The making of a winning Sales organization: Challenges, trends and opportunities in 2022

We surveyed 500 B2B sales pros about their job, the sales intelligence tools they use and their need for data – these are their stories

Being in the sales intelligence business, we get a lot of questions about how data is used by salespeople.

Our unique position allows us to see the potential shortcomings of sales intelligence, and it brings us face to face with the ways bad data affect salespeople on a daily basis.

This year we went a step further than collecting insights from our database, launching an industry-wide survey about these very questions.

For context, the questions we asked were predicated on findings we already stumbled over. We knew that salespeople were finding parts of their jobs challenging. We kind of knew what the pain points were. But we wanted to see how widespread these struggles were and just how much they were bleeding into the day-to-day work.

Seeing that 96% of the sales professionals reported needing more help than they are currently getting out of their sales software, and 77% claimed they face actual hardships in the early stages of the sales cycle despite having ample access to sales tools, went a long way in grounding what we already knew and propelling us to dig deeper.

To see more data, visit the?FULL REPORT

How to stop wasting time?

A few months ago Lusha sat down with?Shahin Hoda?from xGrowth. XGrowth is an SMB marketing agency whose sales team has faced serious hardships getting to decision-makers in the companies it was targeting.

Shahin is young, ambitious, and tech-savvy. Much like 95% of the sales professionals surveyed who reported having access to sales tools, Hoda is no stranger to software and he knows his way around a sale. If only he can get in front of the right person in the org, that is….

Unfortunately, Shahin’s frustration with sales tools that fail to provide the right contact information coincides with the experiences of much of the 75% of respondents who reported relying on sales tools to perform their jobs.

These are salespeople who are tech-savvy, who do use sales software, and who will put in the effort to adopt new technologies. 96% of these individuals say the tools their companies provide them with don’t do enough to make their jobs easier, and 42% of them venture out on their own and, like Hoda, supplement the tools they are given with additional software.

Sales pros admit: Time efficiency is linked to data quality

A recent sitdown with?Chancellor Corbett?who’s a sales consultant for Oracle Netsuite raised similar concerns. Corbett got right down to it and explained in simple terms the cost of wrong or inaccurate data. He talked about time wasted on wild goose chases after phone numbers of executives. His quota of 35 booked meetings a quarter ballooned into too many additional hours hunting for correct contact information.

Corbett’s frustration is mirrored in the survey results. 97% of respondents claim they are emotionally affected by their jobs, and 28% point to the time they spend searching for accurate contact information instead of selling as a primary source of aggravation.

These voices, and the fact that they are heard in 10,000 employee corporations as often as they come from 50-100 people startups, was what prompted us to question the effects of data quality on sales and on salespeople’s job satisfaction.

You can read the full report?here.

Poor data affects reach-out and pitching

We saw that the biggest challenge SDRs are facing in the early stages of the sales cycle is a lack of data about their prospects.

Consistent with what we heard from our users, prospecting and lead qualification were also an issue and the hardships there boiled down to data quality.

Low-quality data was sending SDRs into tailspins in search of the information they needed to determine the relevance of their prospects. Once these prospects turned into leads, quality data was instrumental in determining whether or not to pursue them.

Respondents’ breakdown of where they needed to help the most coincided with the challenges they described.

To see more data points, visit the?FULL REPORT

And then there’s the emotional toll on SDRs

While most of the talk surrounding the efficiency of the sales cycle revolves around the ability to land sales, time wasted and impact on revenue, the story of salespeople’s satisfaction with their jobs is an angle that doesn’t get nearly as much coverage. This is why we put an emphasis on sales professionals’ emotional health and the mental load of their job.

Respondents consistently expressed a correlation between the amount and quality of data at their disposal and their satisfaction with their jobs. They reported a decline in their sense of wellness when faced with the effects of bad data. Feeling embarrassed and unprofessional were some of the described emotions, alongside frustration over the time wasted prospecting that they could be selling.

To see more data about sales pros job satisfaction and well-being stats, visit the?FULL REPORT

Next steps for an optimal sales organization

We’re now in the lessons learned part of the learning curve. We’ve learned that the way sales have been done is flawed. Or rather, that it could be made better. We’ve learned, also, what hurts and we know how to fix it.

Improving technology:

The days of ‘spray and pray’ are over and sales professionals have turned in their one-size-fits-all pitches for targeted efforts and hyper-focused outreach. To do that, salespeople need quality data. Data that continuously updates and integrates from multiple sources. Software that runs ongoing quality checks, dynamic and live. Data that won’t give you a wrong number or an out-of-use email, a job title from last year, or the name of a decision-maker that doesn’t work for the company anymore.

Increasing adoption:

It often takes purchasing companies longer to make changes in their software usage. The bigger the company the longer it may take and the more red tape to get through. This is why sales professionals, especially decision-makers like team leads, need to get ahead of their companies ‘slow to move’ attitudes, and find and demand the software that will bring them results.

Companies that are devoted to creating quality data for B2B sales are out there. They are increasing their data sources and perfecting their outputs all the time. They are, essentially, making your life that much easier. But it’s up to the people that need them to relay the message upward. To get their companies to take notice of what they’re missing or what isn’t working, and to make the case for adopting these new technologies.

For more data points see the full report?here.

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