Akoonu Pipeline Reviews and Forecasting

Akoonu Pipeline Reviews and Forecasting

Blog: Thoughts, Tips and Tricks

Stop Forcing Sales Reps and Start Helping Them

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It’s a mandate from above.
They get paid a salary to do things like this.
If it’s not in Salesforce it doesn’t exist…..

Sure, these things might be true, but how much luck are you having forcing sales reps to enter data in Salesforce?  How much success are you having with getting them to log into third party tools? If your B2B sales org is anything like most, you’re either experiencing high friction or not having much success getting reps to enter data. Or—possibly worse—you’re successfully forcing compliance and now your reps are wasting valuable selling time.

With the average enterprise rep managing multiple deals with 7 or more buyers with long, complex journeys, it’s no wonder they are not motivated to do what they consider busy work.

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In a perfect world, good data hygiene can coexist with value. There’s two critical components to making this possible:

  1. Make it easy and automate as much as possible. You can earn a lot of trust with your reps by making as many things easy or automatic for them as possible. You can’t replace your humans with AI, but you can use technology make a lot of things easier for them. Make sure it only takes two clicks instead of 10 to update a field you need updated to reduce the burden. Also, reps don’t want to do work twice. Scheduling a meeting and then logging the task can feel like double duty.  Emailing customers and remembering to hit the “copy to CRM” feature is laborious to reps.  Aim your tech stack on solving tiresome updating and eliminating duplicative work.
  2. Make what isn’t automated irreplaceably helpful.  You’ve automated everything possible and still want those call notes? Create an environment where data science turns those call notes and related buyer signals into something that helps reps see beyond what they already know. 

That’s what we’re doing at Akoonu. Our customers are able to leverage the data they already have (even incomplete CRM data) to automatically log and evaluate activity from buyers, reps and marketing efforts to understand how current deals are progressing. Process-driven recommendations in the context of each individual deal help reps and their managers to understand where deals are and how to move them forward. And help prevent unpleasant surprises.

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“With Akoonu for Sales, my reps will spend less time on data entry and stay focused on selling to the right people in our accounts” says Shirin Oshidari, VP of Sales and Services at StreetLight Data. “By integrating buyer signals from email, calendar and marketing activities into visual opportunity maps that track the progress of buyers through their buyers journey and our sales process, my new reps can onboard faster and my seasoned reps can be more productive.”

It’s time to stop forcing and start inspiring. Learn more about buyer-aware opportunity management in Akoonu, or check us out on the Salesforce AppExchange.