We have new priorities to address in 2023. Businesses are prioritizing “overcoming recession” as the topmost priority over Leveraging technology, hiring skilled resources, giving great Customer Experience (CX), and others. In this oncoming recession, it is quite challenging for these businesses to decide on increasing or decreasing IT spending this year. Gartner estimates that IT spending will rise by 5.1% (from 2022) and reach $4.6 trillion in 2023. Businesses have no choice but to use technology to meet the customers’ expectations besides monitoring the recession period closely. This blog will explain how to plan sales growth in 2023 using technology and sales strategy to focus on 2023’s business priorities.
I. Automate and streamline sales processes: Leverage the right tools and technologies to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Survey findings conclude that Sales reps spend only 35.2 percent of their time in selling activities. Improve their productivity by leveraging automation tools to help them manage leads, invoicing, quoting, rebate management, forecasting, reporting, and other critical active selling processes. Automation can enable your teams to focus more on revenue-generating tasks by simplifying time-consuming and iterative tasks.
II. Train to Gain: Gartner report says that training the sales teams can improve productivity, but only 40% of sales reps say that their organizations have a well-established culture for training and coaching. Your IT service provider can help you guide your teams and support your business to use the leveraged sales tool to get the desired outcomes.
III. Upgrade the IT systems and integrations: Having outdated CRM, CPQ software, and broken IT integrations always result in workflow interruption, unexpected failures, and valueless insights. So, your IT teams, CPQ consultants, or IT service providers are responsible for ensuring the IT systems are well-integrated with the advanced CPQ software. Customers demand a great Experience along with the customization of configure price quote on products/services. So, implement the next-generation CPQ solution soon to streamline the sales process, improve CX and live up to customers’ expectations.
IV. Reform the sales strategies: A frequent realignment of the strategy to achieve the sales goals can aid your business:
- Stay hassle-free, ensuring the sales initiatives are well-aligned with your brand’s vision and mission.
- Identify the blocks and use automation tools to simplify the recurrent and complex sales activities.
- Collaborate with all the stakeholders to share ideas, information, Key Performance Indicators, and targets, and also to monitor the sales funnels constantly.
- Give a great Customer Experience with instant support, thereby improving conversions and revenue generation
- Involve Sales operations teams to monitor sales teams’ performance, accelerate sales cycles, act based on insights
Follow these tips while planning the 2023 sales strategy: Besides having a sales plan, it is great to have a sales strategy to transiting the smaller milestones. So, start with setting realistic business performance and revenue goals, along with tactics and strategies to achieve these goals in 2023. Plan sales strategy with the below-mentioned steps:
- Develop a Sales strategy with attainable sales revenue and performance goals each month, quarter, and year
- Analyze the existing revenue streams and know if your sales teams are equipped with the right tools, like advanced CPQ solutions, to upsell and cross-sell and make better use of all the sales opportunities or not
- Plan meetings and reviews at regular intervals to monitor opportunity pipeline and close more deals in less time
- Share the roadmap to success and define each team’s roles and responsibilities in following this sales strategy
- Execute the sales plan and evaluate the results frequently to understand what’s working and what’s not in your sales plan
- Focus on areas of improvement and repeat these steps to make successful 2023
To conclude, a Sales plan, strategy, and IT spending can keep you on track and keep your business afloat despite the economic situation. Thus, include cost-effective sales automation tools and technologies to grow revenue this 2023 and beyond. Consult our CPQ experts to know how we can assist you in streamlining your sales processes in 2 weeks at sales@dextara.com.