Kate Ahlering | Why Automation is Key in Giving Revenue Teams a Crucial Edge Over Competitors

When faced with new challenges, your ability to adapt will determine whether you succeed. In the past 12-18 months, the market has undergone a massive shift. In today’s episode, you’re going to get the facts you need to respond. Your host Donald Kelly sits down with Kate Ahlering (CRO at Calendly) to talk about how automation can save you time and energy so you can apply your focus to the moments that matter.

Challenges In the Current Market

• The game has changed from placing importance on “growth at all costs” (2020–2021) to “path to profitability” (2022-present). 

• There is a lot more scrutiny from buyers on all types of investment. The path to profitability needs to be clear at the outset.

• The silver lining: sales organizations get to hone their craft, become more focused, and improve beyond what they’ve been able to offer in the past.

Speed of Sales Cycle

• When balancing personalization with automation, some steps in the process require a more personalized approach than others. Find the parts you can automate.

• If a customer is already on your website, they’re ready to talk to you at that moment – most don’t want to send a lot of e-mails back and forth.

• Calendly Routing allows customers to easily book meetings with you from your website, cutting down the amount of time they spend in your pipeline.

Getting the Right Meetings Booked

• Team selling is becoming increasingly common. Streamlining the booking process for collaborative meetings helps your customer get scheduled painlessly.

• Standardizing the process to whatever extent you can helps give your customers a consistent experience, and makes your process more scalable.

Expansion Using Automation

• There’s nothing wrong with doubling down on your base, but must also demonstrate your value to that base or offer more value.

• Use analytic suites to become more educated on what works and improve conversion based on data.

• HackerOne, a global cybersecurity company, implemented Calendly and scheduled 114% more meetings while streamlining their process by 600 hours.

“If you haven’t already, take a look at your customer life cycle map. What are the points in time that you really want to engage your customer? What are those high value conversations? What are those inflection points that are so critical? And [ensure] that you have the right amount and the right blend of personalization and automation to ensure that those moments happen.” – Kate Ahlering

Resources

https://calendly.com/ – Get started with a FREE trial

Connect with Kate Ahlering on LinkedIn

The Brevet Group: 21 Mind-blowing Sales Stats - check out this website for helpful stats Ahlering refers to

How CI Assante Wealth Management Achieved 323% ROI with Calendly - Case Study

HackerOne Realizes 169% ROI by Powering Customer Success with Calendly - Case Study

Sponsorship Offers

1. This episode is brought to you in part by LinkedIn.

Are you struggling to close deals? Cold outreach wastes the buyer and seller's time at every stage, especially when sellers are using shallow and outdated data.

1. Your organization can overcome these challenges with technology that translates comprehensive, high-quality buyer data into real-time insights.

1. These deeper insights empower sales reps and teams to adopt the habits of top performers, which leads to better outcomes - like more pipelines, higher win rates, and larger deals.

2. We call this Deep Sales. And we’ve built the first deep sales platform with the next generation of LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Try LinkedIn Sales Navigator and get a sixty-day free trial at linkedin.com/tse.

2. This episode is brought to you in part by TSE Sales Foundation.

I think we can all agree that sales should be fun. However, many times, we find ourselves in a quagmire where we’re not progressing and deals are not going the way that they should. This is why we created TSE Sales Foundation. It’s a program designed to help sales professionals just like you master the fundamentals of sales so they can radically improve their sales pipeline and close more deals. To find out more about TSE Sales Foundation and our next start date, simply go to thesalesevangelist.com/foundation.

Credits

As one of our podcast listeners, we value your opinion and always want to improve the quality of our show. Complete our two-minute survey here: thesalesevangelist.com/survey. We’d love for you to join us for our next episodes by tuning in on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or Spotify. Audio provided by Free SFX, Soundstripe, and Bensound. Other songs used in the episodes are as follows: The Organ Grinder written by Bradley Jay Hill, performed by Bright Seed, and Produced by Brightseed and Hill.