Let’s not sugar-coat it: Times are tough. Across industries, across enterprise and small business, revenue teams are shrinking. And those smaller teams are being asked to hit the same targets without the resources they need to succeed.
Over the past year, the brunt of cuts have hit SDR and BDR roles, leaving AEs, AMs, and even CSMs to pick up the work of prospecting, qualification, and upsell. Sales leaders, in turn, are forced to do more complex coaching to remold highly effective closers into equally effective full-cycle revenue masters.
And it’s not just a question of being tasked to do more with less. Ironically, smaller revenue teams are often more complicated to manage. Without the luxury of specialization and the clearly defined process that comes with it, conversations can get muddled and deals can be lost. As people pick up new responsibilities, the lines between roles can get blurry, making it harder to know who to turn to for the information you need. Where there used to be smoothly functioning, transparent pods, there are now opaque silos.
But what’s the way forward? How can sales leaders codify best practices, improve team collaboration, and make it more comfortable for sellers to stretch into their expanded roles?
In the following sections, we explain why a revenue workflow platform is the critical “just in time” solution that will get your team working from a single pane of glass — eliminating administrative overhead and context switching.
Get the best from every player with a revenue workflow platform
One of the advantages of workflow technology is its capacity to slash the administrative burden that bogs things down. This is a double benefit: it frees people up to focus on doing the work that matters, and it makes sure they have what they need to do that work more effectively.
For a revenue workflow platform like Salesloft, that means fulfilling different needs across different roles throughout the org. For example:
- Sales Leaders can effortlessly track the performance of their teams, down to individual sellers or even individual deals. That makes it so much easier to coach sellers to success, increase team productivity, and make more informed decisions and forecasts.
- Revenue Operations (RevOps) get a 360° view of performance at every level. With one complete platform for pipeline generation, managing and closing deals, customer growth, and effective coaching, it’s so much easier to address areas of risk and hit team targets.
- Account Execs (AEs) and Account Managers (AMs) can track multi-threaded conversations across channels, so they always have the complete context for every conversation. That lets them meet buyers where they are, from creation to close, so they can meet and beat quota.
- Customer Success Managers (CSMs) get the tools they need to deliver coordinated, personalized engagement across channels. This makes it easier to scale onboarding journeys, customer education, advocacy opportunities, and adoption plays in a way that delights customers and fosters loyalty.
- SDRs and BDRs get AI-powered task lists that map real-time buyer signals to personalized actions, all prioritized to hit prospects with the right message at the just right moment. Baked-in analytics show what’s working and what isn’t, making it easy to build on prior successes.
On average, sales teams use 10 tools to move from opportunity to close. No wonder the process feels fragmented and inefficient.
The solution, then, is not just layering another piece of technology on top of an already bloated tech stack. It’s finding something that can unite or even replace existing tools to give your team the performance they need.
It takes a full team to win deals
Sure, putting everyone in the revenue team on a workflow platform will help them be more effective and efficient. But putting your entire org on the same platform yields benefits over and above individual performance.
A sale is not a one-time — or even a one-team — thing. Even a small-scale deal involves a rep, a CSM, and RevOps. And that’s just the sell side. On the buy side, there can be multiple layers of admins, users, approvers, and legal and compliance experts, each with their own unique needs and concerns. For large deals, the C-Suite may get involved on both sides. That adds up to dozens of calls and side conversations, each carrying an insight that could be critical to the success of the deal.
But how can you get to those insights? Tracking down information could involve emailing or Slacking five different people, crossing your fingers that they get back to you before your next touchpoint with the customer. And that’s just for the questions you know to ask. What about all the times you didn’t even know you should have reached out to a colleague?
“What we know about sales cycles via our data is that it’s great to have AMs on the platform, because they’re getting all the benefits of Salesloft. But that alone is not how deals are won,” explains Katie Krippner, Global VP of Client Sales at Salesloft. “How was the lead uncovered? How was that deal found? How was that prospect initiated into the sales cycle? Once you have all eyes on this from a complete revenue standpoint, then you’re able to influence the deal faster and drive revenue faster — especially in Q4, when time to value is everything.”
With every call, conversation, and activity logged in the same place, everyone involved in the sale has full visibility. And with full visibility, they can be more effective at managing the deal, combating objections before they’re raised, and making sure the customer has a seamless, delightful experience from sale to renewal and beyond.
Better visibility leads to increased productivity and serious cost savings
Even in the very best of times, there are points of friction and fracture where critical information can be lost. Territories change. Technologies come and go. Sellers forget to log things in the CRM. Individual reps are promoted or moved to new teams, taking all their institutional knowledge with them.
And without access to that background, sellers can fumble. Sales leaders struggle to coach appropriately. Customers get a frustrating, fragmented experience. And the entire company pays the price in a million tiny inefficiencies that add up to major losses.
Or, as Krippner puts it: “Visibility is the number one thing. If we’re doing things manually, we have no visibility into the deal cycle, we have no visibility into how deals are trending — which leads us to no visibility into the forecast, which basically puts us in a position where we have no control over the outcome. But if you have Salesloft, everything changes. You look at a deal and see the engagement and the warning signs before they become an issue.”
And that’s the key. You can have a high-velocity go-to-market organization that acts nimbly, as long as they’re all on the same page. When everyone has access to all the information they need, everyone is prepared to make pivotal decisions on the fly.
Limited resources don’t have to limit what you and your team can achieve. According to recent research, using Salesloft results in a 10% increase in productivity, which, in real dollars, represents $1.4 million in time savings. All it takes is bringing everyone together to share information, and you can move faster, close more business, and get more out of every deal.
But don’t take our word for it! Reach out today to see Salesloft’s comprehensive platform in action.
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