Improving Deal Management and Forecasting with Advanced Tools
In today’s fast-moving sales environment, accurate forecasting and deal management are more critical than ever. Sales teams were perpetually being asked to do more with less, and that challenge was even more poignant in times of economic uncertainty. By incorporating more sophisticated tools with flexibility, real-time insight, and heightened data privacy, the sales team is primed to not just survive but thrive. These tools put them in an enabling position to create more pipeline, close more deals, and increase revenue visibility to ensure they will meet their targets despite all the challenges they face.
The Critical Role of Forecast Flexibility
Forecasting is a key component of sales management. In fact, the ability to configure and manipulate a forecast to a business’s needs is tantamount to accuracy and confidence. Outreach recently introduced a number of new features that greatly enhance forecast flexibility.
These features include pipeline reports with custom filters to enable sales leaders to get detailed views of their business and enhanced automated forecast roll-up that provides an integrated view from the different parts of the business, such as growth, expansion, and renewals from a single location for ease of use. This enables the simplification of forecasting and helps diminish forecast risk.
Precise forecasting functionality remains key to sales and RevOps leaders, even in today’s economic environment. With this functionality, leaders can rest assured of informed decision-making, efficient resource allocation, and reporting to stakeholders with much greater confidence. Outreach brings increased configurability in ensuring sales teams tailor their forecasting processes to suit their needs for improvement in overall accuracy and reliability on forecasts.
Maximize the Power of Sales Meetings
Each interaction with a customer has the potential to move a sale one step further, but it’s equally obvious that not all meetings are equal. It’s essential for sales managers to remain visible to every one of these interactions to understand whether their teams are seizing every opportunity. Obviously, for managers, attending each meeting is an impossible feat.
Outreach has developed a new set of features to meet this challenge, allowing closeness into meeting trends. With this easy-to-view new recording page and UI for Kaia, it has never been easier to see what is happening in key prospect and customer meetings.
The major/most notable development lately has to be the introduction of Saved Search Trends. With this feature, managers can monitor interactions in meetings and save reports to ensure their team discusses the right details to engage buyers right through the sales process. This type of insight at the core of targeted coaching by managers unblocks deals and ensures follow-up actions are timely and relevant. This focused meeting management approach is crucial to winning key deals, especially in a highly competitive sales environment.
Amplifying Prospecting with Real-Time Intelligence
Prospecting still is one of the most important stages for any sales, and poor preparation for this may result in lost opportunities. Not being prepared is on par with real research: 82% of B2B decision makers believe that sellers are not prepared for their meetings. Certainly, this might lead to ineffective conversations and a loss of potential deals. With this in mind, Outreach decided to take Kaia’s real-time call intelligence and integrated it directly into the seller’s workflow with Outreach Voice.
The integration offers several key benefits: AI-powered content cards pop up in real-time during calls, providing valuable information that resellers can use to answer even the most blunt questions confidently. The ability to track key moments through bookmarks and notes allows reps to pinpoint and write down the most important points from the conversation. After the call, insights into how the conversation went can help sales teams refine their strategies and improve future interactions.
Kaia for Outreach Voice simply amplifies the overall prospecting experience by offering the prospecting teams the right information at the right time, further elevating success.
Stronger Data Privacy and Compliance
And because sales teams are using much more personal, regulated data than ever, data privacy doesn’t get more pressing. That’s why Outreach is releasing new features at scale that take proactive protection of customer data to the fore, day by day.
HIPAA Attestation
This is one of the newest major updates, which covers PHI data stored in Outreach. Empowering enterprises who prospect, sell, and interact with healthcare through efficient and keen observation of strict data privacy regulations. Outreach also offers HIPAA attestation and the opportunity to sign a Business Associate Agreement, or BAA, for additional contractual protection. This is actually a formal agreement in data privacy and security that will give organizations confidence that their data will be taken care of.
These go a long way toward helping an organization meet strict data privacy requirements, thereby keeping it compliant across a number of different jurisdictions-a chief concern of businesses operating in today’s globalized business environment.
New Reporting Capabilities in the EU Datacenter
For customers in the European Union, data residency and compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation, now known as the GDPR, along with other local regulations, are top of mind. Outreach, having listened to those needs, has focused its development on increasing the reporting capabilities within its EU datacenter as part of Outreach Engage.
These AI-driven reporting tools arm sales teams with real-time, actionable insights into playbooks, people, and processes so they can operate efficiently while staying compliant with local data privacy laws.
These new reporting capabilities will also let an organization go past simple compliance with the GDPR but, moreover, provide unrivaled insight into the inner workings of an organization. Such transparency and control are critical for businesses which want to position themselves as responsible custodians of data on privacy and security issues. With these tools, organizations can achieve much more than mere compliance but also realize a competitive advantage upon which trust with customers was built.
Conclusion
It thus makes a lot of difference when advanced tools and features are integrated with the deal management and forecasting process in regard to pipeline generation, closing deals, and protection of sensitive data. Outreach’s latest updates offer the needed flexibility, insights, and compliance measures necessary to make one’s way through today’s complex sales landscape. Driven by sales leaders, these are designed to ensure better outcomes with more prepared teams to succeed in whatever economic environment might come along.
As the sales landscape continues to shift, having the right tools and strategies will be virtually indispensable in juxtaposition to levels of performance versus competition. These enhancements not only heighten operation efficiency but also free the sales teams to do what they do best-sell. With the ability to forecast more accurately, manage deals more effectively, and maintain strict data privacy, organizations are in a position to assure resolution of modern marketplace challenges with confidence and emerge stronger on the other side. These tools represent a very important step forward in the evolution of sales technology, offering the capabilities that today’s sales teams need to thrive.
