The last few years forced sellers to switch tracks and go digital-first. In how they prospected, engaged and sold. 

Now that digital (or hybrid) selling is here to stay, sellers have to quickly learn to use the plethora of sales tools available to their advantage. Especially with the looming threat of a recession.

Thankfully, we have some expert help from our co-founder & CEO Lax Papeneni who joined sales gurus Tyler Lessard (VP Marketing & Chief Video Strategist, Vidyard/head of Sales Feed) and Rajiv 'RajNATION' Nathan (Founder, Startup Hypeman) in an episode of the Sales Feed Show podcast. 

Here are 5 expert tips on how sales teams can accelerate their sales, even during an economic slump. 

Personalize with context 

Sales conversations today are happening across channels (if you aren’t on the multi-channel engagement bandwagon, hope on now). As prospects get more accessible, they’re also inundated with messages from hundreds of sellers. And you’re just one of them. Which means you have to stand out. By personalizing. One simple but effective way to personalize your outreach and stand out in crowded inboxes is to include a video message in your email or LinkedIn messages. But you also have to think beyond just understanding the challenges and wishlist of your Ideal Customer Profile. You need to also tailor your engagement with your prospects based on action they’ve previously taken. Which means that you need to know things like when a prospect who’s a part of current engagement goes on to your website. When this happens, you should be able to leverage this context to proactively start a conversation with them on that page. Or move prospects between sequences based on specific triggers. 

Tighten your targeting

Sales folks are likely to hear a lot of Nos during a downturn, thanks to strapped cash flows and tightened budgets. While the (natural) response to combating that might be to expand prospecting lists and cover more ground, the opposite might work better. As Tyler says, “I'm going to spend my precious minutes, hours, days focused on a smaller number of potential prospects who I have a better sense for fitting into either my ICP. They're the ones who are showing a higher level of activity on our website and engaging with us in different places.” This is the time to focus on narrowing down exactly which kind of prospects you want to go after, how pressing their need for a resolution is, what kind of competition you want to take on, which geography you’re targeting….Getting more specific with your targeting means going after a smaller pool with a much greater chance of success and bigger deal sizes. 

Do more with less

This is Lax’s mantra for businesses during any challenge. With a smaller prospect less, tighter budget, a possibly smaller workforce, you need to optimize every stage of your sales process to..you said it..do more with less. Which means that your tools need to do more than one thing. And it needs to enable your reps by taking non-revenue tasks out of their way. For example,the old way was to use different tools for each stage of the sales cycle (prospecting, engaging, monitoring, scheduling, etc..). Each with overlapping functionalities. And multiple invoices. The new way would be to trade these tools for a single platform with not just multiple efficiency features, but also end-to-end functionalities. 

Increase speed to lead

This is a big one. You need to optimize every step of the sales process to convert a prospect into a lead. Especially inbound ones, because there’s intent over there. For example, if it’s taking forever to enrich your marketing and inbound sales leads before you act on them..you’re doing it wrong. The old way would be to use multiple tools, do some trusty ol’ LinkedIn research or something else that involves spreadsheets. Instead, what you’ll need is a tool that auto-enriches every inbound lead so they’re all ready for a meeting or to get nurtured with multi-channel sequences.

Get intelligent about AI 

No conversation is complete without a mention of ChatGPT. So the question is to bot, or not to bot. No doubt that AI tools like ChatGPT are changing the game. Outplay even has an AI email writer that can draft a message and save reps some time. But with all the talk about personalization, can AI really do what humans can? The experts urge you to think a bit differently here. Sure, AI can help with scale. But you’ll still need to get your hands in there for the personal touch. What you should be also tapping into is using AI for efficiency. From summarizing calls and identifying sentiment to automating certain actions, the scope of AI is far beyond writing. For example, AI can be leveraged to identify objections during conversations and surface battle cards that’ll help rep address them. All in real-time. 

It is indeed a new era of sales, and if you play it right, the sales game is yours to win. All you need to do is choose the right tools and make the most of them. It also helps if the tool is easy and intuitive, and comes with a support team that’s really invested in your success. So if you don’t think you have that, try Outplay. 

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