The term Digital Transformation means many things, but as we will present, our discussion here uses the term to capture the strategic dimension as well as the value-creation objective. For many revenue leaders, CRM represents the embodiment of the role that digital technology plays in the sales organization. After all, it’s in the CRM where customer data is held, providing a complete record of all customer interactions in a timely and readily accessible format to drive analytic sales processes, the development of marketing strategies, and feedback to the sales force and channels.
As a consequence, many companies settle on a “holistic” view of the customer based on their CRM being the ground source of truth and this enables enterprise-level marketing, sales, and channel decisions that drive business outcomes. This dynamic is well understood. But what does Digital Transformation look like for complex sales cycles where POCs are required?
Revenue leaders and sales teams managing POCs face many challenges that make it difficult to get the critical insights needed to ensure forecast accuracy. For example, during the pre-sales phase of the sales process where getting to technical win is required for the deal to close, teams often use a collection of disconnected apps with disparate data sets from each solution. This makes information-sharing and transparency difficult and it’s why Digital Transformation for the revenue leadership team should be an essential part of planning in 2022.
Understanding the four main challenges revenue leaders face today can help businesses clarify how to move forward. The good news is that next-generation digital solutions can solve these problems and provide organizations with much-needed clarity on the deal status and revenue projections.
4 Challenges Revenue Leaders Face Today
1. Disconnected Apps Inhibit Sales Visibility
The single biggest challenge facing sales executives and pre-sales leaders is access to data that is being siloed across a smorgasbord of spreadsheets, individual computers, cloud drives and single point solution applications. Management teams need an advanced platform that is able to unite data across disparate systems, giving the organization the ability to combine customer and sales data today that is mostly being lost.
2. Win/Loss Lessons Learned Are Lacking
CRM systems do not preserve win/loss learnings. The only way for sales or other revenue professionals to find win/loss and lessons learned data is to review email threads, Slack messages, and CRM entries manually. Constructing a postmortem from the manual analysis is time-consuming and prone to misrepresentation.
3. Limited Information Sharing Between Vendors and Customers
Another shortcoming of many pre-sales solutions is that there is often no way for a customer to access the vendor's CRM instance. This issue doubles the visibility problem, as customers cannot easily learn from the evaluation process to improve future evaluations with the same vendor or other vendors.
4. Security Risks Are on the Rise
While information-sharing is essential, solutions need robust security to protect sensitive and confidential data. The best pre-sales solutions adhere to SOC2, a voluntary compliance standard for service organizations that focuses on managing customer data in alignment with the five "trust service principles" - security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.
Embrace Digital Transformation with a Proof of Success Platform
Today's leading-edge pre-sales platforms are purpose-built to solve disparate data problems by uniting data held in disconnected solutions in order to improve information flow and transparency. One such platform is Provarity's Proof of Success solution, which delivers reliable forecasting, real-time reporting, efficient engineering allocation, and powerful integrations that enhance the source of truth. This intel provides sales leaders real-time clarity into their pipeline and future business to close projected deals faster.
Provarity gives both the buyer and the seller frictionless communication to ensure what each is looking to buy or sell is the right fit. Visibility into product usage provides clarity and is essential in helping clients win deals. Shortening the sales cycle and providing better deal clarity and improved forecast accuracy is a technical win for all parties.
A Proof of Success system is a competitive advantage by keeping Sales Organizations one step ahead of the competition by:
- Empowering management to deploy universal Play Books across the entire sales organization where management is able to make adjustments in real-time based on lessons learned, new winning techniques, or other industry and market factors.
- Empowering management to ensure best practices are followed on all POC’s.
- Enabling a company to gather rich sales data that has never been obtainable. Now, sales intelligence can be applied to the data giving management actionable business intelligence that has never been obtainable.
Provarity can help to provide proof of value and show the real-time health of every deal in progress. The system is game-changing because it integrates with your CRM to provide never before available functionality so that you can have Situational Awareness of all your POCs. Now you can put an end to the dreaded deal encroachment that plagues many otherwise high-performing sales organizations at the end of the quarter.
