Guided selling and opportunity predictive analytics are the two most efficient and effective techniques for sales enablement that organizations can adopt, according to recent research from Gartner.
Lacking internal performance benchmarks, business leaders often find it difficult to quantify the business value of sales enablement techniques and prioritize which ones to undertake. Accordingly, Gartner created the “Sales Efficiency and Effectiveness Matrix”, shown below. This matrix is designed to help business and IT leaders develop a prioritized sales capability road map that ties back to corporate objectives.
Efficiency — this capability delivers repeatable processes with consistently improving time savings.
Effectiveness — this capability drives processes that indirectly or directly improve revenue growth or cost savings.
Your organization improves efficiency through process optimization, to do things in an appropriate manner faster. Ways to measure effectiveness include opportunity close rates, pipeline growth, revenue growth, margin improvement and cost savings.
About Predictive Opportunity Analytics and Guided Selling
Predictive analytics solutions support sales by putting sophisticated machine-learning capabilities into the hands of salespeople, and require large datasets to be most effective. Opportunity scoring provides a constantly updated metric showing the likelihood of an opportunity becoming a closed deal together with the forecasted deal value, while identifying positive or negative flags for a deal to close by the forecast date.
Software from vendors such as DxContinuum which are specialists in sales predictive analytics offer prescriptive models that suggest actions a particular salesperson or sales manager should take to increase the likelihood of deal closure. This is where predictive opportunity scoring becomes an integral part of guided selling.
In DxContinuum dashboards, sales and marketing teams see which programs and activities have the highest impact on deal closure. Individual sales reps and their managers see opportunity pipeline charts detailing which borderline deals are currently forecast not to close but with some additional attention can be brought across the finish line. Equally important, sales reps and their managers see which specific activities or programs will be the most effective and efficient to sign those borderline deals by the forecast close date.
This software wouldn't be efficient if it required specialized training or months to deploy. These DxContinuum self-service dashboards appear as desktop and mobile browser tabs in your CRM software of choice, including Salesforce or Oracle Sales Cloud, so there is no new software to learn or new data to input.
The result is that by adopting DxContinuum predictive analytics applications as extensions of your Salesforce.com or Oracle Sales Cloud, you maximize both the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales team with the two techniques that will offer the most value -- opportunity lead scoring and guided selling.
To Learn More
View the on-demand video demo about DxContinuum predictive opportunity scoring, and contact us so we can talk about how to best meet your sales team’s specific needs. If you are a Gartner client, you may want to request an inquiry call with the research authors Todd Berkowitz and Tad Travis to talk about Gartner's Sales Efficiency and Effectiveness Matrix and ask about how your sales team may benefit from the top techniques by vendors such as DxContinuum.
