Howard Brown Talks Sales Acceleration Software on NBC’s Smart Money

Our Founder and CEO, Howard Brown, kicked this week off with a guest appearance on NBC’s Smart Money talk radio program. The appearance came on the heels of Howard’s heavily shared Entrepreneur article, The New Wave of Sales Acceleration Technology, which challenged business owners to outfit their sales teams with sales acceleration technology (or lose deals to competitors with superior sales technology.)

In case you missed it, you can listen to a recording of Howard’s appearance and read the transcript here.

Here are 5 great takeaways from Howard’s interview:

2/3rds of Inside Sales Reps Don’t Make Quota

During his radio appearance, Howard described sales acceleration technology in greater depth, underpinning why it’s so vital for businesses to invest in solutions that improve sales ROI. As Howard told host Jim Conaway, “67% of reps don’t hit quota … and a lot of revenue gets left on the table.” .

But with sales acceleration technology, this doesn’t have to be the case. Sales acceleration technology does what the name implies: increase the velocity of sales by helping reps identify hot prospects, connect with them more successfully and increase productivity during the selling process.

Phone Calls Are More Important Than Ever

Buyers have changed. Most customers don’t want to meet sales reps – even in the B2B world, where software can be extremely expensive.The phone call has become even more important than it has in the past. Since far fewer in-person meetings are happening, companies really need as much insight into what is happening on the phone as they do what’s happening by email and other forms of communications. Most don’t have it.

Managers Should Establish Benchmarks to Maximize Success

Howard also discussed how we’re helping inside sales managers ramp up reps much quicker by giving managers real-time feedback into reps’ performance. Managers not only get predictive analytics, but can also drill into call recordings and listen to live calls to monitor which reps are giving a great sales pitch and which reps need some additional coaching. By looking at top performing reps’ sales activities and listening to their pitches, managers can establish benchmarks that can raise the performance of an entire team and help more reps crush quota than ever.

Sales Acceleration Technology Helps Reps Ramp Faster

Without sales acceleration technology, ramping up inside sales reps can be a slow and arduous process. In fact, it can take up to 6 months to ramp up inside sales reps. But by using Revenue.io our customers are ramping up to full quota in a fraction of that time.

The Importance of Scalable Sales Technology

Though Revenue.io was designed for enterprise sales teams, one important question that Jim Conaway asked Howard was whether Revenue.io can work for smaller sales teams as well. Howard raised a great point, stating that many the same tools and processes that work for large enterprise sales teams can almost always be applied to smaller sales organizations as well. Revenue.io was built to scale with your company. Since our customers are closing more revenue, many of them continue to on-boarding more reps. In fact, many of our cusotmers onboard new reps regularly. And whether your sales organization is scaling from 5 reps to 10 or from 100 to 200, Revenue.io makes scaling painless. With Revenue.io, onboarding new reps is as simple as installing an app, and new reps can get up and running in a couple minutes.

When we first built Revenue.io the term sales acceleration technology was not commonly being used. However, we knew that with the right tools, inside sales managers and reps could work together to close more revenue than ever before.  We’re thankful to Jim Conaway and the NBC SmartMoney team for taking the time to interview Howard and cast light on this bustling vertical of business technology.

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