Insights and Research for Marketing, Sales Development and Sales

Sales development reps (SDRs) are responsible for creating qualified meetings for sales reps. While this seems like a straightforward process, TOPO has identified a breaking point.

Many sales organizations fail to address what happens before and after SDRs set up those meetings. This oversight creates confusion.

SDRs pass leads before they are fully qualified, sales ignores qualified leads, or sales fails to document what happened in the meeting and next steps. More often than not, issues like these lead to a lack of alignment and the SDR program suffers.

A trial provides prospects an opportunity to test a vendor’s solution before purchasing. In the age of Software as a Service (SaaS), many technology companies provide self-serve demos. While this works for single-user purchases, it’s not as effective for more complex purchases where multiple stakeholders are forced to navigate the intricacies of trials on their own.

In our first post on sales enablement, we explained the optimal sales enablement stack and the trends influencing its evolution. In part two of the series, we focus on the market landscape, along with TOPO’s predictions and buyer guidance.

One of the key factors for sales success is an organization’s ability to enable sales by providing the required resources to sell effectively. The more fluid and effective a sales rep’s interactions with a buyer, the faster reps can close each deal. And the faster they can close, the more deals they can close. That’s where sales enablement technology comes into play.

The success of a modern sales organization starts before the first sales person even walks in the door. A well-conceived go-to-market strategy, sales playbook, and messaging framework are the foundation for every sales call. Ongoing training on the right processes and the right technology keeps a sales team effective, efficient, and on the same path.

Once you have nailed the product market fit in the seed stage, your focus in Series A is determining whether a small set of sales reps can meet your target revenue number. In other words, can they convert interested, relevant buyers into real opportunities and deals? At this point, you should be looking for ways to optimize the sales process so that you can prove your model is viable at scale.

In part 2 of this series on our Sales Management Market Guide, TOPO focuses on how these technologies deliver value to sales leaders, key considerations when evaluating sales management technology, and the increasing demand for insights and engagement.

The Sales Team Lifecycle is a roadmap companies can follow to effectively put in place the right salespeople, processes, technology, and metrics as they grow from seed to Series C. This roadmap provides a proven approach to aligning the sales team with the company’s size and growth, and setting expectations for what is required at each stage. By following this framework, companies can avoid making the mistakes that introduce unnecessary risk into their sales organizations, go-to-market strategies, and growth plans.

Predictable sales execution is the most important aspect of successful sales from leadership to the sales rep. Today, the ability to deliver on these core responsibilities is not optimized. The day-to-day tasks of reviewing the pipeline, recommending next best actions, and creating forecast visibility suffer from imperfect data. Data that is only partially recalled by the reps and therefore entered incorrectly. Data that falls through the cracks and is left out of the database altogether. Data that is not optimally captured and therefore not visible. Data that is visible, but not easily scanned by busy sales leaders. Data, in other words, that is suboptimal—and therefore leads to unsatisfactory sales results.

Sales engagement, interactions between sales reps and buyers or customers, is overwhelmingly named by sales leaders as their top priority. They are focused on the quality and volume of sales reps’ engagement with buyers as they look to drive higher conversion rates and larger average deal sizes. Sales engagement is such a high priority that 90% of sales leaders plan to invest in technologies and methodologies to help their sellers engage effectively with prospects and customers.