How To Evaluate The Efficacy of SaaS Programs That Your Sales Team Subscribes To Is your SaaS program effective? Is it making you money or costing you more than your return? Ankesh Kumar is with a company called Let’s Chat and the company focuses on personalization outreach to make sure your dollars are being spent well. Let’s Chat helps a conversation run smoother. It does this by providing a co-extension that identifies LinkedIn topics that are of interest to your clients, it gives suggestions about how to break the ice, and generally makes it easier for sales reps to speak with their prospects in a more personal way. Let’s Chat also looks into social platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and others to identify the person or client sales reps are going to talk to. It’s important for first meetings to be friendly, without crossing the line. Let’s Chat also uses its AI capabilities to prioritize the data based on the time spent on a particular topic, the frequency looking at topics and the topics a client might want to expand on. Evaluating your SaaS program There are various tools that a sales team can use to evaluate their SaaS program, the amount depending on the size of the organization. Ankesh’s company ensures their app works with the company’s current workload. There are many competing platforms like CRM, other sales engagement platforms, and sales outreach. With so many to choose from, there comes an added concern that incorporating all these different platforms may change the workflow of the sales team. You want to make sure that your team isn’t managing so many tools that their time isn’t spent on actual sales. Salesforce slows down the process Ankesh shares how products such as Salesforce can actually slow down the sales process. Salesforce adds data to the system record. It tracks activity so everyone can see how clients are interacting with the information, from receiving the proposal to what executive levels are looking at what was sent. As a result, there can be an imbalance between how much time a sales rep spends on Salesforce data and how much time is spent actually interacting with a client and making a sale. Ankesh’s company uses a plugin tool for LinkedIn because that’s where people are and the most actual interaction can take place. . Maintain your team’s efficiency By Ankesh’s estimation it’s not the cost of the software that can impact a company’s budget but the time a sales rep spends on specific software. The CRM budget can vary but the value of return is the added value the software brings to the workflow process. Ankesh cautions about adding additional software and plugins without regularly checking whether or not this software is benefiting the sales force and ultimately, the company. One thing he suggests, when you’re considering new software, is assigning some of your sales reps to be beta testers before you go company-wide. Be unique By now, almost all sales people and their clients know the process of prospecting by email. Even before a company sends that second or third email, they can almost predict the content of ensuing correspondence. As a sales rep, you need to be unique and stand out from the crowd. Instead of sending 10 predictable touch emails, do something different. Use snail mail and send along a little something they can use, like a $5 Starbucks gift card. Once received, you already have one foot in the door before you connect the second time. Personalization can work but it’s also a lot more time-consuming. Salespeople need to understand that what works now may not work in the next 2-3 years. The industries are changing and our approach to clients and prospects will change too. Emails that work Ankesh says that there are three buckets of personalization that work when...

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