The Advantages of SaaS for Sales

Software as a service, or SaaS, can have a positive effect on almost any business. By licensing software from a single source rather than installing it onto your company’s hardware, you can save time and money. Nowhere is this more beneficial than in sales. Sales can be a fickle industry and the ability to adapt to changes quickly and expand your capabilities can be priceless. Sales automation and lead management software like Leads360 can be an invaluable resource to a sales team looking to streamline their approach. Sales automation through SaaS can be an even more effective tool in the ongoing fight to maximize ROI. By using SaaS to distribute your sales automation, your company can see immediate results and a distinct improvement in your sales process.

In this economy, it’s important that a sales team be able to work leads quickly, efficiently, and as often as is necessary. The automated approach to lead generation, lead routing, lead scoring, and metrics available with a Lead Management System like Leads360 will allow your sales team to work every lead in the way most likely to produce results. By linking your sales automation to SaaS, these benefits can be expanded on even more. If nothing else, SaaS can allow your sales team to dramatically increase its mobility. SaaS can allow your sales team to access the sales software from anywhere, not just those computers with the software installed. As a result, members of your sales team won’t be tied to the office. They can remotely access the sales software to work leads anytime and from anywhere. This improved flexibility can allow your sales team to ensure that they’re getting to hot leads right away regardless of when they’re coming in, and it means that if leads aren’t reached on the first attempt, future attempts can happen at the most advantageous time. Or as, it’s put on hostedpowerdialer.com:

The best sales or marketing SaaS software envelops business techniques, individuals plus technology to obtain a real end goal: getting the best answers to the correct individual at the right time in the sales cycle to get maximum earnings. These types of solutions ensure that your sales, advertising and marketing, and in some cases your service efforts are all pushing toward the same objective to help you to take your business results to a whole new level.

Because of listed SaaS systems, you would streamline and automate your sales methods and give every person within your company (sales force, marketing and advertising, and managers) a complete look of the buyers and sales methods, offering terrific insights in to very important sales and profits metrics along with prospect patterns and purchasing requirements, continuing to keep everybody centered on obtaining brand new deals executed while keeping your existing clients and customers completely satisfied.¹

Building on that benefit is the ability to sell on the weekends. Sales managers are often presented with a difficult decision. Modern business doesn’t grind to a halt at the close of business on Friday. You might be getting great leads on days where your staff isn’t around, or you may be missing the best chances to reach leads that you haven’t been able to get to on prior attempts. However, keeping an office open through the weekend can be costly and certainly isn’t a way to make any friends on your sales team. SaaS provides an opportunity for team members to work on the weekends from their personal computers, seizing those opportunities that won’t necessarily be there on Monday while not having to keep the office open.

While the ability to work from anywhere or the chance to work leads on the weekend are invaluable resources to an organized and motivated sales team, they are a micro chasm of why sales automation through SaaS can be an important investment for any sales team. When working leads success can be most directly tied to a few key metrics with speed to contact and number of contacts being among the most important. It should come as no surprise to any sales manager that 78% of prospective buyers close with the company that contacts them first.² What’s more, leads are 22 times more likely to convert when they’re contacted in the first five minutes.³ In terms of following up, calling a lead second time can increase your chances of success by 87% while a whopping 93% of leads with six or more call attempts are ultimately contacted.⁴ SaaS software and the flexibility it provides tie into the overall mindset of a successful sales team that focuses their efforts on improving those metrics tied to success while discovering new ones that are specific to you business. It moves at the speed of business and allows your sales staff to work hard and work smart, taking advantage of every opportunity to close the sale. The cultural shift available for a sales team that can work leads anytime from anywhere can be big and play into the sort of overall approach that will see great long-term results.

Finally, SaaS offers a number of advantages in cost and implementation. In sales, time is money, and any wasted second could be a lead that doesn’t get closed. Time and effort wasted on implementing and updating software can be costly and wasteful. So when a sales team decides to make the shift to sales automation software to improve their approach, the faster and more efficient it can be, the better. SaaS allows a sales team to drastically cut the time necessary to implement the new software into their business when compared to more conventional means, allowing your sales team to hit the ground running without losing too much time. What’s more, customization is typically quick and easy to handle, and future updates and upgrades are automatic, saving even more time and money. Finally, SaaS cuts out the need for a big up-front investment, allowing you to see results on your balance sheet much sooner. The sort of rapid ROI possible from SaaS is invaluable in sales. Or, as a post on business blog make-money.net puts it:

Why go online? Because to manage these tough times it’s more important than ever to be in front of every prospect, every lead, every opportunity, and every customer interaction… right now. And without a big up-front software investment that’s expensive to install and maintain. With the web’s Software as a Service (SaaS) pay-as-you-go model, the price of success is much lower… Web based implementations usually happen over a matter of hours or days-compared to months or longer with traditional client-server Sales Acceleration software…Because deployments of new Sales Acceleration features are nearly instant, you’re always using the newest version with web-based Sales Acceleration systems-so software upgrades are painless. Going through an upgrade of a Sales Acceleration product works just like your favorite consumer sites-Web-based email or networking sites all of your “data” is there and working right away.⁵

In the end, sales is a tricky business. It requires the ability to be flexible and adaptable, shifting to meet the challenges of the marketplace and aggressively pursuing every opportunity available. In this sense, the benefits of SaaS may be greater in sales automation than anywhere else. Sales teams can work leads from any work station, whether it’s in the office or not, allowing them to work from anywhere, work weekends, and ensure that every lead is getting thoroughly explored.

¹ http://hostedpowerdialer.com/new-sales-automation-saas/03/28/2010/; March 28, 2010

² First to Call: Why You Can’t Afford to Be Second; Leads360 Whitepaper; June 2008; http://www.leads360.com

³ Study on Click-to-Dial Effectiveness; Leads360 Whitepaper; March 2009; http://www.leads360.com

⁴ Six Call Equals Success: The Surprising Impact of Call Frequency on Lead Conversion; Leads360 Whitepaper; November 2009; http://www.leads360.com

⁵ http://www.money-made.net/2010/05/var-sales-automation-software-as-a-service-saas-07.html; May 7, 2010, 5:14 AM