It’s been a whirlwind couple of weeks! It’s event season and Qvidian has been busy around the world attending some of the leading business and sales events, talking to leaders from all industries. Most recently, we returned from Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual user conference that drew an astounding 130,000 attendees this year. It’s the type of event that is as much a spectacle as it is full of networking and learning.
There were 1,250 sessions covering topics across industry, job role and product, and over 350 companies showcasing more than 1000 solutions. It can be a tricky week to get your message through to attendees. But this year, we had a resounding number of attendees stop and say some variation of the same thing after reading our booth signage, “Oh, we need help with sales execution!”
After many conversations with customers and sales leaders, it’s clear there is a gap between sales strategy and sales execution. How do we know? The symptoms are ubiquitous – missing quotas, needing to do more with existing (or often times fewer) resources, and overwhelming pressure to scale and grow top line revenues profitably.
Then, layer on top of that the changed buying environment: sales have become more complex – more product and solution offerings, more configurability, more process, and often more legal or compliance requirements. And we all have read some version of how the buyer is more educated than ever, before they engage with vendor sales reps. Data shows that the decision making process is somewhere around 60% complete before they engage. So it’s more important than ever for sales reps to be able to communicate value in the sales process to differentiate.
So traditionally, what do companies do? They invest in a myriad of point solutions to solve the problems. More training, coaching, sales tools, and marketing and selling content to support the sales team. But that doesn’t move the needle. None of those are silver bullets to solve the overall problem.
We coach our customers to look at all the tools and resources they have, and think about how they can leverage them, along with their CRM data, to create a simple, repeatable process for their reps to follow. With Qvidian Sales Playbooks, our customers are able to not only simplify and repeat proven tactics across sales teams, but do so in a dynamic, personalized way to differentiate their sellers among the others.
If you attended Dreamforce, we would love to hear your thoughts and takeaways from the week! Let us know in the Comments, below.
