If you’re struggling to maintain productivity and close deals with a leaner revenue team, you’re not alone. The turbulent business climate has left many organizations with empty seats that won’t be filled any time soon. So where does that leave shrinking revenue teams, who carry the double burden of fewer people and increased pressure to deliver?
Hard Choices: Lean Revenue Team Options
When revenue teams shrink, it feels like you have two choices:
- Work fewer deals, or
- Work the same number of deals but see sales cycle times increase.
In our view, neither of those is an acceptable outcome for your business. Having fewer people doesn’t mean you have to settle for lesser results.
Moving Revenue Teams Forward Efficiently
So how can you empower your lean revenue team to keep producing? The answer lies in getting everyone on the same revenue orchestration platform. Revenue orchestration platforms combine once loosely connected tech throughout the entire seller and buyer journey into a unified powerhouse – bringing together conversational AI chat, buyer signals, sales engagement, deal management, conversation intelligence, sales coaching, and forecasting into one platform.
When people are on the same page, more things get done with less effort. In fact, nearly every respondent in a recent Expert Market survey agreed that effective communication impacts their productivity and efficiency.1 Here’s how a shared workflow platform for revenue teams makes that happen.
Smoother handoffs. As deals move through the funnel, customers get passed to other roles or teams. With a revenue orchestration platform like Salesloft, the next team member in your process can get up to speed quickly and easily, without having to waste time in internal catch-up meetings or dig through deal notes. Users can simply go into an account and review what buyer engagement has happened with the account. They can read emails and listen to call recordings (or read the AI-generated recaps for key points from a call). No one has to spend hours in handoff meetings or worse, fly blindly through the funnel.
Streamlined interactions. Because every touch with that customer is contained in one place, a shared workflow platform can help manage the sales cycle more effectively when next-stage roles such as a solutions engineer, value consultant, or even leadership are brought into the relationship. A team member can go into a call knowing the customer had a recent discussion about X issue with Team Member Y and it sounds like Z happened as a result. It also means that calls can start with resolving whatever question or challenge is at hand for the customer, not figuring out who has said what to whom. This is no small benefit — according to Forbes, ineffective workplace communication costs U.S. businesses $1.2 trillion annually.2
More face time. Time is a precious resource, especially for a lean revenue org. If your team is spending time tracking down account information from multiple tools or sitting through internal catch-up meetings, guess what they’re not doing? Spending time with the customer. When your full revenue team operates efficiently on a shared workflow platform like Salesloft, that saved time means getting in front of more customers, more often. That moves teams — and deals — forward.
Moving Revenue Teams Forward Faster
A shared revenue orchestration platform empowers your team to engage with the right people in the right way from the very beginning of the deal. Lean revenue teams have no time for wasted steps, dropped balls, or confusion that delays a deal moving through the funnel. Your team also gets all the deal context and coaching they need to bring home the win faster than ever. This is how it works:
Full-deal visibility. A revenue orchestration platform makes all stages of a deal go faster because everyone can look and — in under a minute — understand the deal stage quickly. There’s no confusion around the next right step in your process or who on the team is supposed to take it. When all of your team’s roles engage in their part at the right time, it eliminates friction and accelerates deal closings. An added bonus: seeing the entire journey, with steps taken, also helps with sales forecasting.
Close-worthy coaching. For managers in particular, a revenue orchestration platform is an invaluable tool for improving team performance. Managers can see what’s contributed to the deal progressing and what has gotten you to a particular point. This is pivotal, because instead of spending time discussing what happened on the last call or getting brought up to speed, the time in one-on-ones can be spent actually coaching. This delivers two benefits. First, a manager with a holistic view has everything needed to coach their teams on moving a deal that’s slowing down. Second, when it’s easy for managers to lean into the sales coaching and skills aspects of developing their people, they nurture stronger performers who can close more deals more quickly.
Imagine the amazement when your team over-delivers even when you’re under-resourced. It’s no daydream — according to recent research, using Salesloft results in a 10% increase in sales productivity, which, in real dollars, represents $1.4 million in time savings. That’s delivering serious value when your organization needs it most.
If you’re part of a leaner revenue team, you don’t have to settle for fewer deals or longer sales cycle time. By implementing a revenue orchestration platform, you can improve the productivity of your people and the closing speed of your deals. If you already have Salesloft, the way forward is even easier. Simply assign your unused licenses to the rest of the revenue team — especially roles such as full cycle account executives and account managers, sales engineers, value engineers, customer success and renewals teams, leadership — to turn “lean” into “green.”
2 Forbes