A fully integrated sales cycle involves a variety of tools and technologies working seamlessly together to create a smooth, efficient sales process that gives your teams the advantages they need to increase conversions and build customer loyalty. It helps them better understand their customers' needs and preferences, personalize their interactions, and, ultimately, close more deals. 

Let's explore the components of a fully integrated B2B sales cycle and how they each help you achieve better results.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tool

With a CRM solution, you can orchestrate the entire B2B sales process. This includes tracking your interactions with customers, managing your leads and contacts, coordinating with the extended team, developing/negotiating offers, and gaining insights into your sales performance.

According to Gartner, 80% of chief sales officers say a good sales tech stack is essential to achieving revenue goals.  With the CRM tool as the foundation, we’ll examine five tech innovations that move the needle for B2B sales.

Cloud-Based Solutions

As technology advances, cloud solutions have become increasingly popular for organizations seeking better solution management. The cloud provides flexibility to adapt to changes and grow and often relies on more robust cybersecurity measures for increased data protection.

One of the biggest challenges in B2B sales is keeping everyone on the same page. Cloud-based solutions provide a centralized platform for sales reps, managers, and support teams to collaborate and share information, enabling a more efficient sales process with faster response times and fewer errors.

Cloud-based solutions also allow an organization to be nimble from a people, process, and technology-change perspective. If something isn’t delivering results, it can be as simple as plugging in a new component without any disruption to the customer.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI is transforming B2B sales by predicting next best action, automating routine tasks, providing insights into customer behavior, and improving forecasting accuracy. With the help of AI, sales reps have a better understanding of where they are in the sales process and can segment leads based on their profitability and likelihood to close. This results in more accurate forecasting of win rates and setting of quotas.

AI can also identify underserved customers, generate personalized recommendations, and improve customer retention rates by identifying at-risk accounts. It can help managers improve sales team performance by setting realistic sales goals, incentivizing high performers, and identifying areas of improvement for each sales rep.

[Infographic] B2B Ecommerce Features That Generate ROI

A modern B2B eCommerce system drives sales while enabling your teams to do more in less time. It also enhances the shopping experience and boosts customer retention. Here are the elements you need to achieve all that.

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Workflow Automation

From an inward-facing perspective, this involves identifying routine tasks that can be automated — like data entry and lead qualification — and implementing the tools to handle them, freeing up your sales team to focus on high-value activities like prospecting and closing deals.

Customer-facing is where workflow automation has improved exponentially. Combined with the connectedness provided by cloud-based solutions, workflow automation is the engine that turns a clumsy customer experience full of stops and starts into a seamless one.

It's a good idea to regularly evaluate the effectiveness of your automation and enablement strategies and make necessary adjustments to ensure they align with your business goals and drive results. 

Omnichannel Capabilities

Today’s B2B buyers expect to be able to interact with your company across a variety of channels — email, phone, website, social media, chat, digital sales rooms, and more. According to McKinsey, B2B buyers regularly use at least 10 channels to interact with suppliers (up from 5 in 2016).

You meet these expectations by providing a consistent and seamless customer experience wherever your customers spend their time — keeping in mind that might include places like LinkedIn and YouTube. Leverage your data to find out where that is, then position your brand accordingly.

Customer-Directed Journeys

Finally, a customer-directed journey involves tailoring your sales process to meet your customers' needs and preferences. Mapping out your customers’ journey and identifying the key touchpoints where they interact with your company lets you create a more personalized, effective sales process.

Best practices for designing a seamless customer journey include:

• Identifying your target customers’ true goals and putting their needs first
• Understanding the psychology behind how your customers browse, search for, and select products
• Creating a feedback loop to help you gather and implement customer suggestions, in real-time.

The Bottom Line

Seamless integration of your tools and technologies gives your sales teams the advantages they need to acquire new customers and retain your existing ones. Our Sales & Marketing Technology specialists can help you make sure you’re getting the most out of your investments and providing the right support.