The early bird catches the worm. The saying stands true in business as it does in life. Speed and business agility are more than just advantages. They’re a mandatory set of skills that every business needs to have. Businesses can achieve efficiency and agility by using sales acceleration software.
You can often rely on your USP, products, or strategy in sales. Yet, businesses are turning to more than just these as the world develops and the market expands. They’re leveraging powerful technology to put them ahead of the competition.
In this article, we’ll share what sales acceleration software is and how you might want to implement it into your business. We’ll then share our opinion on some of the leading sales acceleration software that the market has to offer.
- What makes sales acceleration different from normal sales?
- What features do sales acceleration tools typically have?
- Which are the leading tools?
Understanding Sales Acceleration
You’d be forgiven for thinking this was another digital buzzword. However, this is one that you should pay attention to. Sales acceleration will help your business. It will streamline your sales process and make the transition from lead to conversion faster.
Traditional sales relied on tactics such as cold calls on the phone and meeting prospects in person. These are still tactics that have some relevance. But with the advent of eCommerce, digital advertising, social media, and instant communication, they have taken a back seat. Businesses that aren’t adapting to the new age are being or have been left behind.
Imagine that you’re walking through a Saturday morning market. The street is lined with vendors, all vying for your attention and hard-earned cash. Vendors need to act fast. They know they have you in their sights for a limited time. They know the next vendor will start advertising their wares at you any moment. So, what’s the way of winning your business?
It’s almost always down to sharing the right message at the right time. As a business, you need to cut through the noise so that your offering is presented to the prospect at precisely the right moment. There’s certainly some intuition here, but you can’t rely on that alone. You need technology to help. You need sales acceleration software.
Sales acceleration software doesn’t replace your sales team. Far from it. It enhances them. It gives them an edge against competitors and helps them to move with speed and efficiency. They have myriad features, such as automated sales outreach, analytics, and scoring systems.
Using them means that audiences can be targeted more accurately than ever before. That same audience can be engaged effectively. Then, deals can be closed quickly and succinctly at the right time. These tools aren’t about shouting at the passerby the loudest. They’re about forging a meaningful connection with them instead.
How Does Sales Acceleration Software Work?
We’ve briefly mentioned some of the features of sales acceleration software above. Each software offers a slightly different range of features and tools. These are some that you should look out for.
Automated Outreach
One of the biggest time savers during the sales process. Automated outreach saves you hundreds of hours of manual outreach. Rather than making endless phone calls or sending countless emails, the system does it for you. The tool ensures your message is sent at the right time and then engages with the lead accordingly. You get to engage with more prospects by making considerably less effort. Win-win.
Lead Scoring
Some leads are worth more of your time than others. When leads are scored, you can prioritize based on how likely they are to convert. That means you can assign resources and people to those most likely to deliver revenue. Lead scoring happens automatically based on certain behaviors or characteristics displayed by the lead.
Analytics
A comprehensive analytics suite gives you insight into how your business is performing. You can often gain an understanding of metrics related to sales performance, marketing campaigns, and even customer preferences. Once armed with this knowledge, you’ll be far more likely to achieve conversions.
Integrations
Your tool should integrate with your current tech stack. At the very least, it must be compatible with your choice of CRM. With a CRM connection, you can track each customer’s journey through your sales process.
Playbooks and Templates
These are essential for new starters and act as a great reference for experienced employees. Sales acceleration software often comes loaded with templates to help send emails or make calls. The playbooks will act as your sales bibles, clearly demonstrating what the ideal customer journey looks like.
Notifications
As events happen, you need to act fast. A system that can tell you precisely when to act will be a powerful tool. Many tools will instantly inform you when a proposal is read or an email is opened, meaning you can plan your follow-ups perfectly.
Leading Sales Acceleration Software
Instantly
Effective communication is at the heart of sales acceleration software. That’s precisely what Instantly offers. Powerful sequences and subsequences deliver automated outreach. Each email is delivered at exactly the correct time. Plus, you can be sure that the email will land in the recipient’s inbox thanks to the AI-powered account warm-up process.
Beyond emailing, Instantly offers a robust lead prospecting tool. These leads are generated through powerful workflows that search a database with over 160 million contacts. Lead prospecting isn’t a typical feature of sales acceleration tools, but seeing your newly prospected leads immediately enter your sales process is a genuine lightbulb moment.
Once you’ve found an ideal client, you can build on that knowledge by cloning them using the lookalike feature. That saves valuable time during the prospecting process. Talking of saving time, Instantly’s cold email accelerator gives you access to 50+ docs and SOPs, 600+ cold email templates, step-by-step campaign instructions, and even access to Instantly’s cold email vault.
Koncert
Koncert brands itself as a personalized sales cadence software. The aim is to enable your team to reach leads in a scalable way by using phone and email. It achieves this through power dialers, predictive programming, and even sales gamification. Your team creates an optimized sales process within Koncert, and the system guides leads through it. You can then track and monitor their progress and intervene appropriately.
LeadConnect
If you’re a LinkedIn power user, LeadConnect could be a great choice. The software automates your entire workflow by generating leads from profile searches. You set your audience segmentation and search criteria, and LeadConnect does the rest. Once you connect with the right people, you can pick up the communication and take the conversation forward.
Adobe Marketo Engage
Adobe Marketo Engage focuses on data to help nurture leads. It provides insights on users few other tools can, including what the lead has interacted with, downloaded, viewed, clicked, and more. It also provides significant volumes of email metrics. Beyond metrics, you can have emails, calls, CRM, and even calendar events monitored and reported on.
DataFox by Oracle
One of the best ways of accelerating your sales process is to talk to the right prospects from the start. That’s what DataFox specializes in. It will assess thousands of prospects across thousands of data sources and provide you with a likelihood of response. That means your team can quickly source and then prioritize leads that they are most likely to open a conversation with.
Playbooks by InsideSales
Playbooks uses cutting-edge AI to generate Plays. These Plays create pre-set strategies and cadences based on customer engagement and pattern analysis. The aim is that, through adaption, it can create more efficient and effective processes. All the while, it will deliver insights and provide actions on who you should be selling to, how you should engage with them, and what the right time might be.
Key Takeaways
If you want to stand out from the competition, you need to be fast and use the right tools. Picking the right sales acceleration software means choosing an asset to enhance and develop your sales process. With the perfect combination of speed and strategy, you can leave the competition in your wake.
- Automation and data will get you so far, but make sure you also take your human sales team with you. They have the human touch, after all.
- This software will evolve your business, so be ready to adapt.
- Ensure your new tool can easily integrate with your existing software and tools.
If you want to maximize the efficiency and speed of your email outreach, you need a tool that can facilitate that. That’s precisely what Instantly offers, and you can get started with it today.