Engagement is key to any successful sales process, whether you’re selling products or services to other businesses. B2B buyers are increasingly researching online before ever talking to a sales rep. As a result, sales reps must be armed with the latest information about their products and services to build trust quickly and easily.
Smooth customer interaction is essential in today’s market. A company that cannot provide customers with a positive experience will quickly lose ground to competitors. Therefore, the importance of rules of engagement (RoE) cannot be overstated. Any company that wants to be successful must ensure a clear, consistent, and comprehensive RoE.
Related: Best Practices To Implement A Sales Engagement Platform
So in this blog post, let’s look at sales rules of engagement that help you engage more effectively with customers and close more deals.
5 Rules Of Engagement For The Sales Team To Achieve Its Full Potential
Sales teams are the lifeblood of any company; they bring in the revenue that keeps businesses afloat. But, to achieve its full potential, the sales team must follow these five rules of engagement to serve their customers better and achieve their goals.
1. Align to real-time collaboration
Most sales teams operate with separation between inside and outside sales. However, they can still be aligned with each other. Real-time collaboration is key to the two teams working together towards a common goal.
This means having a shared space where details about conversations and leads can be shared. This way, when an inside sales rep is making headway on an inbound lead, the outside sales team can offer additional insight to help move the sale forward. This level of collaboration is essential to ensuring that both teams are working towards the same goal. By keeping everyone on the same page, you can avoid potential roadblocks and ensure your sales team is operating at its best.
2. Firm understanding of qualification criteria
For teams to work together efficiently, it is essential to have a clear understanding of the criteria needed to qualify for opportunities. These criteria include buying authority, pain points, timing, company profile, or relevant corporate initiatives.
However, they might differ by target organizations or even by different offerings. But, by solidifying qualification criteria, the inside sales team will know whom to convert to a productive first meeting and whom to nurture until factors are aligned.
Moreover, establishing the proper criteria can be tricky, but with a little effort, you can make sure that the teams work together towards a common goal.
3. Having a clean pipeline
Every sales executive’s nightmare is that a pipeline of leads has gone dormant. Not only is it a wasted opportunity, but it is also costly to restart the process with new leads. Keeping prospect data clean and the pipeline healthy requires cooperation from both sides of the sales team.
The most successful sales teams work together in a feedback loop. For example, if the contact goes cold, inside sales reps warm up prospects for outside sales and then pass them back to the inside team to gather more insights on what is needed to move the dark leads forward.
Moreover, abandoning a lead for any reason is never advisable, even if it has yet to progress in the sales cycle. Instead, the best way to ensure sales executives focus on the right opportunities is to correctly identify which prospects are most likely to convert and focus accordingly.
4. Ensure visibility and transparency for everyone
Alignment is key to having an effective sales team. Everyone must be on the same page to achieve the goal. For this, there must be visibility and transparency for everyone involved. This can be accomplished by scheduling regular meetings to check in on KPIs and optimize strategy at least every quarter or every month.
Additionally, it is crucial to have all the data stored in one system to analyze real-time and historical data. This data is then shared with both sides of the sales team to see how the metrics are performing and strategize what needs to happen to hit objectives. Finally, it is vital to set clear goals and objectives, but an inside sales team must also be flexible to shift with the market and buyer needs.
5. Having complete data at every stage
Qualifying leads and closing deals require two different skill sets. Outside sales are typically more focused on moving deals to close and need more time for prospecting. However, inside sales should step in to ensure that opportunities at an early stage are addressed.
Getting a prospect from the first conversation to a closed deal will take several months of nurturing and dozens of touchpoints, especially in a complex sale. Therefore, data covering the entire opportunity lifecycle is essential for success.
Without it, sales teams will only have visibility into a small portion of the buyer’s journey and will miss critical information that helps them win the sale. Having data at every stage of the opportunity will help sales teams close more deals and increase their win rate.
Sales are all about relationships. Whether you are working with customers face-to-face or over the phone, it’s important to remember that the rules of engagement will help you close more sales. Following the above rules can create a positive experience for your business and your customer, leading to a successful sale.
