Sales Enablement Tools: 6 Financial Benefits With An Interactive Experiences Platform

“When organizations take the step to enable sellers with data and insights to tell the buyer’s story, the ROI is clear – up to 66% lift in revenue, and as much as 82% more repeat business.”

Forrester

Personalised, visually persuasive and relevant, a sales enablement tool, like an interactive experiences platform can create the WOW! in customer conversations, encouraging your customers to find out more about your business and the value you can deliver in their world.

84% of sales reps achieve their quotas when their employer incorporates a best-in-class sales enablement strategy. Interactive digital experiences contribute to this significantly, by equipping a sales team with the information, tools, and resources they need to have easier, more meaningful customer conversations to ultimately close deals. 

But, if you haven’t yet developed a digital sales experience as your key sales tool, you may be wondering what returns your investment will bring. What are the financial benefits or advantages of using an interactive experiences platform to develop your sales enablement experiences?   

Ultimately increased sales and market share is the goal, which an interactive experiences platform contributes significantly to, but there are other benefits which you may not be so aware of, which also increase revenue and cut costs for our customers.

In this blog, we’ll explore six key financial advantages of implementing an interactive experiences
platform backed by research and customer testimonials.

1. Letting your sales teams concentrate on what they’re best at – selling

“Only 33% of a sales rep’s time is spent actively selling.”

CSO Insights

“81% of sales executives cited content search and utilization as the top productivity improvement area”

Spotio

Did you know that your sales team is wasting over 2/3 of their time every week on routine tasks, when they could be selling? And almost three quarters say they spend too much time on data entry.

How does an interactive experiences platform free up your rep’s time and allow them to focus on maximising sales opportunities?

According to the Aberdeen Group, sales reps spend on average 440 hours per year searching for the right content.  By providing all the most up-to-date information in one place – the latest product specs, insights, data, images, 3D models, videos, and brochures etc – your sales team can use their time much more effectively.

A single source of truth that banishes the need to create new, bespoke, linear sales presentations for each and every prospect. Not only saving time before the meetings, but also allowing sales reps and buyers to have more relevant sales conversations when they are together – whether that be face-to-face or virtually.

Plus, updating your CRM post-meeting can be a drag with an interactive experiences platform you can connect to your CRM, automatically pushing and pulling information in real-time – saving your
reps valuable time.

“The app allows me to access and browse all the sales materials I need in one place so that I can easily show, or send them to my customers and colleagues. The app is easy to navigate, looks really professional, and allows me to deliver sales material in an effective way.”

Katie Bell, Senior Territory Manager, Coloplast

2. Shorter sales cycle and increased market share

“Lost productivity and poorly managed leads cost companies at least $1 trillion every year.”

CMO Council

The speed a business can service their clients, above others, is often a key differentiator.

Additionally, the ease at which they can demonstrate their range, alternative products and cross-sell to suit their customers’ needs can have a great impact on winning business.

An interactive experiences platform can help to increase market share and reduce the sales cycle in three ways, in the field and back in the office, when following up with a contact.

1. Real-Time Information Sharing: There’s no need to wait until you’re back at the office to provide relevant information to your prospects. With an interactive experiences platform, you can instantly send tailored information during a sales meeting. Whether it’s a PDF, video, or a custom solution configured during the meeting, you can email it directly to the customer, and a record is automatically logged in your CRM.

2. Precise Prospect Monitoring: Analytics built into the platform allow you to monitor an individual prospect’s position in the sales funnel, according to the types of content they’ve engaged with, more accurately. Sales reps can then help shorten the sales cycle by reviewing and positioning the right content at the right time during subsequent conversations based on this data.

3. Instant Information Access for Reps during Meetings: When meeting with a customer, you have immediate access to all the most up-to-date information and assets you need, whether it’s 3D models, high-resolution images, videos, or animations, to really make your product stand out.

By quickly demonstrating exactly how you can fulfil their specification and sharing this tailored information instantly with a prospect during a meeting, the value of your solution is much more immediate. There is no longer a delay in the process while they need to wait for a sample or specifications to be sent through – valuable time is won where they could otherwise be looking at different providers to yourselves.

In the case of our customer, Wienerberger, the difference in being able to immediately provide specification sheets was hugely significant and really helped their customers to make a decision:

To provide relevant information for the customer took “from up to a week to literally minutes. It’s been a massive step change which is demonstrated by our increased market share.”

Dan Cheung, Wienerberger

3. Demonstratable Return on Investment (ROI)

In contrast to more traditional sales and marketing assets used in sales meetings (brochures, catalogues, linear, static presentations), an interactive experiences platform generates valuable data insights that enable your business to derive real business value and make smarter decisions in marketing asset development, training needs and customer interaction.

It’s possible to get a better understanding of how your sales team and prospects interact with your sales and marketing materials.

Did you know that “65% of marketing content never gets used”? (SiriusDecisions).

Sales and marketing misalignment costs businesses $1 trillion each year in decreased sales productivity and wasted marketing efforts.

Every customer interaction or datasheet downloaded is automatically tracked. You’ll no
longer just rely on feedback from sales and vice versa.

You’ll know exactly what resonates with your customers, and what they’re downloading, the
analytics gives you invaluable data to plan and invest more in assets that impact revenue.

Sales and marketing alignment can help your company become 67% better at closing deals.

4. Training and onboarding support

“42.5% of sales reps take 10 months or longer to become productive enough to contribute to company goals.”

Accenture

Onboarding a sales rep can be lengthy, especially in a virtual setup.

An interactive experiences platform allows your sales teams to put themselves in the position of their customer, to discover the products, features, benefits and true value, just as a customer would.

In addition, existing sales teams can benefit from monitoring sales reps who are performing well and gaining insights into the content that they are using and their customer’s journey. This can provide actionable insights for coaching, development and training teams.

5. The most effective and cost-efficient marketing assets

“As a result of launching the digital sales app we anticipate that our print costs will be significantly reduced long-term. But in addition to the printing cost benefit, we also have more data to base future decisions for sales material development on.” 

Dan Cheung, Wienerberger

It is not only the design and print of traditional marketing materials that can be costly, but also the distribution to sales teams across many regions. Coupled with amendments to print runs when new products are launched, or changes are made to existing ones.

An interactive experiences platform can instantly update and take account of regional variations to ensure that all marketing materials are always fully compliant. This is especially important when working in heavily regulated industries, such as Healthcare or Technology, where variations can occur across borders.

“It was a challenge for us to demo our technology to our customers and ensure that our salespeople were communicating the most relevant and up-to-date information. POPcomms created an intuitive and well-designed interactive sales tool that we can easily update centrally.”

Anne-Rieke Schweigatz, Global Product Marketing Lead, Syntegon

Plus, an interactive experiences platform can be flexed to be used across many different devices – laptops, tablets or touchscreens – in meetings, at tradeshows and events and in customer salesrooms. A truly versatile, online and offline, omnichannel sales experience for your customers.

6. Reduced travel costs

“70-80% of B2B decision makers prefer remote human interactions or digital self-serve. Why? Ease of scheduling, savings on travel expenses and (currently) safety”

McKinsey, Oct 2020

Sometimes meeting face-to-face just isn’t practical or possible. An interactive experiences platform allows sales teams to demonstrate their solutions to new or existing customers virtually, saving not only on the cost of travelling, but also the time taken.  

Also, 64% who transitioned to remote sales either met or exceeded their revenue targets, compared to 50% of those who didn’t make the transition. 

Our customer, Syntegon, uses our experience to demonstrate their enormous packaging machines to customers. Their sales teams’ highly technical conversations are supported virtually using videos, images, 3D modelling and specification information, and unlike their machines, if they need to visit a customer, they can take the experience with them to continue their conversation.

“We have highly complex and sophisticated machinery so we have a very long selling process and our salesforce were used to travelling to see our customers. Since Covid we have all learnt that we can live without travelling, but obviously it makes it more complicated, therefore it is so important to have a digital tool that can be shared through screens and still follow the same storyline to build up the same trust with our customers.”

Anne-Rieke Schweigatz, Global Product Marketing Lead, Syntegon

In summary

“The sales tool that POP created helps our Customer Account Managers to have much more efficient meetings. The customer journey is polished, allowing them to navigate and tailor the vast amount of content – including heritage, innovation, product range and cocktail recipes – quickly and easily, so conversations continue to flow naturally and are more productive.”

Thomas Seymour, Head of UK & Ireland Commercial Capability, Bacardi

Ultimately the need to increase more meaningful customer engagement is often the key driver to digitally transforming sales and marketing functions and an interactive experiences platform can help do just that. And as seen here, an engaged customer is more receptive to buying from a sales rep who can tailor their sales conversations to meet their customer’s needs:

“74% of buyers choose the sales rep that was first to add value and insight.”

Corporate Visions

The investment in an interactive experiences platform can have an incremental impact on revenue in many ways from, increasing your sales team’s bandwidth to reducing the time and costs associated with travel.

However, with Gartner predicting in their Future of Sales 2025 report that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels more businesses are asking themselves: what the cost is of not digitalising their sales and marketing is in order to stay ahead of the competition?

See what an interactive experiences platform can do for you!

At POPcomms, we’re committed to helping you deliver on your business objectives and create more opportunities for your sales teams to differentiate themselves from the competition and sell effectively with POP’s interactive experiences platform.

If you would like to know more about POP, we’re always happy to arrange a demonstration and chat to explain exactly how it can add value to your business.

Get in touch today on +44 (0)117 329 1712 or hello@popcomms.com – we’re always happy to have a chat to discuss the possibilities. Alternatively follow us on LinkedIn for our latest updates.