How Prime 8 Accelerates the Sales Cycle for Big Tech Companies
Field teams build and nurture long-term relationships with leads across the country (and, often, the globe), bringing in consistent revenue and ensuring that new customers become loyal ones.
Because they’re out in the field instead of located at company headquarters, improving and enhancing your field teams’ efforts can be a difficult process. But Prime 8 has developed a program over time to help companies get more from their field and it’s proven successful time and again.
We recently helped an enterprise company enable their global sales teams to penetrate new areas of their market, with enormous success. After implementing our methods and strategies, the client now closes new business more quickly and maintains a happy, educated customer base thanks to their better-supported field teams.
Here’s our proven formula for optimizing performance within your field sales teams – without adding to your individual agents’ workloads.
Improve Bi-Directional Communication
In order to figure out how to better support your field teams, you’ll need to understand their needs and pain points. What are the gaps in their knowledge when it comes to explaining products or services to prospects? Where are they losing prospects in the cycle, and what might be causing that churn?
Having systems and tools in place to collect data and gather honest feedback from your field agents is essential to assessing what elements of their process can be improved and strategizing that improvement.
Establishing communication norms between corporate and the field as well as reliable channels of communication are required at a minimum. Give the field the right mechanism to reach timely support at HQ when they need it. Have SLAs for response times. Set clear expectations for reporting and provide easy tools to provide status. Do you need monthly reports or will you rely on virtual Quarterly Business Reviews with field leaders?
Don’t just wait for your reps to reach out when they have an issue or to volunteer feedback. You should also be checking in regularly with your field teams to identify any critical sales blocks and additional resources needed to help accelerate deals. Communication to the field should be on a predictable cadence and in a predictable format and should take local culture and language into account.
Annual or bi-annual virtual meetings where corporate, territory and product leaders share inspiration, business results and direction offer the field opportunities to receive strategy and training 'from the horse's mouth' and opportunities to connect and feel a part of the larger company.
Sales resources are another way you communicate with the field - having clear, up-to-date, comprehensive materials to support their job function. Sales playbooks designed for particular sales motions or personas, presentation decks targeting specific customer pain points, and detailed email templates and call scripts can all help your field teams deliver better results. Consider localizing these materials - for both language and culture - to accommodate differences between regions.
Anticipate the Needs of Your Field
In addition to asking your field reps what support they need from you, anticipate their needs ahead of time. Waiting until a sales team comes to you with an issue puts you at a disadvantage for solving it. The prospect may already be lost, which is potential revenue out the window, and you’ll be scrambling to make improvements quickly before more potential customers experience the same friction.
Prime 8 has helped clients establish systems that monitor sales cycles and identify issues before they become problems. There are many tools that can intelligently monitor processes, sales wins, training consumption, downloads of sales resources and highlight trouble spots. They can even be designed to predict problems.
Anticipating your reps’ needs lets you get out ahead of any potential issues, which saves your organization money and enables your agents to do their jobs more smoothly and effectively.
Empower Teams with Data
An effective sales framework should include built-in process documentation to ensure your sales teams are capturing their own best practices and creating repeatable wins. Ideally, you’ll want to implement technology that automates this tracking and includes an AI functionality to identify best practices and share them with your teams.
In addition to helping you track sales best practices, data collection and monitoring can also give your field teams a leg up on the competition by arming them with detailed qualified lead insights and customer information, which will enable them to target their sales pitch more effectively.
Further, data visualizations and dashboards encourage information to flow freely across territorial boundaries and create transparency at all levels of the organization.
Scale to Meet Demand
Demand in the field is an ever-moving target, increasing or decreasing based on the market as a whole, additions to your product or service offerings, and various other factors that can be difficult to prepare for ahead of time.
But just because demand can be unpredictable doesn’t mean you can’t scale up or down to meet it – you just have to plan for the unplannable, which means keeping a portion of your field teams flexible.
The best way to scale up in a hurry is to outsource elements of your sales team, including bringing in contract agents if necessary (this is where having detailed training and support materials comes in extra handy, as it helps you get external reps up and running that much faster).
Just because field sales teams are out of physical range doesn’t mean they can’t be improved or supported just as well as in-house teams. As an essential player in your company’s pursuit of your overall revenue goals, your field teams deserve your attention and support – and they’ll return your investment with higher sales numbers.
If your field teams could use some additional support and improvement, Prime 8 is here for you!
Prime 8 Consulting takes a programmatic approach to helping companies develop profitable sales strategies and tactical growth plans. When building a solution for you, our holistic framework considers all aspects of sales and the sale cycle, including communication practices, process efficiency, operational optimization, business intelligence to find new opportunities, and sales enablement materials and learning programs to build high performing sales teams. We’d love to hear more about your needs. Reach out to our revenue experts today for a free consultation.
