detail the various business requirements and priority levels. The project manager can then translate the document into the vendor/partner selection criteria to help objectively navigate the evaluation and selection of a technology platform.

There are many benefits to investing in sales enablement technology, including better productivity, collaboration, data management and customer satisfaction. Alexander Group will serve as your partner in building a better future through technology.