Insights and Innovations: Your Resource for Industry Knowledge

To serve the global community of B2B sales and marketing leaders who are committed to the quantification of the value of their solutions, ValueCore (formerly known as ValueCore) and Intellicap are partnering together to deliver end-to-end value consulting services and a SaaS platform for value management.

The challenges of chasing leads and building pipelines in today’s business environment sometimes make me wonder why I ever chose sales as a career—we all follow up on company-generated leads and contact existing customers. Sometimes we even resort to cold calls. For each call, we carefully and conscientiously record the date, time, person we tried to contact, and the outcome of the call in our company CRM system. A quick review confirms our feeling that, all too often, we’ve only managed to connect with a voice-activated system and/or voice mail. It can get so bad that the human contact of having an administrative assistant screen our calls can be gratifying. The common theme is the damned difficult time we have getting access to decision makers.

These days there’s a tool for everything. The question becomes, how do you determine which tools are the ones you should be paying attention to? Should you be using internally facing tools to automate your sales processes, or customer-facing tools to help close deals faster? The trick is finding the right balance. Sales reps in some of the more ambitious organizations have access to about 10 to 15 tools in total. Beware: internally facing tools can be great at driving productivity and helping you identify leads (e.g. LinkedIn!), but if you don’t have access to a handful of best-of-breed customer-facing tools, your sales may be lagging. So, how do you determine which customer-facing tool is the right one for closing deals, faster? Here are a few things to consider when looking for the right fit for your needs: