What is sales acceleration technology?

If you are yet to hear about sales acceleration technology then take note, at least some of your competitors are almost certainly using it already. Whether your company and your sales department is small or large, you will need to implement some sort of sales acceleration technology in order to stay competitive.

Sales acceleration technology sits between customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation and is the process of making the sales cycle quicker, shorter and smarter. It uses data to make informed decisions, creates engaging content with which to speak to your prospects and speeds up the process through each part of the sales funnel.

According to InsideSales.com’s 2014 Sales Acceleration Technology Market Size Study, companies investing the most in this technology experience:

• Higher close rates
• Faster sales cycles
• Bigger deals
• Increased revenue

Sales acceleration technology dramatically increases the velocity of the sales cycle, but this doesn’t mean that your sales teams will have less work to do. Automation and acceleration tools increase the efficiency, meaning for the same amount of work one could cover 10x as many opportunities and leads – not do a tenth of the work!

This new technology means that the benchmark is moving a lot higher and the expectation levels of leads and prospects has really changed. Sales success will depend on how persistent you are and how engaged your prospects are with your content.

Does your sales team have the right tools?

Really your sales people should be demanding these tools in order to allow them to be so much more productive and efficient in meeting their targets.

Examples of sales acceleration technology includes:

• Remote sales presentation technology
• Sales intelligence tools
• Data / list services
• Video conferencing
• Sales email
• Social tools
• Contract technology

How many of these is your team currently using? For optimal sales, train and grow a great team and give them the tools.

Rediscovering email

Sales teams are rediscovering email as a really effective sales acceleration tool. Instead of being spammy, sales acceleration technology allows tailored content to be created and pre-loaded so it is ready to use for different types of prospect and at different stages of the sales funnel. This content can then be continually optimised through the use of statistics and functions like split testing.

With the average office worker spending 28% of their day on email and another 19% searching for information (McKinsey Global Institute), use of a sales acceleration email platform presents a huge opportunity.

Big business

Gartner estimated that CRM technology is now a $20billion market and will be $36billion by 2017. The size of the sales acceleration market was $12.8billion in 2013, predicted to reach $30billion by 2017 (Forbes.com).

There is no doubt that sales acceleration technology has a huge influence on competitive advantage and will set you ahead in the race for revenue and customers.