That’s why we did some digging. And this is what we found: It turns out that, as a sales representative, you’re only spending 40% of your valuable time actually selling. So, what about the remaining time? Well, we’ve managed to discover the three biggest sales time wasters.

Pay attention! Because this is important. Obviously, because time is money. You could consider each minute spent toward anything else besides selling a waste of time, and therefore a loss in revenue.

As a sales representative, you’re only spending 40% of your valuable time actually selling.

So we started digging deeper, to find out even more about these sales time wasters, and how you can take action to eliminate them. The result? A complete whitepaper on how you can gain 15% in customer-facing sales time.

We’ve made it available just for you, because we want you to be your best selling self, always. Are you ready for it? Download our whitepaper now. You won’t be disappointed. Promise!

There’s no doubt about it. The sales team of your company is of utmost importance. It’s an essential part to the health and prosperity of your business. Sales reps attract prospects, feed them with crucial information, persuade them with power and convert like a boss. But what exactly is a strong sales team? When they’re working hard at the office? When they’re on the road? Or when they’re making optimal use of their sales processes, digital tools and people? Let’s go with that last one.

Is your sales team being its best selling self? Ask yourself these three questions, and make decisions accordingly.

QUESTION 1 — DOES YOUR TEAM OFTEN LOSE TIME ON CREATING PRESENTATIONS, OFFERS, CONTRACTS AND VISIT REPORTS?

You’re not alone. In general, almost 15% of your valuable sales time is wasted on administrative tasks. That contains setting up offers, preparing contracts, writing down visit reports and creating custom presentations. Crucial tasks, but very time consuming as well.

Obviously, we know that you will not get where you want to go without the necessary preparation. You only have one shot to make the perfect first impression, so you better grab it. Using numbers, dashboards, simulators and configurators to feed your potential customer with data that fit their needs. In an ideal world you’d have a tool that easily creates all of these things in a matter of minutes. That would be a huge time saver, and therefore a money maker as well.

Guess what? It is possible to live in that ideal world. By using a custom sales application that automatically does your admin work for you, based on the data you enter, it’s possible to save hours and hours of work. Using d!nk SalesMatik you’ll be able to capture all information you gather during a customer meeting through an interactive digital tool. Automatically creating the output you need. Whether that is a contract, a proposal, presentation or visit report.

QUESTION 2 — DO YOU SPEND MORE TIME ON FOLLOW-UP THAN ACTUAL CUSTOMER-FACING SALES TIME?

That’s a problem. The more time you spend on follow-up and maintaining customer interactions, the less time remains for attracting new prospects and converting leads. Obviously, this is still part of the job, but it shouldn’t be taking more time than necessary.

You must have already heard about the hunter and farmer principle. Using this concept efficiently, you could free up a tremendous amount of customer-facing sales time for the hunters, while limiting their account management time. Let’s take a closer look.

The Hunter is typically thought of as a doer. He claims to close as many deals as fast as possible. Exactly what you need! But obviously it’s key to retain your customer by following a strong account management strategy. That’s where the farmer comes in. The Farmer is focused on developing long term customer relationships. Keeping them happy, motivating them to spread the word and to get the highest possible value out of the customer lifetime cycle.

It makes sense that not one of them is better than the other one. It’s the combination of both that creates premium sales and account management quality. Has the Hunter succeeded in closing the deal? That’s the perfect timing for the Farmer to take over.

Now imagine a way to partly automate this process, and create the smoothest transition ever. By using an interactive digital sales app your hunter will only need a few clicks to communicate everything the farmer needs to know to maintain and optimize the relationship. With d!nk you can create your own interactive sales tools that you can easily distribute to the whole sales team. Keeping everyone up to date, all the time.

QUESTION 3 — DOES YOUR TEAM HAVE ACCESS TO A POWERFUL CRM?

Not yet? It is high time to fix this issue. A powerful Customer Relationship Management system allows you to handle prospects, leads and customers faster, better and easier. Filling up your sales funnel is one thing. Filling it up correctly and efficiently is another. Your ideal funnel should look something like this:

• Awareness: Creating awareness with your target audience
• Acquisition: Turning strangers into leads by showing your core value
• Activation: Activate your leads to use your product/service and buy it
• Retention: Creating great customer experiences to keep your customers
• Referral: Encouraging your customers to spread the word
• Revenue: Upsell and cross sell during the customer lifecycle

*The Pirate Funnel (AAARRR, Dave McClure).

So, a CRM helps you out tremendously, by gathering all relevant client information in one central spot to make it easier for you to guide your customers through the entire funnel. We’re talking about general contact information, but also meeting reports, presentations, financial numbers, contracts and customer feedback.

Have you found a CRM that works for you? Then you’re on the right track. Do you have stronger ambitions? Go ahead! By using interactive tools that you can click into your current CRM it might be possible to automate a big part of your sales pipeline management.

There is however one caveat when using CRM: it can become a goal instead of means. Just filling up the CRM with information is a waste of time. it’s about actionable information that helps your sales people to move opportunities through the funnel and gives sales management insight in the upcoming sales revenue. That’s were dink CRM connector comes in….

Our CRM Connector allows you to integrate your d!nk sales tools to your CRM. That immediately opens a world of very interesting possibilities: managing all customer interactions smoother, better and based on data. This way of working helps you to grow and scale, through valuable insights you didn’t have access to before. Eventually, you’ll gain time and thoroughly understand your sales process and success.

GET YOUR SALES TEAM UP TO SPEED

By now you should already know that d!nk could be your best decision to create a productive working environment. Our sales toolkits can make a world of difference in overall efficiency, time management for your sales reps and value for your customers.

Even more so: we’ve found a way to save 15% of your valuable sales time, allowing your sales team to be its best self. Discover how. Do it now.

Are you at your office right now? If you look through the window, do you see the parking lot? If so, do you also see the fancy cars of the sales people? Yes? Bad news: you are losing revenue.

Why? Your sales people’s company cars shouldn’t be parked at your office, but rather at the premise of your clients and prospects.

Office time = wasted sales time

It’s very common to see Sales people overspending time at the office. Sure, it’s nice and valuable to meet with colleagues, catch up with your admin work and have a coffee or two, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay for your sales revenue to have the salespeople to stick around the office.

How is it possible the parking lot full of sales people’s cars? Allow us to be brutally honest: it’s all about making excuses. “I have to prepare for my meeting”, “I need to input all client data in our CRM”, “I have to write up some tenders” … Often, sales reps are making excuses while in fact, they’re not in control when it comes to their own sales process, and even less when it comes to the buying process of potential customers. They are waiting for their clients to get back to them.

On average, 6.3 stakeholders are involved in complex B2B buying decisions. Yes, you guessed it right: that’s a lot of individual agendas to get in line for your sale.

Great sales professionals continuously manage the buying process of prospects which means guiding the 6.3 stakeholders to a consensus decision in their favor. As a sales pro you have to spend time with each of the stakeholders to understand their ambitions, present and valorise the benefits of your offer. For each of the 6.3 stakeholders. That’s a lot of time to spend with the customer and not in the office.

CRM is for a company, what a beer tap is for a pub

The best sales people live on the phone with prospects and customers, and spend time in the office of prospects and customers. Their challenge is how to keep an overview of the interactions with the 6.3 stakeholders in each of their prospects? Just put all information in CRM, how difficult can this be?

Why is it then that so many CRM systems look like abandoned buildings? When CRM is just a passive repository, sales people don’t bother to spend time in the office populating CRM, time they would rather spend with customers. How then to support sales people to keep an overview of opportunities and leads?

We’ve done some recent projects with The House of Sales to help sales people align their Sales process with the Buying process of their customers in order to keep that end-to-end control. Our ambition was to provide digital support allowing Sales to share relevant insights to each of the client stakeholders at the appropriate stage. Think of a library of reference questions when diagnosing the needs of prospects, a simulator of total cost of ownership when the value has to be proven or an offer tool to rightsize proposals together with the prospect.

When the sales tools integrate with prospect information in CRM, everybody wins: sales people get insights in buying stage of stakeholders, an overview of activities and suggested next actions. In addition, Sales management gets accurate insights in the pipeline. In short, the CRM gets adopted by your Sales team as their partner in crime.

Process-driven sales tools integrated with your CRM will eliminate excuses to be at the office. Is your sales team making excuses? Let us know. There’s a good chance we can support you.

d!nk receives recognition from the American technology giant for the development of SalesMatik, a Sales Enablement application that has convinced dozens of international customers in the past few years.

Opening up to the international market

For d!nk, the Co-sell Ready status is the start of a promising collaboration with the multinational. Eric Martens, Partner Development Manager at Microsoft, explains: “The Co-sell Ready program brings innovative software solutions to the attention of our sales teams around the globe. Jan Dheedene, founder and CEO of d!nk, is delighted: “The partnership with Microsoft is an enormous opportunity for growth with large customers in new markets.”

Passion for sales

The software company from Belgium develops smart, interactive sales solutions so sales reps can spend more time with their customers and sell more. Jan Dheedene himself is very passionate about this: “More time and attention for customers is the basis of success for every company. With SalesMatik, companies can eliminate the main sales time wasters. The results are tangible: sales people get an extra month per year with their customers!”

Seamless integration with Microsoft applications

SalesMatik integrates out-of-the-box with Microsoft’s business and office applications. “Customers do not want long integration processes, but look for solutions that are closely linked to their existing platforms. SalesMatik adds a mobile and interactive dimension to familiar applications like Dynamics and Office 365. The partnership with Microsoft highlights this advantage!

Reviewed and approved

SalesMatik runs on Microsoft Azure, the fastest grower in the public cloud domain, and candidates for the Co-Sell Ready program have to meet certain criteria. Eric Martens explains: “ISVs can only obtain Co-sell Ready status if the solution meets administrative, commercial and technical standards. We need to ensure overall quality before we allow solutions to the program.”

Software Catalogue

The co-sell ready program ensures that SalesMatik is now also included in Microsoft’s AppSource catalogue and Azure Marketplace. This gives potential customers easy access to the software, and they can immediately experience the benefits with our free trial.

MANAGE, MONITOR AND COMMUNICATE

d!nk’s promise to eliminate sales time wasters also applies to the time spent to create and manage sales tools. That’s why we’re very happy to announce our latest product redesign. We rebranded the upgraded d!nk product as SalesMatik. This new platform has been under construction for over a year, and now we’re ready to show you what we’ve been working on.

We did our best to make the new Portfolio Manager very easy to use and when taking a closer look you’ll notice we drastically simplified the management of your content, your users and communication.

What has changed?

1. Streamlined content & user management
2. Controlled account activation in the Account Hub
3. Smooth & swift communication to users

1 | STREAMLINED CONTENT & USER MANAGEMENT

Using our new drag and drop feature, you can now upload any content you need to your portfolio manager in a matter of seconds.

Simplify content uploading and distribution by dragging, dropping and choosing which libraries the content belongs to. And then, at the push of a button, push the newly added content directly to users that needs access, no matter the time zone they’re in. Just check or uncheck the boxes to determine who can access the updated content.

Use filter to immediately find the content you’re looking for, rather than searching every single library.

New users, teams or settings? Manage your users through our new interface. Invite new people by clicking the blue ‘+ Add user’ button. Manage their settings through the dropdown feature at the right of each user box.

Immediately notice user roles and rights by using the color indicators, or immediately find users by filtering your feed at the left of your interface. Maximum user-friendliness at a minimum of time. You’ll notice the image at the top changes a few times a day. This is the one feature our CEO wanted to add. He claims it is relaxing to see landscape images.

2 | CONTROLLED ACCOUNT ACTIVATION IN THE ACCOUNT HUB

The Account Hub is a controlled environment where the sales person and the customer meet. The Account Hub is a microsite where sales reps share relevant documents with customers, with the possibility to monitor every interaction.

Our redesigned Account Hub uses inbound marketing techniques in sales to smartly and non-intrusively uinteract with customers through the entire sales funnel. This enables the process of activating and engaging your customers.

Sales reps have at any time a view on the activity of their customers.

In order to activate customers to engage with the sales content, we introduce Campaign Messages:

1. Content managers create a Campaign Message and alert the sales people of the new message they can use to activate customers in account hubs.
2. Sales people share the campaign message with relevant customers
3. Sales people monitor the engagement of their customers with the campaign message

3 | SMOOTH & SWIFT COMMUNICATION

Our updated Portfolio Manager allows you to communicate more efficiently with the entire sales team. Your newsfeed is shown in the sales app, right where all of your sales tools are.

We’ve redesigned the message editor so you can send short notifications to the sales app and also create attractive multimedia messages.

Using Newsfeed Messages and Notifications, you can alert your sales reps on new Newsfeed items, important updates or certain management decisions. You can choose a message title, insert an image, an external link, text or video. Define the timing and audience of the message and even pick an expiry time if it’s only temporarily valuable.

OUR NEW PORTFOLIO MANAGER: BETTER, FASTER, STRONGER

As we speak, our new Portfolio Manager is live. This Portfolio Manager 3.0 version allows your team to work easier, faster and better. Through advanced options, notifications and messages, but mostly because of the usability optimizations, fully adapted to what you need today.