4 ways sales leaders can help their teams win more deals with less effort using Outreach

Posted May 23, 2022

By Elizabeth Dailing

VP of Product Marketing Strategy at Outreach

Every sales team is trying to meet and exceed their revenue goals. That’s a given. But with the sometimes thousands of actions required for your team to deliver at their highest potential, it can be hard to know where to focus your energy to close the gap between potential revenue and actual revenue your organization achieves.

We call this the Sales Execution Gap.

The Sales Execution Gap has three root causes:

  • Inefficient prospecting
  • Weak deal management
  • Inaccurate sales forecasting
When organizations close the Sales Execution Gap, they win more deals with less effort, forecast without guesswork, and deliver a better customer experience.

How does traditional technology stand in the way of revenue potential?

Disconnected apps, manual tracking and tasks, and lack of overall visibility mean sellers spend far less time selling than they should. And as a leader, you don’t have visibility across all activities to know where your team’s deals stand and whether or not they will close. Meeting revenue goals is not only essential for company success, but for your sellers’ success. When sellers aren’t closing deals, they aren’t making money. This leads to higher turnover, costing leaders time and money to replace them.

Each time a worker leaves, it costs companies one-third of that person’s annual earnings to replace them — and it's that much harder on the rest of the team to hit the company quota short-handed.

Teams need one single source of truth that makes it easy for them to take the right steps at the right time to win the deal. The Outreach Sales Execution Platform helps teams prospect more efficiently, improve sales execution, proactively fix deal risks, and win more predictably to close the Sales Execution Gap.

When organizations close the Sales Execution Gap and execute at their full potential, they win more deals with less effort and deliver a better customer experience.

Here are four ways Outreach can help you close the Sales Execution Gap.

1. Gain full visibility into all sales activities and customer interactions

As a sales leader, you need a clear understanding of the prospect’s needs in order to help your sellers execute the right deal strategy. But you certainly don’t have time to attend every sales call.

Outreach Guide provides true visibility into sales activities and customer interactions by automatically capturing key moments during calls, providing real-time guidance to sellers, and ensuring they take the right actions after the call. At an executive level, you can look for key trends across meetings and monitor all deals and mutual action plans in a single view to support your team’s deal progress. 

Buyer engagement signals help you guide reps to focus on deals that have a higher chance of closing.

2. Increase credibility with accurate revenue forecasting

When sellers have too many tasks that are not directly related to making quota, they’re reluctant to get them done — like updating a CRM system. This leaves leaders without the visibility they need to accurately forecast and measure deal health. When everyone is uneasy about status, it means leaders end up spending too much time checking up on deals.

When sellers make calls or send emails with our sales engagement solution Outreach Engage, everything writes back to our revenue operations solution, Outreach Commit (and the CRM). Sales leaders no longer need to nag or check in on sellers and sellers don't have to spend so much time updating numerous sales systems. With Outreach Commit, leaders automatically get a deal-pacing view and forecasting they can trust.

Outreach Commit enables leaders to go from guessing the future to changing it with recommended actions.

3. Streamline workflows to retain talent

Sellers using traditional methods spend less than 36% of their time selling. The high volume of repetitive tasks and data entry into all their disparate systems takes their attention away from their actual job of selling and impedes their ability to make quota. And as a result, sellers seek jobs elsewhere where they can more consistently make their commission.

Outreach Engage simplifies and automates workflows to greatly reduce those manual tasks that take up much too much time. From templates to pre-loaded content snippets to automatic meeting scheduling — sellers can stay focused on high-value, customer-facing activities that generate revenue for themselves and your business.

Outreach Engage serves as a system-of-execution for sales reps, simplifying and automating their workflows to optimize pipeline generation and seller success across the organization.

4. Stay ahead of the competition

When your systems and processes are not automated to help sellers engage buyers with personalized interactions throughout the sales cycle, they’re likely going with their gut to navigate the deal. Eventually, even the best sellers will make mistakes in this environment. This can cost your company hard-won opportunities and open the door for competitors to step in and take your place.

To get past intuition selling and guesswork, the Outreach Sales Execution Platform — Outreach Commit, Outreach Guide, and Outreach Engage — helps replace random gut-instinct decisions with consistent data-backed actions. Sales leaders can see what actions are experiencing success and put them to work across the team.

Learn how your team can improve efficiency and close more deals

If your team has the talent but can’t seem to put all the pieces together to deliver on your sales objectives, you are likely experiencing a Sales Execution Gap. Sales leaders that use Outreach gain confidence in the health of their deals and the reliability of their projections because they can see both in real-time. The entire organization can perform at a higher level with proven playbooks and workflows that act as levers for growth, risk mitigation, and operational excellence.

Want to improve efficiency and close more deals? Request a demo of Outreach today. 


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