How B2B sales teams are driving more pipeline and deals

Traditional CRMs weren’t built for the modern B2B sales journey. And, despite putting a great deal of technology at their fingertips, they’re not making sellers more effective. 

Why?

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1. They rely on manual data entry. Records are prone to human error and left incomplete by sellers too busy with their first job: selling. 
2. They require too much context-switching. Sellers use a myriad of tools and websites to find prospects, conduct discovery, and manage deals. The CRM should be embedded with them through the process, but it’s not.
3. They lack one fundamental type of insight that can help sellers map out the buying committee and the warm introduction critical to a successful deal: relationship intelligence. 

Today’s B2B sellers need a solution that works for them, not the other way around. Our new guide looks at how sales teams can edge ahead of the competition with next-generation tools built for our age of relationship-first selling. Download the guide or keep reading for some of our key takeaways.

The unique needs of B2B sales

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Complex enterprise deals require a vast amount of internal collaboration from a team of AEs, BDRs, AMs and sales and RevOps leadership. This requires keeping everyone on the same page with complete, accurate data—especially since the number of interactions per deal jumped by 60% in 2021 alone, according to Forrester.

Who has time for that? 

Macroeconomic pressures are weighing on many sales teams, competition is higher than ever, and sellers chasing quota understandably deprioritize data upkeep. At the same time, warm introductions have been proven to help close deals 25% faster. 

But when data is siloed or out of date, the hope of finding the right connection to open a door with a prospect remains just that—a hope.

There is a better way of doing things. Relationship intelligence automates away the data drudgery of contact and company records, and provides deal and relationship insights that help ensure sellers focus on selling to the highest quality opportunities. It helps sales teams focus on the right opportunities and optimizes team collaboration to speed sales cycles, and close more deals.

Let’s take a deeper dive.

Data-driven insight to close a deal faster

Whether following up on a lead from marketing or prospecting into a cold account, you can’t prospect effectively without research. You need answers to questions like:

• Who is the decision-maker?
• Who else might be on the buying committee?
• Has anyone in our organization spoken to this prospect before? If so, what was the result?

Relationship intelligence fills in the blanks. It has already analyzed your organization’s entire network and all its communication data. The result is data-driven insights that help you map key stakeholders, find a warm introduction, and conduct outreach that is both personalized and strategic.

Learn more about how to effectively integrate data into your sales processes when you download the guide, Shift Sales into High Gear with Relationship Intelligence.

Removing internal inefficiencies for faster collaboration

Complex B2B deals don’t just require executive support. They often need extra due diligence, security audits, trials, and so on. Sellers must rely on the go-to-market team and their data to close the deal. They must work together in lockstep with a shared understanding of what has already happened and what needs to be done. With little time for internal meetings about every deal, a consolidated view of information is key.

Relationship intelligence ensures seamless handoffs as well as executive alignment. Sales leaders can quickly and easily understand where a deal is, and where it’s going.

By integrating relationship intelligence into Salesforce, sellers can move deals faster with the ability to make instant updates and changes to deal data directly from their email or browser. This removes context-switching from the sales process, giving sellers valuable time back and ensuring the integrity of the data that everyone relies on.

Explore the full impact of relationship intelligence at every stage of the deal cycle in the new guide, Shift Sales into High Gear with Relationship Intelligence.

More deals, less data work

Getting a B2B sales deal over the line is a team sport. Relationship intelligence helps teams work more effectively together, with data automation that creates a strong foundation for better decision-making. Organizations already benefiting from the capabilities of Salesforce can shift into high gear with the addition of Affinity’s relationship intelligence; make sellers more productive by streamlining paths to the best deals, removing manual work, and enabling them to update their deals directly in their everyday workflows and tools.

Download the guide, Shift Sales into High Gear with Relationship Intelligence to discover:

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• How sellers can save more than 200 hours of data entry per year
• What impact relationship intelligence has at every stage of the deal
• Why B2B sales is more like motorsport than you realize

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