Sales Empowerment Platforms: The Bright Future of Remote Sales

Find out what a sales empowerment platform is and how it’s vital to your remote sales team straight from Bloobirds CRO Toni Perez.

What is a sales empowerment platform?

A Sales Empowerment Platform integrates with your CRM or ERP to transform it into an intelligent sales assistant. It’s like having an extra team leader or sales operations on your team, enhancing your sales reps’ efficiency and effectiveness. In return, you’ll get more activity and better conversion rates from your salespeople.

Does a sales empowerment platform work with my existing CRM?

Yep!

The fact is that a CRM is little more than a database. Of course, it is the company’s backbone and your data recording system. But, it doesn’t help sales reps to sell more and better. 

If the CRM is the system of recording, the sales empowerment platform is the system of operations. It’s an essential tool to help sales reps digitalize and systematize sales. And to monitor and orchestrate remote teams in real-time, it’s the perfect partner for your CRM.

How does a sales empowerment platform benefit my sales team?

A sales empowerment platform encourages sales reps to be more active. They’ll use more channels, choose the right message for each touchpoint, and aggressively and consistently manage their pipeline. 

A sales empowerment platform automatically translates lead, account, opportunity lists into tasks – always guiding sales reps with what to do next with every lead, account, or opportunity. So, you can forget about opps without enough follow-up activity and abandoned leads.

When should I connect a sales empowerment platform to my CRM?

The CRM is the perfect database. That’s a fact. But, is it made for helping, assisting, guiding, or pushing sales reps?

The answer is no.

And this fact can cause many issues for your sales team. Here are some signs it’s time to add a sales empowerment platform to your CRM:

1. Your salespeople are spending too much time updating the CRM and filling it with errors.
2. Your salespeople aren’t calling or emailing leads enough and sometimes opportunities are forgotten.
3. The CRM doesn’t help in organizing the pipeline and managing the process, so you have free riders/freestylers.
4. Your sales team’s messaging isn’t ideal and doesn’t portray your product or service’s value.
5. You don’t have enough reliable data from your CRM to help you make better decisions.

These common pains make sales leaders move from one CRM to another trying to find one that can actually help their sales reps. Others invest a lot of resources in hacking their CRM – developing triggers, workflows, or customizing processes, and connecting tons of tools.

My experience is that usually, these scenarios generate a lot of technical issues, huge maintenance costs, and very slow improvement processes.

Sales empowerment platforms are the perfect partner for your CRM. They offer a plug-and-play, all-in-one solution for solving all of these common pains.

Now, let’s find out how.

What features can I expect to find in a sales empowerment platform?

1. Sales Engagement Features

Sales engagement platforms offer a host of features that are helpful to sales reps. But, sales empowerment platforms take those features one step further. 

Here are the sales engagement capabilities you can expect to find inside Bloobirds: 

• Smooth integrations with telephone, email, and LinkedIn so each activity is registered within the CRM automatically. Including call recording for training and coaching purposes.
• A cadence engine for increasing activity, maximizing contactability, keeping track of every lead/account, and maximizing opportunity follow-ups. Having a systematic and intensive team is a game-changer.
• Smart-alerts inform you of any incoming activity (new mail, email opens and clicks, new web download, new linkedIn message) in real-time so sales reps can react immediately.

2. Sales Enablement Features

Sales enablement software combines sales playbooks and marketing collateral with useful processes for sales reps.

Bloobirds also provides sales enablement capabilities:  

Sales playbook framework

Land your Go-To-Market Strategy (GTM-S) into something that guides your team daily, so they:

• Prospect the right leads and accounts, i.e., Target Market
• Find and import prospects from LinkedIn and classify each lead by Buyer Persona.
• Correctly identify pain points based on specific situations or scenarios.
• Ask the right qualifying and profiling questions for each specific case so your CRM is plenty of ‘market research’ data.

Content & Template Database

Gain access to a content and template database smartly pre-segmented by: 

• Target Market 
• Scenario
• Buyer Persona

Your reps will deliver the right messaging and content for each specific case. In turn, you’ll increase brand relevance and conversion rates.

3. Pre-built Sales Process Features

Finally, the missing piece of many sales engagement or enablement platforms is full process assistance. Bloobirds transforms your current CRM from being a passive data base to being a smart sales assistant.

Bloobirds provides pre-defined processes for:

• Pre-qualifying inbound leads.
• Assigning the right accounts and leads to the right sales reps.
• Prospecting the right amount of accounts and leads with a minimum level of daily activity. And using a minimum set of channels. 
• Daily follow-ups with each opportunity based on each specific level of engagement and opportunity stage.

A full nurturing process

You can precisely identify reasons for discarding and nurturing leads and accounts to:

• Understand the whys behind the whats.
• Create different nurturing and recycling policies for each relevant reason.
• Recycle accounts and leads in nurturing.

4. Sales Intelligence Features

A sales empowerment system registers each insight into a structured format within your CRM. In turn, your reporting system will have an abundance of data at all levels: activity, results, efficiency, conversions, and process quality. 

The data is structured based on your playbook. So, you can segment and understand the whys behind the whats and validate your Go-To-Market strategy weekly. 

Precise Targeting

With Bloobirds, you can answer the following questions about which prospects your sales team is targeting –

• Is my team targeting the right companies based on geography, industry, vertical, and company size?
• Is my team pre-qualifying every lead properly?
• Is my team targeting enough quality leads based on my buyer persona definition?
• Is my team taking appropriate, systematic, and sufficient action to contact their leads?

Relevant messaging 

With Bloobirds, you can answer the following questions about the messaging your team uses –

• After contacting the right person, is my team using the perfect messaging to persuade them to meet with us?
• Is my team asking both the right questions to qualify and profile the company and the defined pain point questions? Are those answers being recorded so I can understand my market?
• Which pitch works best?
• What is my pitch conversion rate by Target Market? And by buyer persona?

Strategic Insights

With Bloobirds, you can answer these critical questions to make better business decisions –

• Is my conversion rate from Qualified Company to Pitch Done ideal? And from Pitch Done to 1st Meeting Scheduled?
• What is an excellent opportunity for my company – which convert more and faster? Is my team generating enough of these opps?
• With which business scenario do we succeed the most? Which ones do we need to improve? 
• Why aren’t the qualified companies we manage to pitch converting into a first meeting? What are the objections we are not handling properly?
• Is my team following up on all of the opportunities systematically? Are they nurturing them with the right content?

Why do I need a sales empowerment platform?

Finally, a sales empowerment platform ensures that your entire team works as a system predictably. Meanwhile, your reps will know what to do at the right time, using the best communication channel and with the most relevant messaging and content. 

Typically, managers love CRMs. They hold the information you need to understand your sales processes. Bloobirds makes sure your CRM has more data without any extra effort. 

In contrast, sales reps usually hate CRMs. They waste their precious selling time by asking them to fill in form after form. 

Fortunately, sales reps love sales empowerment platforms.

“Before Bloobirds, I found myself losing time with mundane tasks and logging data. Now I can focus my time on calling, emailing, and becoming more relevant while optimizing my activity. What I like the most about Bloobirds is the simplicity and UX that it provides.”

Ivan Falcó, Sales Development Representative, Lead Ratings

In the era of remote sales, your CRM plus a sales empowerment platform is the perfect combo. You’ll make your life, and your sales reps’ workdays, much more manageable.

– All the best

Toni Perez, CRO and Co-Founder Bloobirds

Discover how to empower your sales team without changing your CRM.