Driving Consistency into Your Sales Processes for Higher Performance

Is your Sales team as effective as they could be? Even the best Sales rep knows there are only so many hours in a day to follow up with leads via emails, SMS text messages, and phone calls. Each of these touches requires persistence and consistent messaging. Some of these efforts result in conversions, while others amount to little more than time spent. If your workforce is handling a high volume of customer interactions on a daily basis, lapses in messaging may crop up and leads tend to slip through the cracks.

The good news is that one core shift can solve this problem quickly — establishing consistent sales processes within your organization. Organization-wide consistency is a powerful practice that takes your Sales team from good to great. In this post, we’ll cover why consistency is critical to lead engagement and how an AI-powered Revenue Digital Assistant™ can help.

Crash Course: Consistency

First, let’s discuss why consistency is important. The truth is, if you don’t catch a lead’s interest from the get-go, the lead won’t make it further down the pipeline. This means having a clear process in place for first engagements is a critical consideration for your organization.

But the Sales process doesn’t stop there. For many of your leads, more interactions and conversations are needed before they agree to buy. Even if you have a calculated and well-thought-out engagement policy, your reps are only human and sometimes fall short of total adherence to your engagement policies.

Unfortunately, values and consistency are rarely enforced by organizations that instead build lead development cultures around activity and output. Sure, this might lead to short-term gains in lead output. But think about what is lost. This lack of consistency leads to bad first impressions, disconnected messaging, weak customer relationships and lost opportunities.

Luckily, Revenue Digital Assistants for Sales are changing the game by handling first touches with each lead.

How Revenue Digital Assistants Can Help

Because they are fully automated, AI-powered Revenue Digital Assistants adhere to your best-in-class Sales engagement practices, including consistent messaging across conversations. From day one, you can be confident that you’ll be on the path to a consistent lead engagement strategy. Revenue Digital Assistants boost your workforce by automating routine high-volume customer engagements while retaining consistent messaging throughout. This dramatically improves results and leads to more opportunities and conversions.

As we said earlier, this is especially important at the first point of contact with a lead. Incomplete, off-base or otherwise inconsistent messaging turns off leads early in the process. It’s better to keep conversations predictable and routine, and where lead volume is highest.

Generally speaking, these leads are too high in the funnel for your Sales team to handle. But this group is a perfect fit for a Revenue Digital Assistant who can touch thousands of leads at one time without ever stumbling or struggling with inconsistency. Better still, Conversica can also target and dialogue with leads higher in the funnel who rarely, if ever, get touched by your Sales reps.

Revenue Digital Assistants Drive Efficiency

Revenue Digital Assistants are not a replacement for the personal touch of a Sales team, but they can help build more efficient processes so your team can apply their focus where it’s most rewarding.

AI-powered digital assistants help move leads to the next step of your lead qualification process. The volume of leads handed over by the AI assistants is much more manageable for your Sales team. When a Salesperson does jump on a call they’re more likely to have a conversation with someone who is actually interested in your company or product.

Also, when a Sales-focused AI assistant takes over the more routine conversations, your team can focus on more in-depth, creative, and complex conversations with your prospects typical of the bottom of the funnel.

So, how do you ensure consistency across these conversations that your SDRs and other salespeople are having with customers, without the help of an AI assistant? The best approach for this is to focus on creativity and team culture.

Consistency, Team Culture and Teleprospecting

SiriusDecisions’ research brief “Improving Lead Development Team Culture to Drive Teleprospecting Effectiveness” goes into more detail about culture and consistency. According to this brief, culture has a powerful impact on an organization’s effectiveness. Constantly managing that culture plays an important role in the success of teleprospecting.

Research shows a failure to improve culture has a big impact on the success of your Sales team: “Only 5 percent of calls made by LDRs end with a positive result – a teleprospecting qualified or teleprospecting generated lead. Of the remaining 95 percent, nearly half are declines, with an average talk time of just over one minute.”

By maintaining your company culture and reinforcing consistent sales processes, organizations will enjoy a higher performance. And isn’t that the goal?

Next Steps: Creating a Great Culture

Now that you know your organization needs to constantly manage culture, what can you do next? There are three simple steps you can start today to create a better culture:

• First, take a look at your values and how you can apply them consistently across your organization.
• Next, be sure to incentivize your team by having reward and recognition processes in place.
• Finally, ensure that you’re enabling your team by giving them access to the training and development tools they need.

When you put these things together, you can improve lead conversion and lower LDR and SDR attrition.