Crafting an excellent elevator pitch is an art. You need to be able to convey your message in an easy-to-understand way, and you need to be able to do it quickly to keep your audience engaged. It isn’t as easy as listing off benefits or reeling off a scripted sales pitch like Steve Jobs, who mastered product launches. 

You’ll have to build a connection and get people genuinely interested in what you have to say. If this all sounds pretty challenging, don’t worry. We’ve put together this complete guide to help you learn the ropes. I’ll also share 10 examples that you can use for inspiration. 

Plus, I’ll share some actionable tips and best practices to help you get started writing your own pitches.

How long should an elevator pitch be?

Let’s start by addressing the most asked question. How long should an elevator pitch be?

A general best practice is to aim for a 30-second elevator pitch, which is a rough estimate of how long an elevator ride may take, but this isn’t a rule. It all depends on who you’re pitching to and in what context, and it’s easier to begin practising through networking events, virtual networking, or even job searching (if you’re looking for a new job). 

For instance, if you’re pitching to a customer in a B2C setting, you’ll need to be snappy to keep them paying attention. However, in a B2B negotiation where a business is actively seeking services like yours, you likely have some leeway to expand on your messaging. 

That said, you should make your pitch no longer than it needs to be and maintain eye contact. The longer you spend explaining your idea, the higher the chance your audience will clock out and lose interest.

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What are the benefits of writing an elevator pitch?

Here are four compelling components of an elevator speech that should help you create an engaging elevator pitch.

• Make a strong first impression: Elevator pitches catch the audience’s attention quickly. They’re ideal for making a good first impression and showcasing personal branding.
• Increases your confidence: Learning how to concisely communicate your value proposition will improve your communication skills, and develop your confidence to speak about your ideas. 
• Shows your professionalism: An expert elevator pitch shows that you understand the value of your company and also respect your audience’s time. This demonstrates your professionalism. 
• Opens doors to new opportunities: Ultimately, an elevator pitch is an impactful way to get people on board with your idea. Do it right, and it can offer you greater opportunities.

How to write an elevator pitch?

Let’s get into the reason you’re here. Here’s everything you need to consider when crafting an elevator pitch. 

Note that we’ve provided one possible structure in this section, but there are many opportunities for variety. In the next section, we’ll also provide plenty of pitch examples to inspire you.
Experiencing writer’s block? Generative AI can help you draft and write a pitch for your audience in less time. You can then refine the AI content to ensure it’s a good fit for your product or service.

Step 1: Introduce yourself

State your name, what you do, and, if applicable, your company’s name and industry. This is the bare-bones context your audience will need to piece together your pitch. It will also make you more approachable and relatable.

You’ll need to tailor your introduction to the context. For investment pitches and business negotiations, keep it formal. For networking, pitching and social gatherings, you can afford to be more casual and open. 

You can even start with a joke to set the tone and keep things light. Just be sure to keep everything brief at this stage. You need to get to your primary point as quickly as possible.

Step 2: Convey your primary point

What’s your key message? Get your main point across quickly to prevent your audience from losing interest. 

We recommend using a problem-solution structure at this stage. Simply put, present a problem your audience is having. Then, explain how your business is the solution to that problem. For example:

“Small businesses in {{insert country name}} often struggle to build an online presence due to a lack of SEO knowledge. Our platform offers an all-in-one set of business tools for owners to build, optimise, and deploy SEO campaigns with no technical expertise.”

This is short, sweet, and to the point. The more clearly and concisely you can convey how you are the solution, the easier it is to keep a potential client engaged.

Step 3: Demonstrate your value

This is the kicker that sets you apart from other businesses or individuals. Why should your audience choose you over the competition? Offer a sentence or two that lays your value out in an easy-to-grasp way. Refining our example in step two, here’s what we came up with:

“Small businesses in {{insert country name}} often struggle to build an online presence due to a lack of SEO expertise. Our platform offers an all-in-one toolkit for small business owners to build, optimise, and deploy SEO campaigns with no technical expertise. Our fixed price includes free masterclasses from instructors, who will walk you through SEO best practices tailored to your business.”

In that extra sentence, you’ve explained to your audience why you’re different from every other SEO platform. Now you’re making your pitch interesting.

Step 4: End with an interesting finish

Now, it’s time to explain why your value proposition matters. This is your chance to turn curiosity into serious interest.

There are a few approaches to achieving this. You can tailor your pitch to the target audience, provide a personal story, or end with a real-world example. That said, a simple and focused approach is to end with a statistic that proves you get results. Let’s head back to our pitch and round it off with a stat. 

“Small businesses in Australia often struggle to build an online presence due to a lack of SEO expertise. Our platform offers an all-in-one toolkit for small business owners to build, optimise, develop keyword strategies, and deploy SEO campaigns with no technical expertise. Our fixed price includes free masterclasses from instructors who will walk you through SEO best practices tailored to your business. Our customers experience an average of 50% growth in organic traffic within their first 12 months on our platform.”

Step 5: Provide an action item

Depending on the context, you may need to finish up with an action item — something that convinces your audience to make a decision, ponder something, or act. 

The simplest approach is to use contact information and a call to action (CTA). Saying ‘contact me,’ ‘schedule a tour,’ or ‘watch a demo,’ for instance, offers the next step for your audience to take. You should also reiterate the benefit of your service to hammer the point home. 

Alternatively, you could choose to end with a question that provokes thought. For instance, you might ask how the audience intends to solve the problem they’re facing. 

Ultimately, the goal here is to make the audience want to find out more. That’s the ticket to landing that second conversation.

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Elevator pitch template and examples for businesses

When starting to create your own elevator pitch, the best place to start is with some examples for inspiration. 

Elevator pitches are versatile, and I’ve aimed to reflect that in these examples. Let’s start with professional settings and then move to more personal scenarios afterwards.

Example 1: A startup founder presenting their innovative idea to investors

Investors and leadership teams have heard it all before, so you need to get to the point and list the problem you’re solving and the solution you’re presenting. You should also include a stat to show why your business idea makes sense. 

“We’re {{insert company name}}, and we want to address the fear that consumers have when growing their own fresh produce at home. Our automated indoor garden contains smart sensors that adjust light, water, and nutrient levels automatically for every crop’s needs. As our product is a self-contained ecosystem, all crops can grow indoors regardless of climate. Our initial customers have reported that 97% of their planted crops succeeded. We’re the first of our kind and are ready to push our product to a global market. We’d love to have you on board for the next step of our journey.”

Example 2: A business representative delivering a sales pitch

With a sales pitch to customers, you need to directly address the pain points your consumers are facing. Demonstrate empathy and show you understand the problem. 

Prioritise benefits over features when delivering your product overview to make sure your pitch has a clear CTA, as prospects need to know what to do next. This will help to make sure that you’re selling your product right. For example:

“75% of men say they struggle to keep their hairstyle in the right shape throughout the day. It’s annoying and embarrassing when a gust of wind can ruin the look you’ve spent 20 minutes perfecting. At {{insert company name}}, we’re putting an end to that frustration. Our spray provides a rock-solid hold without weighing your hair down, meaning no stray hairs and no more wind ruining your day. And unlike other hairsprays, it contains only beneficial ingredients, which will leave your hair looking and feeling healthier. We can honestly say it’s the best hairspray on the market, and 82% of our customers agree. Here’s one of my business cards.”

Example 3: A recent graduate highlighting their skills and experience

Recent graduates should focus on presenting their skills, professional experiences, and knowledge. They should also demonstrate their enthusiasm for the industry and, where possible, reference a specific example that proves they’re a good fit for the organisation. 

“Hi, I’m {{inset name}}, a recent graduate with a bachelor’s degree in marketing. I’ve spent the last year shadowing at {{insert country name’s}} premier marketing firm and helped the brand decrease its cost-per-lead by 27%. I’m seeking a position that will allow me to put my experience to work and reach my career goals. You’ll find my cover letter attached for your review.”

Example 4: A specialist providing a personal summary in a job interview

The dreaded ‘tell me about yourself question.’ As a job seeker with experience, you have more leeway to reference niche skills. As with all interview questions, you should lean into specific examples to prove your expertise to the potential employer. ‘Tell me about yourself,’ questions are open-ended questions that are aimed to get a response and test what you’re thinking off the top of your head.

“I’m {{insert name}}, a specialist in sustainability who has helped hundreds of businesses fine-tune their environmental initiatives to better align with customer values. I’m proud to say I helped reduce my last company’s carbon footprint by 35% in only a year. Now, I’d like to continue my career with a company that shares my ambitions for the environment. I’m confident I can add value to your organisation based on my recent successes in several green projects. If you’re ready to make a difference for our planet and your customers, I’m the professional that can get you there.”

Example 5: A seasoned professional pitching their services to a business

A good protocol here is to explain a problem a business is or may be having and then present yourself as the solution. This is especially powerful if you can back up your claim with your own research and data. 

“I noticed your competitors are outperforming your website when it comes to organic growth. I performed a competitor analysis of your top-performing keywords and found your most direct Australia competitor ranks for over 1000 additional words and phrases on Google. This presents a huge opportunity for your growth. I forecast we can increase organic traffic by 35% over the next 12 months, driving an additional 1,500 sales for you this year. Is this something you’d be interested in? If so, reach out, and I can talk you through my recommendations.”

30-second elevator pitch examples using different styles

Elevator pitches don’t have to be formulaic. There are plenty of opportunities to switch things up and inject your personality into your speech. Here are five elevator pitch examples with a twist that’ll help you win a new potential client.

Example 6: A humorous pitch

“Ever had a nightmare about your to-do list? I remember waking up in a cold sweat with a pencil in my hand to the sound of every email notification. Never again. I decided to build an AI-powered platform that would automatically optimise my calendar and prioritise the most important tasks. I’ve finally managed to get some of that mythical free time everyone keeps mentioning. Oh, and my nightmares are gone, too. If you want more sleep this year, too, I can show you a demo of how it works.”

Example 7: Playing on human emotions

“I struggled for years to prevent burnout on my team. I wanted to keep everyone happy at work without compromising on deadlines. And that’s a really hard balance to find sometimes. After finding nothing worthwhile on the market, I spent a few months building an incentive platform that would reward my employees with tangible benefits for good performance. I’m not talking about gift cards, either. I could instantly use positive client feedback to provide cash bonuses for my employees. I’ve seen a huge uptick in customer retention, but just as importantly, I’ve also managed to keep my employees secure and satisfied. I’m really proud of that.

Example 8: Leaning into statistics

“Are you aware that 72% of remote workers in {{country}} report experiencing loneliness since the pandemic? A further 35% say remote working has actively made socialising more difficult. And 22% have left a remote job simply due to the isolation. I created my platform to connect remote workers locally and fix this loneliness epidemic. We schedule local meetups to connect these individuals, and so far, we’ve helped 22,350 people across the country meet new friends for life through our initiative.”

Example 9: Drill the point home with repetition

“Did you know that people have an attention span of around 8 seconds? Just like I only have a few more seconds before you lose interest in my pitch, you, as a business, only have 8 seconds to capture attention in your blogs. That’s 8 seconds for a consumer to decide if they’re on board or jumping ship. No wonder most businesses get little to no conversions from their digital marketing. Fortunately, I can help with that.”

Example 10: Ask questions

“Ever worried that your team isn’t doing enough to manage customer relationships? I think every manager has experienced this at some point. But here’s something interesting. When we switched to customer relationship management software, we found that retention increased by 50%. It wasn’t the staff at all — it was a lack of organisation that was letting us down. Who knew? Have you ever tried something similar?”

Have these 10 elevator pitch templates helped you? If so, consider adding them to your project management software as a task for improvement or to your Slack Lists for easy access

12 effective elevator pitch tips

Let’s round things up with 12 fast tips to create and deliver an outstanding elevator speech.

• Edit and refine: Once you’ve written your pitch, see if you can trim it down. The more concisely you can convey your point, the better. 
• Make it relatable: Incorporate anecdotes, humour, or a customer story to make your pitch more authentic and memorable. 
• Practise: Speak your written pitch until you feel comfortable and confident. 
• Speak out loud: Remember to speak your written pitch to check for any language that doesn’t flow as you present. 
• Be friendly: The real way to win over your audience is to keep it light. Make eye contact, smile, and maintain open body language. 
• Consider your audience: Adapt your speech to your audience. Based on the context of your situation, make it more formal or casual. 
• Reduce the jargon: Don’t rely on technical jargon. You need your audience to understand your pitch. Make it easy to grasp. 
• Recording yourself: Optionally, you can also record yourself to see how your speech sounds to others. 
• Speak slowly: When it comes time to deliver the speech, slow down your speaking. It’ll make you look less nervous. 
• Don’t overwhelm: Remember, your goal is simply to secure a follow-up. Stick to the key points, and don’t overwhelm your audience.
• Listen: Remember that an elevator pitch needs to be a conversation. Listen to your audience and respond accordingly.
• Be passionate: If you want to convince your audience, you need to show them why they should care. Let your passion shine through.

Are you looking for real visual examples? You could also watch past episodes of Shark Tank Australia, Shark Tank India, or Shark Tank Global to learn from those who have pitched angel investors and VCs on national TV and practice how to create an effective elevator pitch.

Summing up

Elevator speeches can sometimes feel a bit daunting. As a content marketer, salesperson, or business owner, you’ll have so much to say to an audience that may or may not be interested. And you don’t have much time to do it. That’s why it’s so important to create the perfect elevator pitch and practise your speech to get it right. 

And when you do make the perfect elevator pitch, you’ll make a memorable first impression, foster better customer relationships, create buzz around your idea, and set yourself up for success. If you still feel too shy to give a pitch, then consider networking events that’ll allow you to practice selling your product.

Need help with a sales team pitch? Let Einstein AI provide insights to elevate your sales conversations, helping you tailor pitches that resonate better with your target audience. Start making each interaction count with Salesforce Einstein AI.

The post Elevator Pitch: What is it? 10 Standout Examples appeared first on Salesforce.

Sales incentives can be a valuable tool to get your team fired up, but they’re not one size fits all. Figuring out the best sales incentives structure to motivate your reps can make a big difference in some cases — helping them come to work energised and eager to get results.

Below, we’ll cover different types of sales incentives to consider, how they can motivate your team, and best practices for implementing an effective sales incentive program that drives results.

What you’ll learn:

• What are sales incentives?
• Types of sales incentives
• How sales incentives can help motivate your sales team
• 10 sales incentives that actually work
• Best practices for implementing sales incentives
• Measuring the impact of sales incentives on performance

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What are sales incentives?

Sales incentives are rewards sales reps receive on top of their base compensation for exceptional performance. This typically means meeting or exceeding sales targets. Sales incentives most commonly come in the form of monetary rewards such as performance-based bonuses, but they can include any type of reward designed to motivate salespeople toward a specific result.

Types of sales incentives

There are five common types of sales incentives. Here’s a quick rundown:

1. Role-specific sales incentives: Performance goals vary depending on the role, and role-specific incentives motivate reps to exceed the base goals set for them. For example, a sales development rep (SDR) may earn incentives for surpassing their booked meetings goal for the month, while an account executive may earn incentives for closing more sales than their monthly quota. This can help keep top performers motivated even after they achieve their original goal.
2. Split sales incentives: With a split incentive structure, multiple reps working on the same deal earn an incentive reward that is split among them — either evenly or based on predefined criteria related to their roles or contributions. That ensures everyone involved gets rewarded for their part, and reps are encouraged to work together rather than compete against each other.
3. Presales incentives: Most sales require multiple steps before a deal is closed. Presales incentives reward the reps involved in these steps and can be a valuable way to keep reps motivated throughout longer sales cycles.
4. Omnichannel sales incentives: The Salesforce State of Sales report found that reps interact with prospects across an average of 10 different channels. Omnichannel incentives involve tracking all those interactions to ensure every rep who contributes to a sale is rewarded.
5. Analytics-based sales incentives: These incentives are based on your sales analytics. They reward specific, data-backed goals based on what your data reveals to be the most valuable behaviours for closing deals.

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How sales incentives can help motivate your sales team

Sales incentives help you reinforce the behaviours you want employees to prioritise. They set you up for mutual success: Your company achieves higher sales and profits, while your reps get an extra treat (most often money, but not always).

I’ve found that many people who are drawn to sales are intrinsically motivated to hit high sales numbers because they’re competitive and like to win. Adding sales incentives to the mix gives them an additional reason to give it their all. For sales reps who aren’t as driven by competition, incentives give them something tangible to work toward. Some people love the game, but everybody likes the prospect of extra money or rewards.

Plus, incentive compensation can improve employee satisfaction. Getting a valuable reward because you earned it feels good. It’s a constructive way to show your team you value their hard work. Employee turnover is expensive. Sales incentives are a vital tool to help you keep your top performers and avoid the cost and labor of recruiting and onboarding.

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10 sales incentives that actually work

Money is the most obvious type of sales compensation to consider. And in my opinion, it’s the best type of incentive to motivate salespeople. It’s clear, straightforward, and universally popular.

But you can also shake up your incentive program by adding more creative ideas to the mix. Here are some to consider:

1. Sales contests

Using sales contests as an incentive can be a powerful way to leverage the competitive spirit. That could mean posting a leaderboard that’s updated regularly to show who’s closing the most deals. That may be enough to motivate some of your reps. But you can sweeten the deal by offering the winner a prize — monetary or otherwise — at the end of the month or quarter.

2. Recognitions and awards

Public recognition for big achievements can make a huge difference for some. You can provide bragging rights for reps with titles like “salesperson of the month,” or hosting an annual ceremony where high achievers are recognised and given awards. You could also set up a “President’s Club,” so employees have a prestigious honour to work toward that comes with special benefits, like an annual trip.

3: Stock options

Stock options are a type of monetary compensation that give employees more reason to be invested in the company’s success. They’re a good cash alternative if you want to reward employees in a way that encourages them to care about the long-term success of the business.

4: Extra paid time off

Employees who work hard deserve time for rest and leisure. Offering additional paid vacation time in exchange for meeting performance targets can be a strong motivator.

5: Team rewards:

Selling isn’t a solitary activity, and many successful sales are the result of a team effort. Rewarding your team with a group activity such as a retreat, a nice dinner out, or an escape room experience can double as a reward and a way to encourage further bonding outside the office.

6: All-expense-paid vacations

Vacation packages are a game show standard for a reason — it’s an exciting prize to get. For big wins, offering reps a free trip to a coveted location, or travel vouchers that let them choose their destination, can be an attractive offer for many.

7: Event tickets

Whether it’s season tickets to their favourite team’s games or a hard-to-snag ticket to a concert or play, helping your top sales reps enjoy a cultural activity that matters to them can be a good way to boost their motivation.

8: Gift cards

Like cash, gift cards give sales reps a way to choose how they spend their reward. Something like a Visa or Mastercard gift card can be used almost anywhere, while gift cards from widely used retailers can be put toward a need or an indulgent purchase they might not buy for themselves otherwise.

9: Hot-ticket tech gifts

If you’re going to provide a specific item as a sales incentive, you should choose something that’s high value and universally useful. In today’s world, it’s hard to go wrong with a tech item like a new tablet, laptop, or smartwatch. You can buy a specific item to offer employees or give them a choice of gadgets (which could be valuable for those loyal to specific tech brands).

10: Executive access

Offering top performers a chance to enjoy a nice dinner or event with the company’s executives can be a powerful motivator. It gives them a chance to connect with the company’s top stakeholders, receive positive recognition, and provide direct feedback to those with the most power to implement change.

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Best practices for implementing sales incentives

To get the best results from a sales incentive program, the right design and implementation approach is important. Some of the best advice I can offer is:

Keep it simple

At organisations I’ve worked with, I’ve seen a common tendency to make incentive plans complicated — to add more rules and different ways for reps to make money. That can backfire. If it’s hard for a salesperson to understand how the sales incentives work, it will be hard for them to know what to prioritise.

Seek to craft a straightforward incentive program that people can easily grasp. Write out your commission plan on paper. How many steps does it have? How many caveats are there? Minimise unnecessary complications around reward structures.

A good rule of thumb is to consider whether someone could work out their commission rate with just a calculator. If not, it’s probably too complicated.

Listen to your team

Those with the best insights into what will effectively motivate your sales team are the people on it. Actively solicit their input when developing or updating your incentive program. Understanding what they would go the extra mile for can make a huge difference when it comes to results. So, ask your team what types of rewards matter most to them and what incentive structures feel motivating.

For example, some people thrive on competition, but it’s not for everyone. Switch up your incentive structure periodically to appeal to different preferences. Don’t always force your team into competition with one another for bonuses. Encourage a collaborative approach — like split sales incentives or team activity rewards — for those who enjoy teamwork.

I recommend setting up a feedback roundtable to hear reps’ ideas and suggestions. You can make it clear that you may not be able to use every recommendation they offer, but knowing what matters to them will help you develop a program they’ll respond to.

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Use the right tools

Tracking earnings and making sure team members receive the sales compensation they’re owed can get complicated. But the right technology can make incentive compensation management much easier and give employees the peace of mind that they’re getting the incentives they’ve earned.

Well-designed sales incentive software can make many aspects of running a sales incentive program much easier. Some features that make a difference include:

• Automation and workflows: Let your tech handle some of the work for you by automating even the most intricate commission structures and nuances like accelerators, tiers, triggers, and more.
• In-app comments and notifications: Manage questions, comments, and disputes efficiently, all within a single platform. Encourage cross-org collaboration with real-time comments and notifications for quicker alignment.
• Customised rep statements: Align organisational priorities to seller motivations. Plus, make it easy for your reps to see commission statements, monitor their progress against goals, and track potential earnings.
• Automated expense reporting: Maintain compliance under ASC 606 and IFRS 15 with automated, audit-ready expense reports. Manage exceptions, fringe benefits, varied commission types, and more.
• Integrations: A tool that connects with other products like your customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), human capital management (HCM), and payroll software will help you create a real-time, single source of truth for all commission needs.

My preferred incentives tool is Salesforce Spiff. For salespeople, it can work as a go-to source for reviewing how the reward structure works, the target achievements to aim for, and the commission rates associated with each one. For admins and sales teams alike, it’s easy to use and helps you track the number of performance targets achieved and payouts completed.

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Communicate the plan to your team

Your sales reps must understand the incentive plan for it to have an impact. Communicate how it works clearly, and figure out how best to distribute the plan details to your team so they all see it and know where to go to review it as needed. If you have a central knowledge base the whole team uses, such as a CRM, that’s a good place to put it.

While I recommend keeping your plan simple, if you end up developing a more complex program, it’s especially important to make the details of the plan easy to find. Your reps will want to refer to it to remember which goals to focus on. Their ability to understand how the incentives work is crucial for getting the results you want.

Be transparent

The last thing you want is for salespeople to question whether they’re receiving the commissions they’ve earned. I once heard from a sales rep who was convinced they’d never been paid the correct bonus amount. If any of your reps feel that way — even if it’s not accurate — they’re unlikely to remain motivated by the incentives being promised. Worse, they’re more likely to defect for the first job opportunity to come along.

The best way to avoid that is to keep the plan transparent. Make it easy for salespeople to track the specific performance targets they’ve achieved and commissions they’ve earned. And strive to keep all the data in your sales tool clean and accurate, so the sales team knows they can rely on that information.

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Measuring the impact of sales incentives on performance

While beneficial motivators, sales incentives come at a cost — an important factor to consider when planning your sales budget. Establish the key performance indicators (KPIs) you want to track for your sales incentive program to ensure you successfully align incentives with your main business goals.

Some metrics that can help you measure the success of your program include:

• Overall sales: Track your total sales to determine whether incentives are contributing to an overall increase in sales over a set period.
• Number of new customers: Determine how many of those sales are from new customers to help measure whether your incentive program is driving conversions.
• Number of returning customers: Also pay attention to how many existing customers stuck around during the incentive period, so you can gauge how well your sales team is building and nurturing relationships.
• Incentive program costs vs. ROI: To ensure you don’t overspend on your program relative to what it helps bring in, keep track of how much you spend, as well as how many sales you close and how much revenue you generate during a set period.
• Employee turnover rate: In addition to increasing sales, incentives are about rewarding employees for their hard work and successes. Tracking your employee turnover rate before and after implementing an incentive program can help you compare its impact on employee satisfaction.
• Employee satisfaction rate: Also look for ways to gauge overall sales team satisfaction. This can be difficult to measure effectively, and you may be tempted to stop at running employee satisfaction surveys. Surveys can be a good temperature check, but they work best when paired with anecdotal impressions. Spend time with your sales team, listen to their feedback, and pay attention to how they act at work to help round out the picture.

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Sales incentives can encourage results and improve morale

The most important takeaway I can impress upon anyone designing a sales incentive program is this: Give your team the information they need to make the decisions you want. And when in doubt, keep it simple. The easier your program is to understand, the more likely salespeople are to get how it works and act accordingly. With the right plan and the right tools to implement it effectively, you can grow your sales and improve job satisfaction for your sales team at the same time.

The post Top 10 Sales Incentives That Actually Work appeared first on Salesforce.

To answer that question, Dreamforce offered a firsthand look at Salesforce’s latest AI-powered innovations — including Agentforce, a new collection of autonomous agents that fulfill the promise of AI and human collaboration — and how these, alongside community, power sales success.

Here are the highlights:

Highlight #1: AI is table stakes for sales productivity

As our State of Sales report revealed, AI is everywhere. Roughly four in five sellers use it, and among those that do, 83% saw revenue growth last year. 

The question is: Why? The same report revealed some key benefits, echoed by Salesblazers during this year’s Dreamforce: Improved data quality and accuracy, reduced manual work, streamlined customer research, lead prioritisation, improved forecasting accuracy, and personalisation for customers. 

We saw this underscored during the Sales Cloud keynote, which showed the time-saving work of Sales AI action, highlighting big-win deal opportunities, automatically transcribing and analysing sales call, and updating deal records with the latest customer information — all inside Sales Cloud. (This is only a taste of what AI is already doing. Take a deeper dive into Sales Cloud’s AI features here.)

Of course, the benefits of AI can only be realised when the data feeding AI models is accurate and complete. Which brings us to…

Highlight #2: Integrated data and simplified tech are the way forward

While there were many AI innovations revealed at Dreamforce this year, the preface was clear: The only way to deliver accurate, impactful AI outputs is to make sure your data is clean and consolidated. 

That starts with an integrated tech stack. When you bring the functionality you need onto a single platform, like the Salesforce platform, you bring data into one place. That means whatever AI features you roll out will have access to the most complete customer information available. Clean, complete data = high-quality AI outputs.

Even better, this consolidation makes your sellers’ lives so much easier. No more swivel-chairing or tab juggling.

We chatted with some top-tier sales leaders at Dreamforce about this critical piece of AI use. They shared examples of consolidation in action, and how it’s improved seller performance. Watch a recording here.

Highlight #3: Humans + autonomous agents = the new formula for growth

First, we saw predictive AI take the scene. Sales forecasters were giddy, watching artificial intelligence comb through heaps of data to find trends and tell us the future. Then, generative AI launched, creating emails from simple prompts and call scripts from simple outlines. 

Now, it’s time for autonomous AI. 

Welcome, Agentforce. This Salesforce-wide innovation, revealed at the main Dreamforce keynote, is a collection of autonomous Agents across the Customer 360 platform. 

What are these fully customisable Agents used for? Think of them in two distinct categories: 

• “Complete a job for me” (Autonomous): Autonomous Agents can be set up to perform pipeline-driving tasks entirely independent of a human salesperson, like qualifying leads and sending sales outreach messages.
• “Help me complete a job” (Assistive): Agents can also serve as valuable companions throughout the day-to-day grind of working in sales. An Agent can train salespeople with personalised sales coaching, or answer technical questions on the fly directly in the flow of work.

For sellers, two Sales Agents were unveiled that will improve productivity dramatically:

Agentforce SDR. This prospecting Agent can qualify inbound leads using criteria, permissions, and guardrails set sales teams. For example, a seller might ask Agentforce SDR to send along only those leads with a potential deal value of $10k with a likelihood of closing in the next quarter. Agentforce SDR engages prospects via SMS, email, or their preferred channel and asks questions to qualify them according to preset criteria. Once qualified, leads are sent to sellers to continue the conversation and close.

Agentforce Sales Coach. We’ve heard it many times (including from our State of Sales report respondents): Managers don’t have enough time to coach their reps on sales calls, and sellers don’t have enough time to practice calls with their peers. In fact, roleplaying is one of the least commonly used enablement tactics. Agentforce Sales Coach to the rescue. This new autonomous Agent can roleplay sales calls with reps, providing personalised and objective feedback. How does it make these roleplays realistic? By pulling real-life objections, questions, and conversation details from past deals in Sales Cloud.

These are just a few examples of the fully customisable AI Agents available within the Salesforce platform – and they represent just a small fraction of the many unique Sales AI use cases to come in the near future. (Watch the Sales Cloud keynote for more on the Sales Agents available now.)

Highlight #4: Community will always be the beating heart of sales 

Is AI the future of sales? Yes. But not without people.

In the spring of 2023, we launched the Salesblazer Community. We knew — from conversations with customers, prospects, and sellers we admire — that community (+ technology) was needed to help sales professionals learn, grow, and succeed. 

So we delivered. We created and curated the best sales content anywhere. We offered opportunities to network and connect — from in-person gatherings at World Tours and Dreamforce, to virtual Coffee Chats and AMAs. We delivered sneak peeks of product innovations. And we listened while you shared your vision for this fast-growing community.

In a relatively short time, we’ve grown to almost 10,000 members, representing every conceivable sales role (from SDR to CRO), countless industries, and now, countries across the globe. (Just announced at Dreamforce: We’re adding new channels in our Slack Community for our French and German #Salesblazers.)

We even had the chance to give the much-deserved spotlight to leading #Salesblazers at the Sales Cloud keynote this Dreamforce — applauding THNKS, Veeam, and Accenture for being models of #Salesblazer values.

The best part? We’re just getting started. More innovation, more engagement, more fun is coming. If you’re not a part of the Community yet, you can learn more here and join. (Bonus: You can see photos and videos of #Salesblazers favourite moments at Dreamforce — and all of our events.)

Dreamforce TL;DR: AI + humans is the future of sales

AI was, perhaps not surprisingly, the biggest talking point at this year’s star-studded Dreamforce. But the AI revolution isn’t just about new technology. It’s about how humans, empowered by technology, can grow predictably, sustainably, and safely. That’s the future — and Salesforce is leading the way.

Boost sales productivity with trusted AI

See how AI tools from Sales Cloud can take on everyday tasks and point you to the best action for every deal.

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The post 4 Key Sales Takeaways from Dreamforce 2024, the Biggest AI Event of the Year appeared first on Salesforce.

Challenger Sales got its name because it emphasises challenging your customer’s thinking. Read on to learn how this methodology can benefit your sales team.

What you’ll learn

• What is the Challenger Sales methodology?
• How does Challenger Sales work?
• Challenger Sales example
• Key differences between Challenger Sales and other techniques
• The five steps in Challenger Selling
• Tips for training your team to use Challenger Selling
• How to stay ahead with Challenger Sales

What trends drive sales productivity today?

We believe that business is the greatest platform Get the State of Sales Report to discover AI and productivity insights from 5,500 sales professionals.

Get the free report

What is the Challenger Sales methodology?

The Challenger Sales methodology emphasises challenging a customer or prospect’s thinking and assumptions. The goal is to bring new insights and value to their business so they can make informed decisions. Above all, Challenger Selling focuses on teaching your customers rather than building relationships with them. The seller is positioned as an expert in their field, and they immediately begin sales interactions by showing the customer what their problem is instead of asking questions to uncover the problem.

How does Challenger Sales work?

The Challenger Sales methodology, first introduced in the book The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, stems from research on the attributes, skills, and competencies of successful sellers. The research identified five profiles based on clusters of seller behaviours:

• The Problem Solver: Detail-oriented and reliably responds to customers.
• The Lone Wolf: Self-assured, independent, and follows their instincts.
• The Hard Worker: Self-motivated and will always go the extra mile.
• The Relationship Builder: Builds strong customer advocates and gets along with everyone.
• The Challenger: Pushes the customer and understands their business.

Among these profiles, the Challenger emerged as the one with the best-performing salespeople. The behaviours the Challenger excels at — teaching, tailoring, and taking control — form the basis of the challenger sales model.

• Teach: A Challenger Sales rep possesses a deep understanding of the buyer’s industry. They use this expertise to offer unique perspectives and insights that the buyer had not yet considered and gets them to think differently.
• Tailor: They adapt their message to align with the buyer’s specific challenges, goals, or value drivers, ensuring relevance and resonance.
• Take control: A challenger sales rep uses their comfort with discussing money and applying pressure to guide a buyer toward closing the deal.

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Challenger Sales example

I once sold a session replay product that reproduces a user’s online experience. Despite many similar products in the market, ours stood out for its unique ability to capture everything that happens on a website rather than sampling only parts of it. The feature helped uncover any website issues that could cause the user to have a negative online experience.

For example, my customer had problems on their website’s checkout page that were causing issues with payments. However, they were not aware of the issues because their tool did not sample this section of the site.

With my high level of expertise in session replay, I taught buyers the importance of analysing the entirety of their website instead of just samples. I used the methodology to challenge my buyers to think differently about how this information was presented to company stakeholders and communicated in internal meetings. As a matter of fact, I tailored my message to the buyers’ specific needs instead of only highlighting product features and capabilities. By taking control of the conversations, I was able to compel the buyer to take action based on where they were to get where they wanted to be.

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Key differences between Challenger Sales and other techniques

Challenger Sales techniques are best suited for complex sales scenarios rather than simple transactional selling, especially in business-to-business (B2B) environments where there are longer sales cycles and multiple decision-makers.

In my experience, buyers in a Challenger Sales situation typically already know of the existing problems within their business. However, they suspect there are other issues they don’t know about. They want to grasp what they are missing. The buyer appreciates it when a seller can use their expertise to teach them about their unknown problems and provide a new way of looking at how to solve them.

A Challenger seller starts the sales call by immediately educating the buyer. They are telling, not asking, about the buyer’s problems. This is different from other sales techniques where you’d begin by engaging in relationship-building chatter, such as inquiring about the buyer’s weekend plans.

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The five steps in Challenger Selling

The Challenger Sales methodology is easier to adopt for large sales teams because it allows sales reps to personalise their interactions with buyers without requiring changes to the team structure. These are the five key steps to the Challenger Sales approach for a seller:

1. The warm-up

You begin by sharing knowledge of the prospect’s challenges and problems. Consequently, the goal is to build credibility with the prospect and show that you understand their needs.

2. The reframe

Next, you take the prospect’s challenge and reframe it in a way they may not have considered. You are shifting the prospect’s perception from what they initially thought was their problem to something much bigger, scarier, and more problematic.

3. The emotional impact

Now you tell a relatable story about a customer or company that faced similar problems but didn’t solve them. This helps the prospect see themselves in the story and realise the potential consequences of continuing on their current path.

4. The value proposition

At this stage, you still haven’t mentioned your product as the solution. Instead, you emphasise your product’s value proposition to show the prospect how it could solve their problem.

5. Your solution

In the final step, the prospect is convinced of the need for a solution. Now, you present your product as the perfect answer to the problem.

The five Challenger Sales steps should form a wave of positive highs and negative lows for the prospect. The wave starts at the neutral position of the warm-up, rises to the high of the reframe, lowers to the emotional impact, returns to the neutral value proposition, and ends on the high note of your solution.

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Tips for training your team to use Challenger Selling

Sellers often begin sales conversations talking about their product or service because it’s what makes them comfortable. That’s why the warm-up and the reframe are hard to train a sales team to do, as these steps do not focus on the product.

One way to get your sales team comfortable with the Challenger Selling approach is to consider managing the content of your sales presentation. A traditional sales deck typically includes details about who you are, what you do, and how your product can benefit the prospect. But a Challenger Sales deck only introduces the reframe and includes no mention of your company or product. The deck enables your team to get closer to having the type of meaningful conversations with a prospect that are essential for Challenger Sales.

Another strategy is to train your team to be knowledgeable about the prospect’s business so they can confidently educate as part of the warm-up. These are some ways to research the prospect and their business and industry:

• Job descriptions: Read the job description of the person you are selling to. Consider why they were hired and what they would most likely be fired for.
• Product review sites: Examine the products your prospect is purchasing and why they like them. This helps determine the problems they are trying to solve with these products.
• Industry conferences: Investigate the major conferences your prospect attends. Analyse the agenda and sessions to identify the topics that attract attendees and get an idea of what the industry is focused on and cares about.
• Customer interviews: Some companies do not allow their sellers to contact a prospect’s customers directly. A workaround could be to see whether your marketing or product team could make the call instead. The goal with this research is to find out more about the buyer’s end user.
• Focus on the prospect’s personal values: These might include being liked by their team or becoming influential within the company. Personal values tie in with Step 3, where you create the emotional impact by guiding the prospect to envision themselves in a familiar story. When you do this effectively, you increase the likelihood that your buyer will be an internal champion of change within their business.

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How to stay ahead with Challenger Sales

Reps spend only 28% of their week actually selling, according to the Salesforce State of Sales report. The rest of the time is spent on critical but tedious tasks such as researching prospects (9.3%) and manually entering customer and sales information (8.8%).

To be more efficient and effective with their time, challenger sales reps use sales software tools such as:

• Customer relationship management (CRM) system: A CRM manages a seller’s interactions with customers and prospects. The system unifies customer data and tracks progress across the long sales cycle that is typical in challenger sales. You can unify all sales activities such as emails, phone calls, social touches, and tasks into a single to-do list.
• AI: Use artificial intelligence to automate the prospect and account research that are critical for the challenger sales warm-up. You can summarise leads and opportunities to identify the likelihood of closing a deal and pinpoint which competitors are involved. Pull in real-time data to understand relevant industry updates happening in the news.
• Conversation insights: Have your CRM create a playlist collection of your challenger sellers’ successful calls so your other reps can replicate what works. Highlight the challenger sales best practices and skills in the calls to coach sellers on how to teach, tailor, and take control with the model.
• Onboarding: Need to quickly get new sales reps up to speed on your challenger sales approach? Gather your winning sales strategies in a library of pre-built, customisable templates for sales processes such as account planning, mutual close planning, customer briefings, and more. Use the library as a resource to onboard and train reps so the entire team works from a standardised set of materials that can be tailored to the customers’ challenges.

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Are you a Challenger?

Consider this if you’re still wondering whether Challenger Sales is right for your sales team: The research done for the Challenger Sales book found that nearly 40% of sales team star performers were in the Challenger category. Take the proven methodology, implement the five steps of the Challenger Sales approach, and train your sellers, and you’ll be on your way to fielding your own team of star performers.

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The post What Is the Challenger Sales Methodology? Steps, Examples, and Tips appeared first on Salesforce.

They’re all digital products, and they’re taking a big share of consumer wallets. Whether you have a successful business and are looking to capitalise on lucrative new sales channels, or a side hustler hoping to trade their talent for recurring passive income, you can make digital products work for you.

What you’ll learn:

• What are digital products?
• Types of digital products
• Benefits of digital product sales
• 6 steps to start selling digital products
• Common digital product sales roles
• What to look for in digital selling tools

What trends drive sales productivity today?

We believe that business is the greatest platform Get the State of Sales Report to discover AI and productivity insights from 5,500 sales professionals.

Get the free report

What are digital products?

A digital product is an intangible thing that customers can use on their electronic devices. While you can’t hold or touch it, a digital product is still something you can see, purchase, and consume. Making more is as simple as copying and pasting. And they’re accessed by customers through downloads, streaming, or logging onto a website.

Types of digital products

Digital products come in all shapes and file sizes. If you’re trying to make one, review the following types of products to help you understand and decide which makes the most sense for you, your abilities, and your audience.

Courses and online education

Building new skills is important for your career and passions. Online courses in everything from yoga to digital marketing can draw in big crowds. A common approach is to create a series of paid-subscription online videos hosted in a learning management system, which can include downloadable worksheets and notes. Some take the form of webinars, which are attended live and solicit donations from attendees.

Go the extra mile by offering premium office hours and live lessons to connect with students. It’s easiest to sell courses if you’re already a somewhat well-known figure in the industry, but you can always build up your reputation through a few free giveaways and trial classes.

Coaching and consulting

If you have expertise in anything, your time is valuable. Go one-on-one with paying customers to help them get off the ground in whatever their pursuit is, such as the fundamentals of business operations for a startup founder or digital transformation for a more established business.

Or go one-to-many with virtual group workshops. In this case, the digital products might be content that leads free users to this ultimately paid experience, with more paid content available to them after the fact. Show your knowledge on social media and industry forums, and lead fans back to a landing page to book coaching sessions.

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Digital templates and themes

Many entrepreneurs and businesses want to make things themselves that look good and function well, without having to build from scratch. If you have the graphic design, development, or organisational chops, products you might sell include:

• Themes for popular blogging content management systems (CMS) that make it easy to set up a brand-new, professional-looking website
• Templates for presentation decks, professional documents, and highly functional spreadsheets
• Templates for beautiful notebooks, day planners, or birthday cards
• Presets for the perfect lighting balance for photos or videos in major creative software
• UX, icon, and font kits that enable product and graphic designers to build something professional quickly

These can be sold on independent websites, through marketplace platforms, or directly through the apps they’re made for.

E-books

E-books are electronic books that can be read on a tablet, laptop, or phone. Make yours stand out through a combination of high quality, unique information, and good design. If you have a solid reputation in your field, the hook might be your perspective. The hook could also be the result of an actual study you conducted, which provides new data and statistics.

E-books can be sold through major book marketplaces and e-commerce platforms. E-books are often called “lead magnets,” a giveaway that potential customers get in exchange for filling in forms and agreeing to receive your marketing emails.

Games

Video games and mobile games need no introduction. Between app stores on everyone’s smartphones, PC marketplaces, and stores built into modern consoles, they take many forms and are being played more frequently by more people than ever before. Some have an upfront cost to buyers, some are licensed to subscription platforms (and pay developers based on playtime or downloads), and some are freemium, with in-game purchases down the road.

Licensed digital content

Not everything is made to be enjoyed on its own. Sometimes, the smart move is to sell small pieces of much larger products. Stock photography, music, designs, and videos get used in everything from ads and websites to concept art and packaging.

Marketing and film professionals dig through online marketplaces trying to avoid corny corporate stock assets, so you can stand out by making something unique and beautiful. Simply create your library, license it to the stock websites, and let the sites sell it again and again.

Memberships and communities

Information and discourse are available on social media, forums, blog comments, and countless sites trying to share content, all for free. Some free sources are amazing, but there’s also a lot of junk to sift through. Niche communities might prefer something more curated and exclusive.

That’s where the membership site comes in. You have to pay to get in, but you get what you pay for. Free of ads, free of trolls, free of bots, with every member having a literal financial stake in the community staying high quality and civil. Examples include “masterminds,” where business owners share struggles and swap leads, or communities that are built around an expert in a topic.

Music and audio

Most musicians license music to streaming platforms. They are paid based on subscriber listens, or receive a portion of ad revenue from free users. Podcasts are another popular audio product. There are platforms for premium podcasts with dedicated fan bases that offer exclusive episodes to patrons who donate monthly. The vast majority are free to listeners and collect ad and sponsorship revenue.

Premium content libraries

If you’ve had success selling individual digital products, you can offer subscriptions to a big library of all your past and future products. For example, if your e-books always deliver, past buyers may see the value in simply subscribing to your library to get early and perpetual access to future ones. The same goes for the creator who always makes new UX kits that speed up app production. Prove value and then improve your offer.

Software and apps

Once created, software can provide you with reliable subscription revenue if it serves a real market need. Apps for consumers include everything from photo and video editing to family budgeting. Apps for businesses might include complex accounting, project management software, productivity suites, and shipping coordination. If you go this route, note that tech sales is a complex and nuanced discipline that requires experience to get right.

Videos

Whether it’s an ad-supported video on a popular video streaming website or a paid exclusive sold to a major publisher, video content is among the fastest-growing formats. Production quality is important for some formats, like narratives, and less stringent for quick social media skits.

Visual art and prints

Original visual artwork with an artist’s unique stamp and style can be valuable with the rise of generative AI. It’s all about how you package it. You could sell the original file through a marketplace. You could also create on-demand coffee table books and T-shirts, or sticker sheets and posters that customers print themselves. Build a following and community through social media, and then release exclusives for your fans.

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Benefits of digital product sales

Many of us try our best to avoid paying for online information that feels like it should be free. However, creating and distributing digital products must bring in revenue to facilitate continued production. Here are some of the reasons why big companies and small players alike make the investment in digital products.

Lower upfront costs

There’s a large cost difference between a text document and a multi-platform fully featured app, but neither one needs a factory to make more of them. Once a digital product is created, it’s infinitely duplicable. Your cost of goods sold is close to zero.

Easy to distribute

You can sell digital assets directly through a website you own, or take advantage of one of hundreds of popular platforms. Many creators and businesses cross-distribute to competing channels to cover all their bases.

Flexible to challenges and opportunities

Digital products’ strengths always come back to their digital nature. They’re easy to update and adapt in response to feedback (and market changes).

Your e-book sold poorly last month? Tweak it and advertise the new change.

Have your fall stickers stopped getting preorders? Add red and green holiday themes and relaunch them.

Digital creators also benefit from being able to add more types of digital products to their offerings over time. For example, a popular graphic designer who makes ad-supported video tutorials might be able to start selling templates to their fans, selling deeper courses, and building a premium community that requires a monthly subscription.

New passive income streams

Passive income refers to revenue that doesn’t require new inputs such as labor or equipment after the initial investment. A simple example would be rent collected from a rental property.

Some digital products lend themselves to true passive income more than others. Consultations require your time, but more subscribers to a course you uploaded have very little time investment after creation. If you already sell physical products, digital ones can open up new markets while trading on the reputation you made with your traditional offerings.

It’s important to remember that every product still has costs. That same course might start running out of customers, which means you’d need to either update the product for repeat business or market it to get new business. If you can automate that marketing process, you can get closer to real passive income.

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6 steps to start selling digital products

Maybe the last section got the ideas flowing and you’re excited to get started. Or maybe the idea of actually making a digital product feels intimidating and you’re not sure how to begin. Depending on your talents and whether this is a side hustle, it can be as easy as making a new version of something you always make, or as complex as learning a skill and how to build a business at the same time.

No matter how it strikes you, this process can help you organise your efforts.

1. Brainstorm, research, and choose your products

If you’re a creative or developer, it might be obvious what you’re going to make. A photographer will take photos, though they still need to find their niche. But if you have a less obvious talent, finding the right type of digital product can take more time.

What you make depends on your knowledge, skills, and interests. Do you have an eye for fashion or a knack for speed-running games? Are there accounting mistakes that always get on your nerves or design trends you think are overblown? Play to your passions if you can.

Market research

Let’s say you settled on fashion videos. What else is out there? Who are the top creators? What are they doing? More importantly, what are they not doing? Or let’s say you decided to make a DIY accounting e-book. Does anyone else give that same info away for free? What’s their angle?

Here’s how to approach market research:

• Use social listening tools to search for relevant conversations on social media platforms and see what the general attitudes and issues are in the market.
• Dig up published research from authoritative sources, industry news outlets, and others to understand trends and get some data to work with.
• Set up a CRM to gather information gained from actual customers and leads and keep your notes current.

Choose your product

Whatever you choose, land on your first product and commit to making that one as well as you can before expanding. Focus on your differentiation, such as the target market, the quality of the product, your design, your pricing, and your personal brand.

2. Define your target market with a persona

A buyer persona is a fictional customer who has traits that represent a unique segment of the population. For example, they might be divided out by age, hobbies, income, places they like to frequent, and, importantly, the things they really believe. Here’s how to create a persona for your product:

• Use data to find basic demographic traits: See how many undergraduate accountants in southern California younger than 40 there really are to sell to before you build that ebook on building your own practice.
• Use surveys and research to understand their work: Find people to survey yourself or look for old studies, and see how they relate to their work, what skills they need to succeed, and what they believe success means.
• Go deeper with interviews: Invite a few to speak with and learn about what they worry about, what they desire, and what motivates them to challenge assumptions and uncover secrets that will help you sell to them.
• Build a starter persona: Use what you learned to make a collection of these traits that’s easy to pull up and consider when creating digital products to serve them. It helps to frame it as a story (i.e., “Mark is trying to get promoted in his accounting firm and spends a lot of his free time figuring out ways to impress his bosses”).
• Refine as you learn: Personas are a representation, so they should be subject to change as you try, fail, and succeed in the marketplace.

3. Validate your idea

This is where “failing fast” comes into play. Having a digital product idea and the skills to back it up is one thing, but seeing whether the market will support it is another. An easy first step is to ask people in your life and your target market. Show them your idea and what you have so far, and see what they think is missing and what’s working.

You can also approach this in a more standardised manner, such as running digital surveys asking about the problem you’re trying to solve. The final way to validate would simply be to check relative interest in this topic or product over time. Look at online search trends to see what’s generating interest.

4. Make an online storefront

You need a place for your potential customers to find you online. There are several routes to take. Social media marketplaces are great for reach, but your visibility is subject to private algorithms. Another option is templated website builders that include storefront functionality. They’re convenient, but many competitors will also use them, so you may have a hard time standing out, and analytics and leads are often locked down. Your last choice is to build your own site and use a sales platform on top of it. It lends itself to automation, personalisation, and a better customer experience, but of course it will require a bigger upfront investment.

Many digital product creators opt for a combo, luring in leads from social platforms and handling most of their selling on their privately operated websites to control customer information and reduce transaction fees.

5. Market to drive traffic

If you’re selling digital products, you’ll need to work to stand out. Use your website and social analytics to determine where interested traffic, if any, is coming from. Try to find patterns between where they come from, what they do on your site, and when they ultimately buy. You can also find places in your buying flow where they drop off before making a purchase.

Using this data, decide on channels to invest more in, like organic content you post to your social profiles, advertising placed on search engines, or referrals from partners and groups. Part of the investment will be running these different marketing campaigns, and part of it will be creating the content you’ll use in the marketing.

Connect your CRM and sales tools to your marketing efforts to help you make stronger connections between the types of marketing a lead was exposed to, and the likelihood of buying. Marketing is a game of continuous improvement, so study your results and try tweaks as you go.

6. Test and learn

Your product and marketing efforts both require you to look at the data and adjust as needed. Always gather and be open to feedback, and investigate problems.

You will likely have to adapt to increase revenue. Since digital products are relatively low-cost to make, you need to consider your breakeven point and your time to profitability.

How many units do you need to sell to earn back everything it costs to make it, including your own labor? Also, how long did it take for that to happen?

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Common digital product sales roles

To sell a digital product, many tasks have to get done. Big product development teams have staff for each job function, whereas side hustlers have to do it all themselves. A quick overview of each role can help you see what goes into selling digital products, and figure out if you have any gaps in your team or personal skill set. Study these to help you launch successful products.

Product manager

The PM is like the CEO of a product or product line. They take the vision and break it into achievable sprints and goals, take customer feedback into account, and promote the success of the product throughout the business.

Engineer/creator

A digital product has to be created. Photographers snap pics, software developers build apps, and influencers talk, present, and film (mostly themselves). This person or group is the most important, but their work can be outsourced, too.

Design and user research

Digital products are sold in a world that’s mainly visual. If the main product isn’t made by a designer, a designer still needs to package it into something slick, sellable, and branded. User researchers have to get involved to understand how people interact with your site and content (and to see if the design is working).

Customer support

You can’t leave your buyers in the cold. Once they’ve given you their money, you need to honour your promises, including helping them figure out when something isn’t right. This goes doubly for interactive digital products, such as courses, apps, and games.

Marketer

Someone must schedule social media posts and decide what to say. They also need to film those videos, put together those early-access, buy-now timers, and set up that email sequence once someone signs up for the newsletter.

Sales

Sometimes, marketing and sales go hand in hand for digital products. But if you have higher-ticket items, you might have to do personal one-on-one selling to close the deal. Digital sales professionals also input information in customer relationship management (CRM) software.

The ‘Face’

Oftentimes, this is the creator or thought leader themselves. For independent digital products, someone has to put their creative or personal brand on things to help it stand out from similar competing products.

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What to look for in digital selling tools

Just as the products are digital, so too are the tools needed to make them and move them. In fact, some of this infrastructure can be the largest expense in the process outside labour, so it’s important to determine what you need in your tech stack. All of the following can help with online selling:

• Market research: Whatever website and social platforms you use, make sure you get access to analytics to see what’s working. You also need tools to research your competitors and target markets, like surveys.
• Content creation: You need to be able to build your digital products, using things like creative suites for graphic designers, productivity suites for slides and documents, and generative AI platforms to help speed things up.
• Hosting and storefront: Host your digital content in a secure place with a shopping function to collect payments and gate access to the product.
• CRM: Keep track of past and potential customers with sales software that keeps a database and helps automate your outreach, too.
• Marketing automation platform: Collect lead information through forms on your site, build quick landing pages for your marketing campaigns, personalise web content based on each user’s interests, and send custom email and SMS campaigns.
• Sales forecasting: The best way to make future sales strategies is to understand what’s already happened. Measure digital sales through your storefront over time, so you can begin to predict your sales cycles.
• Customer service management: Save time reading through emails of customer complaints with a platform for tracking and resolving issue tickets. After all, happy customers spread better word of mouth.

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Start selling digital products today

The market may seem stuffed with options, but new people start selling digital products daily, with breakaway successes cropping up constantly. You never know if you don’t try, and you’ve just taken a great first step by reading this guide.

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The post How to Start Selling Digital Products in 6 Steps appeared first on Salesforce.

Read on to discover the most important sales statistics that reveal how the greatest teams are pushing forward. The data shows there are many bright spots to be found, but a nuanced picture emerges when we look more closely. Yes, revenue is up, but reps are struggling to meet quota. AI is yielding benefits, but data concerns remain. Employee retention is high, but fragile and dependent on high pay. 

What trends drive sales productivity today?

We believe that business is the greatest platform Get the State of Sales Report to discover AI and productivity insights from 5,500 sales professionals.

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Sales statistics about revenue growth

In the previous State of Sales report, conducted during the pandemic, 82% of sales professionals said they had to quickly adapt to new ways of selling in the face of economic headwinds. Today, that hard work has paid off. Sales are growing this year, partly thanks to recurring revenue and partner sales.

Growth is on the rise

1. 79% of sales leaders and managers say revenue increased over the past year.

2. 78% of sales leaders and managers say new customer acquisition increased over the past year.

3. 82% of sales leaders and managers feel confident about their company’s 12-month growth strategy

4. The top 3 tactics for growth among sales leaders: Improving sales enablement and training, targeting new markets, and improving use of tools and technologies.

One-off sales take a back seat to recurring revenue

5. Over 90% of sales teams use more than one revenue source.

6. 42% of sales leaders and managers say recurring sales is their top revenue source.

7. Sales leaders and managers say one-off sales is their third top revenue source, after recurring sales, upsells, and cross-sells.

Within 12 months, nearly every company expects to use partner sales

8. 83% of sales pros say partner selling has a bigger impact on revenue than a year ago.

9. 89% of sales teams currently use partner sales.

10. Of those sales teams who don’t use partner sales, 58% expect to within a year.

Sales statistics about challenges

Changing customer expectations is the number one challenge today. Increasing marketplace competition is adding to the squeeze. Meanwhile, buyers are demanding more personalization than before. But even as sellers are asked to deliver more value, they get trapped in non-selling tasks.

Sellers feel the pressure

11. 67% of sales reps don’t expect to meet their quota this year, and 84% missed it last year.

12. 53% of sales pros say it’s harder to sell than a year ago.

Changing customer expectations and marketplace competition are coming in hot

13. Sales leaders and managers say their top challenge is changing customer needs and expectations (for example, demanding lower costs, deeper understanding, and greater value).

14. 57% of sales leaders and managers say competition has increased since last year.

15. Similarly, macroeconomic conditions and inflation still pose a major challenge but is decreasing, with 27% of sales leaders and managers saying it’s a challenge compared to 39% in 2022.

16. 78% of business buyers say their company is more careful about spending money than before.*

17. 76% of business buyers say their company extracts maximum value from every purchase.*

*This data comes from the Salesforce State of the Connected Customer report.

Buyers demand personalization*

18. 86% of business buyers are more likely to buy if companies understand their goals.

19. But 59% say most sales reps don’t take the time to understand them.

20. 84% of business buyers expect sales reps to act as trusted advisors.

21. But 73% say most sales interactions feel transactional.

*The data in this section comes from from the Salesforce State of the Connected Customer report.

Sales reps still have productivity woes

22. Reps spend 70% of their time on nonselling tasks — a figure that is virtually unchanged from the 2022 State of Sales report, when reps spent 72% of their time on nonselling tasks.

23. The tasks that take the most time to complete are meeting customer budget needs, personalizing communication, and building a strong personal relationships.

Sales statistics about data and AI

Four in five sales teams use AI today. As adoption becomes widespread, sales teams are experiencing powerful benefits like accelerated growth and productivity gains. But data concerns like trust and training gaps are preventing teams from making the most out of AI, and many sales pros fear they’re missing out.

Sales teams are benefiting from AI, but obstacles remain

29. 81% of sales teams are investing in AI. Of those, about half are experimenting with AI and the other half have fully implemented it.

30. 83% of sales teams with AI saw revenue growth in the past year — versus 66% of teams without AI.

31. The top 3 areas that AI is improving are sales data quality and accuracy, understanding customer needs, and personalization for customers.

32. AI-using sales teams are 1.4x more likely to say headcount increased over the past year

33. 33% of sales ops pros using AI say they have insufficient budget, headcount, and training on how to use it.

34. Among teams currently using AI, sales ops pros say the top tactic to prepare is to consolidate tools and tech stacks.

The focus turns to building a foundation of trustworthy data

35. 98% of sales leaders say trustworthy data is more important in times of change.*

36. 94% of sales leaders say their organization should be getting more value from their data.*

37. 78% of sales leaders say they’re concerned about missing out on generative AI.*

38. Only 35% of sales professionals completely trust the accuracy of their organization’s data.

39. 73% of sales pros say generative AI introduces new security risks.**

40. 49% of sales pros say they’re not sure how to safely use generative AI at work.**

41. 39% of sales pros say accurate forecasting is hindered by poor data quality.**

42. Among sales pros who don’t trust their organization’s data, 38% say the reason is incompleteness, 37% say it’s because it’s stored in multiple formats, and 37% say it’s because it’s not regularly updated.**

*This data comes from the Salesforce Trends in Data and Analytics for Sales report.

**This data comes from the Salesforce Trends in Generative AI for Sales report.

Sales statistics about enablement and training

Sales teams are improving their training programs for direct sellers and partners alike, a key strategy for delivering more value to customers. Most reps say their company’s enablement programs prepare them to meet quota, rating these activities as the most impactful: support materials, product-specific training, and one-on-one coaching. 

Enablement is the top tactic for growth

24. The number one growth tactic for sales leaders and managers is improving sales enablement and training.

25. The top enablement activity is sales strategy reviews, which 53% of sales teams use. The least popular activity is one-on-one meetings with managers, which only 32% have regularly. 

Enablement helps reps meet quota, but isn’t perfect 

26. 76% of reps say their enablement prepares them to make quota.

27. But only 29% of reps say they are completely satisfied with enablement materials.

Enablement gets a lift from AI

28. Among sales teams who use AI for enablement, 70% offer real-time selling guidance, 67% offer customized enablement for individual reps, and 47% offer call coaching. 

Sales statistics about the employee experience

While employee retention has grown overall, it remains fragile. Sales pros say the top reason they’d consider changing jobs is a lack of career advancement opportunities, and the second top reason is uncompetitive pay or benefits. 

43. 76% of reps say leadership makes employee satisfaction a priority at their company.

44. Sales teams report an 18% average turnover over the last 12 months — down from 25% in 2022. 

45. 81% of sales professionals say their pay has increased over the past year.

46. 82% of sales reps saying they understand which metrics affect their pay. 

47. 71% of sales leaders and managers say overall budget is up.

48. 63% of sales leaders and managers say employee headcount is up.

49. 64% of sales professionals say they would leave if offered a similar job elsewhere with better pay.

50. The top reasons why sales reps are considering leaving their current job are lack of career advancement, lack of clarity from leadership, and uncompetitive pay.

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What you’ll learn:

• What is sales efficiency?
• Why sales efficiency is important
• How to calculate sales efficiency
• What is a good sales efficiency ratio?
• Sales productivity vs. sales efficiency
• 8 ways to improve sales efficiency

What trends drive sales productivity today?

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What is sales efficiency?

Very simply, sales efficiency tracks how quickly your business can generate revenue during a specified period of time. It measures how fast your sales reps can convert prospects into leads, and then turn those leads into customers.

If you want to be more efficient, you need to make more sales with fewer resources in a shorter amount of time. All spent resources are measured against the time spent to produce results — and the resulting ratio shows the efficiency of your sales team.

When you measure sales efficiency, it reveals the reps who are underperforming. Then, you can offer those reps support, guidance, and training — and if all goes well, their sales efficiency will improve.

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Why sales efficiency is important

Most sellers are missing their sales targets — more than 70%, according to the latest State of Sales report. That’s almost 3 of 4 salespeople who fail to hit their sales quotas. And when you, as a sales leader, have a situation where only the top 28% of your people are reaching their goals, you have to ask yourself: “What are these other reps doing?”

When you understand sales efficiency, you’ll see whether your methodologies, process, and overall strategy is sustainable.

Let’s assume you see that your underperforming reps are spending time working deals that never closed. Over two quarters, perhaps they produced just two closed deals. Meanwhile, a top rep who consistently hits quota closed seven deals. Clearly, there’s something inefficient going on with that underperforming rep. If you can get to the heart of the problem, you can work to find a solution.

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How to calculate sales efficiency

Sales efficiency is calculated by dividing the gross revenue generated by the costs incurred by the sales team over a specific time period. These costs can include things such as salaries, expenses, and training. This calculation shows how efficient your sales strategies are over time. It helps you understand the impact of the money spent selling your products or services.

Here is an illustration of the formula:

You can use the formula to review the entire sales pipeline or measure individual deals. Reviewing the entire sales pipeline is useful because it shows how much your business is growing in proportion to every dollar spent on sales. For individual sales, it shows how wisely a team member is using resources to close deals. In many cases, you’ll want to review both metrics because larger deals will require more time and resources, while smaller deals will not.

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What is a good sales efficiency ratio?

Now, that formula gives you a basic understanding of how to calculate sales efficiency, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. The sales efficiency metrics of the total pipeline can be a bit misleading; certain variables will affect the formula. For example, some reps may have favourable territories or other conditions that may affect their win rate. You have to look at the big picture.

Other sales metrics that impact a sales team’s performance include:

• Leads: How are your reps acquiring customers? Understanding the methods they use to get leads — and the number of leads they generate — are key to calculating the effectiveness of your sales reps.
• The average revenue per customer (ARPC): How much money are you earning with a customer over a specific period of time? The ARPC measures the profitability of your product or service based on the money generated by each customer.
• Customer lifetime value (CLV): How does your business retain customers? The CLV shows how much income you can expect from a customer over the course of your relationship.
• Year-over-year growth (YOY): How close is your business to reaching its long-term goals? YOY compares your company’s current annual financial gain with the previous year’s.

Sales activity completion rates: How many sales are your reps closing? With sales activity completion rates, you can see how productive your sales reps actually are.

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Sales productivity vs. sales efficiency

While sales productivity and sales efficiency may sound like more or less the same thing, they focus on different aspects of the sales process:

• Sales productivity measures the output of a sales team or individual salespeople relative to the input of resources. These resources include time, effort, and money. It focuses on end results and the overall output as compared with the input. Some of the key metrics include:
  • Revenue per salesperson
  • Number of deals closed per salesperson
  • Customer acquisition rate
  • Sales growth rate
• Sales efficiency measures how effectively a sales team or individual uses their resources — things such as time, budget, and tools — to achieve sales goals. Key metrics include:
  • Conversion rate
  • Sales cycle length
  • Cost per acquisition
  • Ratio of successful to unsuccessful sales calls

Essentially, sales productivity is about the quantity of results achieved, while sales efficiency focuses on the effectiveness of the process to achieve those results.

Think of a company that sells subscriptions to a high-end photo editing tool. It has two sales teams, one in Los Angeles and one in New York. Team Los Angeles closed 50 deals in a month, generating $1 million in revenue.

Team New York, meanwhile, is using conversational AI in their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. They’re able to work more efficiently and spend more time focusing on their customers, which increases their average deal rate. Because of this extra attention, Team New York closed 50 deals during the same period but generated $1.5 million in revenue.

While these two teams closed an equal number of deals, they are not equally productive. Team New York shows a higher sales efficiency because they’re achieving a better result with fewer resources.

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8 ways to improve sales efficiency

The best way to improve sales efficiency is to improve sales velocity — or just how quickly a rep can close a deal.

Sales velocity speeds up the sales process, enabling faster revenue generation and better cash flow management. It boosts the productivity of your sales team by allowing them to handle more deals in less time. Monitoring sales velocity can also help you accurately track the time it takes for your team to close deals. This can reveal potential roadblocks in your sales process that can jeopardise sales targets.

Other ways to improve sales efficiency include:

1. Set clear sales targets

Sales goals provide a clear direction for the sales team, and that kind of focus improves efficiency. Incentivise your team by offering bonuses and commissions. S.M.A.R.T. goals increase productivity and improve performance.

2. Streamline the sales processes

First, you need to define a clear sales strategy, clearly outlining the process of moving a lead through the sales pipeline. This includes creating a structure of prospecting, qualification, presentation, negotiation, closing, and follow-up. Once that structure is in place, you can streamline the sales process by managing customer data, tracking interactions, and automating tasks with customer relationship management (CRM) software.

3. Take advantage of technology

Using a sales CRM tool makes it easy to boost your sales team’s efficiency and increase sales productivity without hiring additional staff. A CRM platform combined with sales tools can turbocharge efficiency by automating lead nurturing, follow-ups, and scheduling. It can also automate repetitive tasks and provide valuable insights into customer behaviour. For example: A software company decides to implement a sales automation system to streamline its sales process. Before automation, the sales team could handle 50 leads per week. After automation, they could handle 100 leads per week with the same number of resources.

4. Implement sales performance metrics

Consistently hitting benchmarks improves efficiency. One way to measure how well your team is doing is to track key performance indicators (KPIs). Sales KPIs include conversion rates, average deal size, and sales cycle length. These performance metrics identify areas of strength — and what could use improvement.

5. Encourage collaboration

Teamwork makes the dream work. Fostering a culture of collaboration among sales, marketing, and other departments will go a long way toward improving sales efficiency. And reviewing sales calls with generative AI-powered call summaries can make for more effective coaching.

6. Enhance personalisation

Personalisation drives performance and makes for better customer outcomes. And companies with faster growth drive 40% more of their revenue from personalisation than their not-as-quick counterparts, according to research by McKinsey. Make it easier for reps to personalise their communications with prospects and improve efficiency by providing tools that they can use to quickly customise pitches.

7. Effective sales coaching

Your team will be more efficient if your managers actively support them. Review sales calls to find areas that need improvement. Develop strategies to help reps identify unproductive deals early in the sales process. Share success stories and case studies highlighting the positive effects of improved sales efficiency. All of that will foster a culture of accountability and improvement.

8. Provide sales training

Reps perform better when they feel like they’re in control of their own destiny. Invest in sales training programs — such as a course designed to double sales results within 90 days — to improve the efficiency of reps’ selling skills, product knowledge, and customer engagement techniques.

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Sales efficiency for the win

Many sales reps are foiled by spending most of their time performing rote tasks when they should be doing what they do best — selling. By taking advantage of the automation in CRM software, sales reps can increase their productivity. And when you amp up productivity, you increase sales efficiency. When you’re more efficient, you’ll bring in more profit for your company — and your reps will bring home fatter paychecks.

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The post Why Sales Efficiency Matters (and How to Calculate Yours) appeared first on Salesforce.

What is a QBR? It’s a chance to build that business case throughout the year — and presenting a memorable QBR is an indispensable skill.

My team’s QBRs have improved our customer relationships, putting the end goal of the partnership centre stage rather than letting it get lost in the day-to-day minutia. Here’s the best of what we’ve learned.

What you’ll learn:

• What is a QBR?
• Why is a QBR important?
• The benefits of QBRs
• How to prepare for a QBR
• How to structure a QBR and what to include
• How to follow up after a QBR

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What is a QBR?

A quarterly business review is just what the name implies: a meeting with customers every three months to review the partnership. You schedule this one-hour meeting to remind your customer why they went with you to begin with and what you planned to achieve together. You highlight your progress by sharing key metrics, playing up big wins, and talking about any challenges. You can also ask for feedback, plan how to improve your process, align on goals, and look at the coming quarter. Done right, QBRs deliver a critical message: You care about your customer’s success, and you deliver value throughout the entire year.

Wondering who you invite to a QBR? It’s a given that there will be representatives from both your company and your customer’s. Typically, we include the account manager, executive sponsor, and project manager. Because a QBR is a space for feedback, consider limiting the number of attendees from your team. That way, your customer will feel comfortable being transparent. 

Executive business review (EBR) vs. QBR

One more thing to clear up: You may have heard the term executive business review (EBR) and wonder how it relates to QBRs. EBRs are similar, but they’re typically higher level than QBRs and don’t always happen as often. Sometimes, the goal of an EBR is to inform and align while other times their purpose relates to a renewal decision. The relationship between QBRs and EBRs is not one-size-fits-all. Some executives only attend an annual EBR and ask for summarised versions of each QBR. So when you’re planning your QBRs, keep in mind that the information is likely to get passed up several levels beyond your immediate stakeholders. This is another reason to make sure the meeting content supports your customer’s business strategy and goals.

Either way, there’s still a chance executives you don’t normally see may join your QBR. If that happens, take advantage of the moment. Ask for their views of the partnership so you can better understand how to make the relationship a slam dunk from their perspective.

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Why is a QBR important?

QBRs yield business value on both sides. You get the chance to share your customer’s recent successes with their team while reaffirming their overarching business goals. When you do this several times throughout the year, you’ll be more aligned with your customer and identify opportunities to improve, creating a bigger impact. Bonus: QBRs also help you build the case for either a renewal or increasing their spend as you go, rather than at the end of a contract. When you wait to meet in person and only for renewal summaries, building a business case as partners over time just isn’t possible.

If you don’t hold QBRs, you’ll either have to scramble when asked for a surprise business review or prepare for an annual “year in review” meeting. In that case, you’ll need to comb through 12 months of data instead of three, and you’ll have more (and older) stories to tell in the same amount of time. I’ve been there, and it’s a challenge.  The fact is, most clients will have forgotten many of your successes by then, and it’s even possible that your stakeholders will have changed.

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The benefits of QBRs

By holding regular QBRs, you create the following benefits for both sides:

Opportunities to collaborate with your primary customer contacts

This builds your relationship with them and helps you better understand their organisation. As you involve them in the process of preparing for the QBR, you can get a better sense of their goals and what they think will matter most to their leaders.

Regular feedback keeps an open flow of communication

Holding several QBRs throughout the year encourages more thoughtful feedback than you’d get without these more formal check-ins.

Face time with customer executives

Use it to strengthen the ties between organisations at a higher level. And if you impress the higher-ups, you may even earn the opportunity to expand your business with their company.

A chance to strengthen working relationships

I like to think of my main point of contact (POC) as our customer champion. When you highlight your customer champion’s efforts to improve their organisation’s outcomes and bottom line, you’re more likely to gain their trust and loyalty.

Ways to do better and deliver more value

QBRs give you focused time to ask for constructive feedback. When you get it, take it to heart and follow up with specific ways to improve even more.

A chance to collaborate on challenges

Sometimes the roadblocks to success come from the customer’s side. QBRs present the time, place, and neutral space to explain these challenges and plan how to address them in a collaborative way.

Time to highlight service trends and share key metrics

Even if you email regular reports to your customer champion, and even if they share them with their bosses, there’s no guarantee they all make the time to review them. During your QBR, you’ll have their undivided attention to share data and show progress toward goals.

Input on building your service story over four quarters

Collaborating with your customer champion on QBRs not only keeps you more aligned, but also gives you several chances throughout the year to understand and articulate what you achieve together.

A progress check-in on your most important objectives

Without a formal meeting on a regular basis, it can be easy for people to get lost in their day-to-day tasks, putting check-ins on the backburner and making it all too easy to start moving in different directions. QBRs gather key stakeholders for an update and a chance to make sure everyone is on the same page.

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How to prepare for a QBR

I’ll be honest. The first quarter we delivered QBRs, I built them up to be a big, scary gauntlet I’d have to run. But they’re much more manageable than I thought. In fact, it’s been a great opportunity to highlight my customers’ projects, high-five over good work, and solicit customer feedback that helps us deliver what’s needed. Here are a few tips to help you do the same.

Get into the right mindset

Think of your QBR as an opportunity to speak to your successes. You also get to show your customer champion in a good light, so share the great work that both your team and your customer’s team finished during the last quarter. And remember: QBRs don’t come with the pressure of an annual renewal. While you can certainly focus on the good stuff, there’s no reason to shy away from challenges. During a QBR, those are just opportunities to improve. After all, there’s still plenty of time to get things going in the right direction.

Begin with a project plan

Get clarity on who will spearhead QBR preparation and which people will help them. At Red Argyle, the account manager is responsible for the QBR project plan. I work with a support team that helps gather metrics, craft the story, and create the presentation. I start by setting the agenda and areas of focus to keep things organised. I also use a checklist and shared calendar to ensure we are meeting deadlines. If you’re the one who owns the QBR, schedule time on your own calendar and on everyone else’s to work on it. Reach out to your services team early. Tell them what you need, when you need it, and how you’ll use it. That way, the QBR won’t sneak up on you.

Involve your customer champion

While preparing for your QBR, talk to your main customer contact. Ask them what story they want to tell and what their management will likely focus on. That way you can plan to share stories and metrics that align with their goals. Making them look good helps both of you.

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How to structure a QBR and what to include

Each QBR agenda may look similar, but that doesn’t mean there’s a one-size-fits-all plan. Ask your customer for input as you prepare. Tailor your QBR plan to focus on their priorities, including how they prefer to get information and what their upcoming needs are. I’ve found that some QBRs focus heavily on historic metrics and data while others focus most of their time on how to achieve important future outcomes. While the order and the amount of time you spend on each topic will probably differ from customer to customer, here are the key ingredients to include in your QBRs:

• History of the partnership: Briefly review business goals and realign on service level agreements (SLAs) and objectives.
• Data: Present key metrics. Compare trends with those from your last QBR.
• Insights: Use data to deliver new understanding. Tell a story that showcases success and identify areas for improvement.
• Customer stories: Share stories of your wins and how they’ve made an impact on customer success.
• Financial check-in: Cover budgeted versus actual spend. If you’re over or under budget, be honest about it. Just make sure you support that information with a good reason and have a plan for how to recalibrate.
• Feedback: Ask for feedback, including what might be helpful to include in the next QBR.
• A look ahead: Agree on a roadmap for next quarter and assign specific action items if needed.

One last note: You’re asking your customer for an hour. Depending on how many people attend the QBR, this easily adds up to several hours of work time. Plan a compelling meeting, so they don’t feel like that time was wasted. Stay out of the minutiae and instead take a higher-level, strategic view of your services. Make it clear how those services support your customer’s goals — and how you can improve them.

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How to follow up after a QBR

• Email a recap to all attendees within 24 hours.
• Include high-level notes and takeaways, listing out related action items (e.g., Kacey will send an updated XYZ report by Thursday).
• Attach a copy of the slide deck.

I also highly recommend scheduling a debrief with your customer champion. It should take place within a week of the QBR so everything is still fresh in their mind. A debrief reinforces your partnership and gives you a chance to ask how things went from the customer’s perspective. You can also ask how their higher-ups felt about it.

Afterward, give your internal support team a recap of the debrief. If the reaction was positive, celebrate that with them and give credit where it’s due.

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Highlight the victories and review the playbook

Great QBRs help you keep customer’s goals at the forefront of your work and build a solid partnership throughout the year. This is a great way to support your project stakeholders. They can more easily make the business case for continued (or increased) budget at renewal time, and they may even thank you for showing their work in a positive light. Well-planned, strategic QBRs are a win-win.

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The post What Is a QBR? (And How to Plan One Your Customers Will Appreciate) appeared first on Salesforce.

In sales, we’re always swimming in data, from call logs and emails to deal closures and client feedback. All this data isn’t just useful — it’s essential to success. But sales tracking is just the first step. To make the most of your data, you need to understand the story it’s telling. That’s the key to turning data into decisions and insights into action.

What you’ll learn:

• What is sales tracking?
• Why is sales tracking important?
• Important sales tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics
• How to track sales
• 4 sales tracking tools to use

Hit key KPIs with real-time pipeline insights

What could you do with relevant insights at your fingertips? Sell smarter, take action, and hit your forecasts. That’s how Sales Analytics works.

Hit your KPIs

What is sales tracking?

Sales tracking is the process of collecting, analysing, and reporting on sales data to understand performance, identify trends, and improve efficiency. It’s essential for assessing how effectively you are meeting your sales goals and for making informed decisions that propel your sales efforts.

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Why is sales tracking important?

Sales tracking is the groundwork for better sales results. It’s how you gather all the bits of data that tell you what’s happening on the front lines. Sales data gives you a clear picture of your overall performance, as well as a bird’s-eye view of customer trends and behaviours. But it also helps you analyse what’s happening on a more granular level. Sales tracking can help you gauge the length of your sales cycles so you can optimise for more efficiency or determine where your reps are spending their time — and whether those tasks could be automated.

In short, sales tracking sets the stage for deeper analysis and positive action. For instance, if you see a rep is smashing their sales targets but not making enough calls, it might be because they’re zeroing in on personalised LinkedIn InMails. These require more time but are strikingly effective. By tracking this data, you’re equipped to dive deeper and get at why things are working.

After that, you can use this data to make changes, turning raw data into strategic insights that sharpen your sales approaches and training. This way, sales tracking not only keeps you informed but agile, always ready to adapt and improve based on solid data insights.

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How to track sales

Tracking sales goes beyond merely keeping an eye on numbers; it’s also about making those numbers work for you. Here’s how to break the process into actionable steps to ensure your sales tracking is effective as well as easy to manage and interpret.

1. Set goals

Start with the essentials. What really drives sales? Focus on metrics that directly impact your goals. To select these KPIs, begin with the end in mind: What are your main business objectives? Increase customer retention? Boost profit margins? Reduce sales cycles? Choose metrics that give you insight into these areas. (More on the nitty-gritty of this process below.)

2. Define your sales process and set up your pipeline

Get clear on how a lead becomes a customer. Detail each phase from initial contact to final sale. What steps does your customer take? Where do they stumble? Once you’ve defined your sales process, you can map out the most efficient flow. Build a pipeline that reflects each customer’s unique sales journey using sales tracking to see where leads are and how to nudge them along.

3. Set up your CRM tracking workflow

When setting up a sales tracking system, it’s important to nail the workflow — how you collect data, sift through it, and report on it. Whether it’s a customer relationship management (CRM) tool or something else, a single source of truth helps you see the full picture by bringing all of your data together. This saves time and keeps your team focused on analysis, not data wrangling. Make sure that the reports generated are clear and highlight key metrics that provide actionable insights. Regularly update your dashboard features to reflect the most relevant information, helping your team make quick, informed decisions.

4. Customise based on your needs

Customisation is key when it comes to optimising your sales tracking. Regardless of your industry, the principles of tracking remain the same, but the details of what and how you track‌ (and what you track) should be tailored to fit your specific industry and market dynamics. For example, a tech company might focus heavily on customer acquisition costs and lifetime value, while a retail business might track daily sales and customer foot traffic patterns. Focus on data that is tailored to your goals and dashboards, then use that data to make changes that will help you be more efficient and boost your bottom line.

5. Turn data into insights you can use

Now for the fun part — using the data. Regular deep dives into your customised metrics tell you what’s working and what’s not:

• Are acquisition costs too high?
• Do daily sales align with marketing campaigns?
• Are some reps hitting their targets while others lag?
• Where do most leads drop off? Why?
• What tactics are moving leads through the pipeline faster?

Understanding these patterns helps you continually refine your approach. Reviewing your data regularly is more than just a box-ticking exercise. It energises your team, keeps everyone on their toes, and ensures they’re quick to turn every insight into strategic actions that drive real results.

6. Share insights across teams

Sales is a team sport, and your insights can benefit marketing, customer service, and product development, too. By sharing what you learn from your sales tracking, you help align strategies across the board. Maybe a spike in drop-offs at the qualification stage tells you that marketing is attracting the wrong kind of leads, or perhaps a high customer acquisition cost (CAC) prompts a rethink on which deals you chase.

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Important sales tracking KPIs and metrics

Tracking every activity in your sales process isn’t just about oversight — it’s essential for refining tactics and boosting close rates. Depending on the specifics of your sales operations, the exact metrics you focus on might vary. Generally, sales KPIs and sales metrics fall into these main areas:

Sales performance metrics

When you want to gauge how each rep contributes to your goals, performance tracking is key. It provides a detailed look at the individual activities that drive sales success. Metrics to watch include:

• Cold calls made
• Emails sent
• Call duration
• Meetings completed
• Opportunities closed (whether won or lost)
• Sales win rate (leads won compared to opportunities closed, or how many leads get turned into paying customers)

Sales lead metrics

Keeping tabs on leads ensures no potential sale slips through the cracks. By monitoring the journey of each lead, you can refine your approach and enhance conversion rates. Essential metrics include:

• Number of leads generated
• Lead conversion rate
• Lead score
• Deal size
• CAC

Sales goal metrics

To hit your targets, you need a clear roadmap. Sales goal tracking allows you to set benchmarks and measure progress in real time. Metrics that keep you on track include:

• Total revenue goal
• Monthly, weekly, and daily sales totals
• Sales growth

Sales pipeline metrics

Understanding the flow and status of each deal in your pipeline is crucial for timely decision-making. Here’s what to monitor to keep your fingers on the pulse:

• Total open opportunities
• Opportunities lost per day/week/month
• Pipeline velocity, or how quickly leads become customers
• Sales cycle length

Sales activity metrics

It’s all about what your team does and how it translates into results. Tracking sales activities helps you identify high-impact activities and areas for improvement. Key metrics include:

• Email response rates
• Call durations
• New opportunities created
• Booked demos

Sales funnel metrics

Fine-tuning your funnel means understanding each phase of the customer journey. Analysing these metrics allows you to pinpoint where leads are being lost and where you’re winning:

• Total inbound and outbound leads
• Number of qualified leads
• Conversion rate at each stage

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4 sales tracking tools to use

When it comes to nailing your sales targets, having the right tools isn’t a bonus — it’s a must. These aren’t just for keeping data tidy; they’re about making every interaction count, every lead more valuable, and every sales process smoother. Here’s a rundown of the types of tools to lean on to keep your sales engine running at full throttle:

1. Customer relationship management (CRM) software

Think of your CRM as mission control for all your customer interactions. This software centralises everything — from emails and calls to meeting notes — making sure nothing falls through the cracks. It’s about having all the info and making it work for you, ensuring you have a 360-view of every customer journey and can act on it fast.

2. Visualisation and dashboard tools

If a picture’s worth a thousand words, a good dashboard is worth a thousand spreadsheets. These tools help visualise sales data in real-time, turning rows of data into clear, actionable insights. You can see at a glance where you’re beating your targets and where you need to switch gears, making it easier to share successes and strategise on quick meetings with the whole team.

3. Real-time analytics tools

Here’s where you get smart about what’s working. Good analytics tools dig deep into your sales data, uncovering trends and patterns that aren’t immediately obvious. Whether it’s tracking conversion rates or pinpointing your most lucrative sales channels, these tools give you the intel you need to refine your tactics and push your success rates higher.

4. Automation tools

Reps only spend 28% of their time actually selling, according to the latest State of Sales report. Automated tools help with that by capturing data such as emails, phone calls, and customer interactions, and logging every piece of information directly into your CRM. This minimises human error and frees up your team to focus on analysing the data and selling rather than collecting it manually.

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Stay on track toward sales success

Data-driven organisations are 23 times more likely to be profitable than those that aren’t, according to research from McKinsey. But it’s what you do with the data that really makes a difference in your sales approach. Whether you’re part of a small team eager to grow or running a large sales operation, getting your sales tracking right means you can spot trends, rapidly adapt to market changes, and stay ahead of the competition.

The post What Is Sales Tracking and How Does It Help Improve Team Performance? appeared first on Salesforce.

Even though sales prospecting is important, it may sometimes feel like you’re just wishing and hoping the right people will show up. Let’s see how to make prospecting a science instead — less like drilling for oil and more like filling up on gas.

What you’ll learn:

• What is sales prospecting?
• Why is sales prospecting important?
• How does sales prospecting work?
• The stages of the sales prospecting process
• How to find sales prospects
• Inbound vs. outbound prospecting
• How to move sales prospects to the next stage in the sales cycle
• How to qualify a sales prospect
• Sales prospecting questions to ask
• Prospecting email examples
• How to use sales prospecting tools

What is sales prospecting?

Prospects are potential customers, and prospecting is the process of finding them. Sales reps use sales prospecting to expand the size of their potential customer base. They’ll reach out to leads (potential sales contacts) and nurture them into opportunities (leads who have been warmed up over time). There are various sales prospecting techniques, from making calls to sending direct mail, attending networking events, and connecting on social media platforms such as LinkedIn.

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Why is sales prospecting important?

Sales prospecting is fundamental to what we do because it sets the stage for everything that follows in our sales funnel. It’s about focusing on and engaging those most likely to benefit from our products or services.

From my experience as an account director, effective prospecting directs our resources toward the most promising opportunities and gives us a steady stream of leads for conversion. By focusing on the right leads, we enhance our chances of conversion and align our sales strategies with the expectations and needs of our prospects. That drives our business forward.

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How does sales prospecting work?

Reps need to understand that the lead coming to a website has likely already done a lot of legwork. Eighty-one percent of prospects conduct research before inquiring about your product or service, according to the latest State of Sales report. They’ve formed opinions about your offerings before they’ve even engaged with any of your content, such as articles, white papers, or webinars.

The challenge? Capture the attention of these well-informed prospects and convert their interest into engagement. Reps may face a prospect with preconceptions and opinions based on generic messaging received from others. So the rep’s outreach has to be personalised. It has to resonate. A rep must do their own legwork to understand the prospect’s needs, the technologies they’re using, and how they make buying decisions. That helps move them through the sales funnel, from interest to an actual sale.

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The stages of the sales prospecting process

The sales process goes from cold leads to warm opportunities to red-hot deals. Prospecting is what happens in between:

From leads …

Sales and marketing source leads.
Leads are unqualified prospects. Leads can come from marketing (think a webinar that requires a form fill) or sales (think cold outreach).

… to opportunities …

Sales qualifies leads into prospects.
Sales gets to know leads and decides whether they’re a good fit for the product. If they are, the lead is “qualified” to become a prospect.

Sales nurtures prospects into opportunities.
As sales works to make prospects more and more interested in the sale, these prospects become “opportunities” who are more and more likely to buy.

… to customers

Sales closes opportunities into deals.
In the end, after many conversations, there will be two kinds of opportunities: “closed-lost” (boo) or “closed-won” (yay!).

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How to find sales prospects

We could talk about all the other platforms out there. However, we’ll let Stephanie Svanfeldt, Salesforce Strategic Sales Vice President, Auto Vertical, say it for us: “When it comes to sourcing prospects online, LinkedIn is the biggest game in town.”

Indeed. So, here are some tips to get into that game:

Identify top target accounts:

When choosing prospects, start with a strategic approach and focus your list. If you’re assigned 100 accounts, concentrate on the top 10. Plan meticulously to ensure every engagement is targeted and relevant.

Tap into the power of social selling:

Social selling and sales management tools can help reps better understand the organisational dynamics of target companies. For example, reps can map out the decision-makers within a company and learn about their roles and influence. That helps tailor messages to the person who can make or steer purchasing decisions.

Use your CRM to speed up research on your prospect:

Let your customer relationship management (CRM) system do the heavy lifting by automating prospect and account research. This saves you time and gives you instant access to the insights you need to connect with your prospects more effectively.

Personalise your outreach:

Reach out with custom messages that demonstrate a clear understanding of each prospect’s business needs and challenges. For example, you could send a video message to a potential lead to introduce yourself and briefly cover how your solution could address a specific challenge they mentioned in a recent LinkedIn article or post. The goal is to make every communication feel customised and relevant, showing you’ve done your homework.

Continue to deliver value:

Keep the conversation going by offering value in every interaction. This could be by sharing industry insights and relevant articles or inviting your prospect to events that align with their interests. It’s about continuously reinforcing their positive opinion of you and subtly positioning yourself as a go-to resource in their professional network.

Evaluate and refine:

Monitor and analyse the effectiveness of your outreach strategies. Adjust your approach based on what’s working and what isn’t. Pay attention to the technologies your prospects use and look for integration points that can streamline their processes or enhance their existing systems. This iterative adjustment ensures your tactics remain fresh and effective.

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Inbound vs. outbound prospecting

Inbound and outbound prospecting are key tactics in a sales strategy. Though they serve different purposes, each presents unique advantages. Inbound prospecting attracts prospects through content, SEO, online chats, and social media interactions. The main advantage is that it draws in higher-quality leads who initiate contact on their own terms, making it less intrusive. However, this strategy requires a significant investment in time and resources to develop effective content and optimise digital channels that attract these leads.

On the other hand, outbound prospecting involves actively reaching out to potential customers via email, phone calls, and direct messaging on platforms such as LinkedIn. It allows for quicker lead generation because you’re directly initiating conversations with potential buyers. However, it can be seen as more of an intrusion, and the quality of leads might vary if they haven’t shown previous interest in your offerings.

Combining the two strategies covers more ground — capturing those looking for solutions and those who may not yet be aware of how a product or solution can help them.

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How to move sales prospects to the next stage in the sales cycle

Research is important, but you’ll need more than that to take the conversation to the next level. After all, it’s just as easy for prospects to research you as it is for you to research them. You won’t get anywhere with them by repeating the same general information from your company’s website.

How can you go deep and deliver an insight no one else has? You’ll need to learn their accent — not just their language — and become knowledgeable about their lives at work. That means learning about specific trends in their industries, their companies, and even their lives.

Keep the conversation moving.

Don’t just think about closing the deal. Think about closing every step of the deal. It can be easy to get carried away in your excitement to move the conversation along. But don’t forget to cover all your bases:

Obsess over the next step: Don’t forget to end every conversation with a question. “Can we connect for five minutes after you’ve taken a look?” “Is there someone on your team I could work with on that?” “If you’re not the right person to ask, can you tell me who is?”

Advance but qualify: Prospecting is all about marching onward. But don’t over-focus on a deal that won’t be worth the effort. As you move the conversation forward, you need to keep qualifying at the same time. At every stage, ask whether the prospect is still a fit. Qualification also means making sure that they’re ready to move on to the next step.

You won’t have all the answers, but someone else will: Selling is a team sport. You need to lean on everyone you can to get the information you need. Ask subject matter experts at your company to teach you about a new domain. Reach out to technical and digital advisors to help you map out a solution. Ask marketing for help with a new pitch. You don’t have to do this alone.

Qualifying a prospect is an important piece of the puzzle, but don’t mistake “qualifying” for “deciding whether someone is important.” Everyone you talk to is important — because if they’re not the right person to talk to, then they can point you to the person who is.

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How to qualify a sales prospect

Qualifying a prospect is an essential part of the sales process, and a highly qualified prospect will check most of these boxes to move to the next stage of the sales cycle. Remember, though: “Qualifying” doesn’t mean “deciding whether someone is important.” Everyone you engage with is significant. If they’re not the right contact, they could lead you to someone who is.

To qualify whether a prospect is a good fit, consider these questions:

Is this the right person?

• Does the prospect fit your ideal customer profile?
• Are they already interested in your product?
• Do they have the influence to push the deal forward, or the authority to make buying decisions?

Is this the right company?

• Is the company within your designated territory?
• Is the industry compatible with your business model?
• What is the organisation’s size? Think beyond the number of employees. For instance, if you’re selling a subscription or usage-based service, consider the potential volume of its usage.

Is this the right project?

• Is the department funded to pay your price?
• Will the project be a priority for the company this year?
• Will the team be using the product for the right use case — in a way that will create an impact?

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Sales prospecting questions to ask

Good sales prospecting questions start a dialogue that qualifies the prospect and builds a relationship by showing genuine interest in their needs and challenges. Here are a few to start with:

1. What challenges are you currently facing with [insert relevant topic or service]? This question helps identify their pain points, allowing you to build your discussion around how your product addresses these issues.
2. What has been your experience with similar products or solutions? This tells you what has (or hasn’t) already worked for them, helping you position your solution better.
3. Can you tell me about your decision-making process? Who else should I invite to the next call? Knowing that is crucial for understanding how decisions are made and ensuring all decision-makers are engaged early on.
4. What is your timeline for implementing a solution? This helps determine their urgency and expectations, which can guide your engagement strategy.
5. Do you have the budget allocated for this project? Directly addressing the budget helps you qualify the prospect in terms of financial capacity. It also guides the conversation toward realistic solutions within their price range.

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Prospecting email examples

From my perspective, standout emails and smart LinkedIn engagement strategies can make all the difference. Here are some tried-and-true examples from my own experience:

Email outreach:

When it comes to sales prospecting, it’s all about making that connection count. Here’s an email I sent during the holidays. It wasn’t just a pitch; it started with a genuine “thank you” for the recipient’s military service, which creates a moment of personal recognition and gratitude. It’s about finding common ground. Here’s an example that worked well:

[Name],

We connected briefly on LinkedIn before the holidays. I wanted to thank you for your service. My brother-in-law, a lieutenant colonel, has served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I’ve seen the challenges firsthand.

I noticed your work in driving transformation and improving processes at major financial institutions, which is crucial for staying competitive. Digital acceleration makes understanding customer journeys and reducing friction challenging. Leaders like you have shared that personalisation and efficiency are key struggles.

Glassbox is designed to address this, providing session replay and analytics for improved customer experience visibility, helping banks optimise journeys, enhance quality, and cut costs. If you’d like to connect to discuss this further, let me know. Regardless, thank you for your service.

Best,

Lindsey

Video outreach:

One of my reps used this video strategy, sending a personalised video right after connecting with a prospect on LinkedIn. That’s going the extra mile. It shows you’re about more than just words; you’re making real connections. The response? An immediate engaged reply that opened the doors to further conversation.

Hi [Name],

Great to connect! I see you’re working with [tool] for digital experience analytics. I’d love to show you how [company] can add even more value. Let’s chat soon if you’re up for it!

LinkedIn outreach:

And let’s not forget the power of a LinkedIn notification. Tagging a prospect in a post tailored to their interests gets their attention. It’s like giving them a virtual tap on the shoulder and saying, “Hey — thought you might find this interesting.” This works because it directly engages them with content relevant to their interests, making your approach feel personal and showing that you understand their professional needs.

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How to use sales prospecting tools

CRM systems don’t just keep track of data; they turn it into a tool of its own. These systems keep a history of prospect interactions within reach, so every touchpoint is relevant and personalised. However, in my experience, the key is not just to rely on sales tools, but to use them to enhance the human elements of sales.

• Identify your ideal customer profile (ICP): Get a clear picture of who your ideal customer is. What are their pain points? What solutions are they seeking? Understanding your target audience is the first step in effective prospecting.
• Build a list of contacts: Cast a wide net. Scour various channels — from LinkedIn to industry forums — to identify potential leads that match your criteria. It’s all about finding those needles in the haystack.
• Create an omnichannel approach: To connect with prospects effectively, you’ve got to be everywhere they are. Don’t limit yourself to one channel of communication. Connect with prospects in their preferred space, whether it be email, social media, in person, or a phone call.
• Use the right tools at the right time: Don’t just use sales prospecting tools for the sake of it. Be strategic. Tools such as Sales Engagement or LinkedIn Sales Navigator are for understanding the landscape: who the decision-makers are and what messages will resonate with them. It’s about crafting persona-based messaging that hits the mark.
• Build real connections: Think beyond just generating leads, and use soft skills as a prospecting tool. Whether sending an email acknowledging professional milestones or sharing tailored content, a rep who leans into active listening and empathy skills can help prospects feel valued — and more than just a potential sales target.

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Fuel your sales prospecting engine

Sales prospecting isn’t just about wishing and hoping for the right opportunities — it’s about making it a science. By using a combination of inbound and outbound strategies, personalised engagement, and effective sales tools, sellers can rev up sales prospecting and turn more potential leads into closed deals.

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The post Sales Prospecting: How to Find the Right-Fit Customers You’re Looking For appeared first on Salesforce.