“Data, analytics, and AI capabilities have become integral for success in the sales and marketing space. This partnership with XANT will enhance our revenue acceleration offering to deliver the kind of data-driven customer experiences needed to drive sales today,” said Narasimha Kini, EXL Senior Vice President, and Business Unit Leader. “XANT is a proven innovator when it comes to AI-driven sales platforms. We are proud to bring this solution to market and accelerate the adoption of modern digital selling strategies to power growth and profitability for our clients”

The partnership will also offer XANT and its customers the ability to leverage EXL’s wide-ranging expertise in digital transformation and operations management through implementation and business consulting engagements.

“We are thrilled to have EXL join the XANT partner network. EXL is an innovation leader, and our product and service is better as a result of this partnership,” said Dave Boyce, XANT Chief Strategy Officer. “We look forward to working side by side with the EXL team to drive meaningful results for our customers.”

About EXL

EXL (NASDAQ: EXLS) is a leading operations management and analytics company that helps our clients build and grow sustainable businesses. By orchestrating our domain expertise, data, analytics, and digital technology, we look deeper to design and manage agile, customer-centric operating models to improve global operations, drive profitability, enhance customer satisfaction, increase data-driven insights, and manage risk and compliance. Headquartered in New York, EXL has approximately 31,600 professionals in locations throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, India, the Philippines, Colombia, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. EXL serves customers in multiple industries including insurance, healthcare, banking and financial services, utilities, travel, transportation and logistics, media and retail, among others. For more information, visit www.exlservice.com.

About XANT

XANT offers the leading Enterprise Sales Engagement Platform that accelerates revenue. With Playbooks from XANT, sales professionals increase productivity, optimize customer interactions, and connect to the right buyers. Playbooks manages lead follow-up and prospecting cadences, automates administrative tasks, and uses data to predict who, when, and how to engage buyers for the best outcome—all to set your sales reps up for success. Using Playbooks, thousands of sales teams have been able to accelerate revenue using buyer behavior data and AI—including Groupon, Dell, Sage, Ping Identity, Caesars Entertainment, Pluralsight, Motorola, Fidelity, American Express, and Athena Health. For more information, visit www.insidesales.com.

Our RevOps Summit is coming up on July 14th  and we think you should be there. Here’s why: 

1. Enjoy a wealth of revenue operations knowledge. 

Join this mindshare of revenue operations know-how. Revenue operations (rev ops) is an effective and efficient way to standardize process and accelerate growth within an organization as a whole. Rev ops oversee all revenue impacting activity to ensure actions are intentional. This means that there is data, strategy, and process backing up every activity. At our summit, we’ll dive into what rev ops is, how your team should be using it, what trends to look for in the industry, and more.

2. Hear from speakers who know what they are talking about. 

Hear from over 20 revenue experts from G2 Crowd, RevOps Squared, MarketStar, Canopy, Vidyard, Vengresso, Tenbound, Go Nimbly, and more. Content will cover actionable strategies on revenue operations. Topics include operationalization of an effective sales coaching program, how to stop pitching and start solving, tech in rev ops, helping customers discover what they really want, and more, all from experienced industry professionals. 

List of speakers:

• Matt McNulty, Heads of Rev Ops at Canopy
• Sean Ball, VP of Marketing at DurhamLane
• Mike Weir, CRO at G2 Crowd
• Lorena Morales, Rev Ops Executive at Go Nimbly
• Jen Igartua, CEO at Go Nimbly
• Philip Mickey, Director of Marketing and Rev Ops at MarketStar
• Richard Sgro, General Manager at Modern Sales Pros
• Ryan Breneman, Director of RevOps at ObservePoint
• Nick Siddoway, VP of Sales & Marketing at Primary Intelligence 
• Ray Rike, CEO of RevOps Squared
• Brad Rosen, Head of Sales Operations at Sales Assembly
• Justin Michael, CEO & Founder at Salesborgs.ai
• Michael Pedone, CEO of SalesBuzz
• David Dulaney, CEO of Tenbound
• Jeff Ignacio, Head of Revenue and Growth Operations at Upkeep
• Mario Martinez Jr, CEO at Vengreso
• Tyler Lessard, Revenue Operations Lead at Vidyard
• Dave Boyce, Chief Strategy Officer at XANT
• Scott Sutton, VP of Revenue Operations at ZoomInfo 
• Sean Ball, VP of Marketing at DurhamLane
• Steve Richard, Founder of ExecVision
• Tim Wackel, CEO & Founder of ExecVision
• Tyler Lessard, Revenue Operations Lead at Vidyard
• Don Otvos, VP of Revenue Operations at LeanData
• Jen Gergen, Head of Operations at AA-ISP

3. Get ahead of industry trends.

A solid operations team is essential to success in any organization, but revenue operations is a fairly new concept. Revenue operations cover sales and marketing operations for a centralized strategy from the top to the bottom. Some rev ops even go through to customer success and renewals. To put it short, rev ops in the strategy behind the customer journey. And if industry trends have told us anything in the last year, it’s that buyers are in control and they care about the customer experience. In 2020, consumers shifted to value experience overpricing when deciding whether or not to purchase.

4. Invest in your team and your operation. 

Leave with tactics to get better results for your team. Creating a better, smoother process for your customers is a huge investment for your organization. The customer experience is more important and more public than ever. Here are a few stats to really drive that home:

•  93% of consumers say that online reviews influence their decision whether or not to buy. 
• In B2B sales, 92% of buyers say reading a positive review influences them to purchase. Get advice from revenue operations experts on how you can improve your process, create a better experience for your customers, and ultimately impact your bottom line.
• 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. Don’t miss out on potential customers and more revenue because of a poor customer experience. Invest now and your bottom line will thank you later.  

5. Connect with other industry professionals. 

This has been a tough year for connections. Even though many of us are virtual, we can still make connections and grow our networks. Expand your circle—hear from a new crowd and learn from the best in the industry. 

6. It’s FREE!

Do we really need to say more about this? It’s free advice from some industry pros. Plus, if you can’t make it to the event live, you can still get access to the recordings—so sign up! 

Convinced yet? Register for the event here.

Revenue operations are the behind-the-scenes happenings in a sales org. Operations (ops) define processes, implement strategies, enable sales teams to do their work, and ultimately drive results. The systematic element of sales allows sales teams to track progress and repeat successes with the knowledge of what activities are working with customers and what activities are wasting reps’ time. Without a revenue operations role, marketing and sales teams would have no strategy and no process. 

The Value of Rev Ops

Operations makes an organization’s actions intentional—meaning there is data, strategy, and process backing everything up. Rev ops ideally cover all revenue-facing processes including the the full sales cycle from the top to the bottom of the funnel. They follow leads through to close and sometimes cover customer renewals in CS.

Many operations suffer from issues related to the all-too-common disconnect between marketing and sales. If these two aren’t working together, they are significantly less powerful. Rev ops marries marketing and sales for a cohesive and efficient experience for buyers. 

Buyers are in control of the modern sales industry—they are increasingly gaining power and they care about consistent, value-adding experiences. Customer experience has quickly a top priority in the sales world. In 2020, consumers notably valued experience over pricing. 

86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience and 93% of consumers say that online reviews influence their decision to buy or not buy. The same trends are found in B2B sales—92% of B2B buyers say they are more likely to purchase after reading a positive review. Providing an easy and enjoyable process for customers is vital for retention and growth. 

Operations should have a thorough understanding of the customer journey, where they are falling off, and what’s working—this gives them the power to master all touchpoints of an account and optimize the whole customer journey as a centralized owner of the process. 

The Issues Rev Ops Teams are Facing 

The enemy of operations is a poor definition or poor execution of process. Operations need to not only define and strategize an effective process but execute and often adapt that process to ensure it is always working for the organization. Coordination is key. 

There are several teams that work directly with sales—sales enablement, customer success, and marketing. Likewise, there are multiple teams that directly support revenue growth and maintenance. The overall mission of each of these teams is to set up customers for long-term success. With that, there often comes some overlap, confusion, and miscommunication when it comes to responsibilities. 

Part of the job of rev ops is to ensure that every department has clear and specific tasks and deliverables. These groups need to plan and coordinate together to avoid overlap. When process starts to break apart and become a Frankenstein, created by different teams only focusing on their team, overlap happens. Rev ops coordinates between teams and departments to streamline and execute process and ultimately avoid overlap so that the whole organization can win and not just one team. 

Where there is no process or methodology, there is no strategy. And what is sales without strategy? Guessing. Random outreach. Hoping for the best.

But as previously mentioned, ill-defined process and randomness is the nightmare of an operations professional. 

Rev Ops: Sales Success is Our Success

A strong revenue operations team creates a clear process, with defined measures of success, and holds teams accountable. When they’re enabled to effectively execute their mandates, it creates a domino effect that leads to consistent revenue, more satisfied customers, and predictable growth. 

Rev ops measures team success with performance-centric goals. Go-to-market teams should be hitting 60% attainment consistently as a baseline. If attainment is lower than this, ops should determine if they are supporting the right channels, modeling the ideal customer profiles, and implementing an effective strategy. The ideal machine that rev ops runs through process is based on volume on the right activity—the more volume or greater sample size, the more predictable it becomes. 

Both sales enablement and revenue operations are measured through revenue attainments. Tying them together can help to close communication gaps and ultimately lead to the success of the sales team. 

Ops teams traditionally rely on basic territory planning and account planning for an initial prioritization, but there isn’t really much prioritization strategy beyond that initial plan for more organizations. Certain tools, like Playbooks, use data and buyer intelligence to help you know what to prioritize for the best planning. 

Rev Ops Tools 

Consistency of the sales motion is key. There are several tools that can enable operations to consistently track progress, implement processes, and execute strategy—the top one being CRM. Everyone who is successful in a rev ops role capitalizes on the CRM. CRM adoption and data integrity are vital, they create a common source of truth that everyone in the company can rely on.

Visibility into the entire revenue funnel to understand the customer journey is a must for operations strategy. Rev ops need to know what happens as a lead progresses the funnel.   

Tracking is also extremely important for operations. To perfect their sales process, they need to know what’s working, what’s not, and where people are dropping out. Reps are often tasked with logging activity in the CRM, and when that logged information is incorrect or unreadable—any decisions made off of it are unreliable. Too many teams shoot themselves in the foot this way. Reliable CRM integrations ensure that nothing goes unlogged or incorrectly tracked. No more bad, siloed or duplicated data. The CRM becomes a one-stop source of truth. 

Be Elite With Playbooks

Playbooks was built with operational effectiveness in mind. Leaders get more visibility into reps’ performance and outcomes. They can easily enhance workflows with automation and compliance, track progress, make decisions backed by data from native CRM reporting packages. 

Standardize and structured workflows through PLaybooks ensure that process is not forgotten and that work is done in a consistent manner.  

Playbooks gives them a better window into the weak points of a process, the black holes, and the areas in which to double down. You don’t have to worry about the waste of random acts of selling the risks of operating without clear processes and controls. Reps are guided to the next best activity and the next best contact through a guided sales experience.

RevOps Summit

Looking to become a rev ops expert? XANT is hosting an upcoming RevOps Summit featuring several industry experts and operations professionals. This event is virtual and completely free. Tune in on July 14th from 9 AM to 12 PM PT to hear more about the behind-the-scenes work of operations and how they can dramatically impact your results. Register for the summit here.

Of course… the data isn’t always spot on. 

B2B buyers are completely digital and in control.

Buyers are used to having the information and resources they need to build their own criteria. And they are harder to reach than ever. 

Random acts of selling are inefficient and unpredictable. Reps guess at what’s important and what to do. Don’t be that guy: 

Managers respond by getting them to just do more stuff, then call it productivity. 

Don’t confuse busy with productive or effective. Waste scales as well. 

Without process or insights, sellers target randomly and often target the wrong people altogether. They look busy, but it won’t lead to consistent results. 

Too often reps get deep into a deal only to be surprised they haven’t looped in all the right people.

What they really need is not more, at first, but better. Then more of what works.

Use your selling time for, well selling. Move from guessing to guided. 

Scale what works best.

Stop guessing. Start selling. 

For more content like this, follow us on Linked In. 

As part of the Playbooks Buyer Intelligence suite, PeopleFinder identifies individuals who may be part of the buying group, contacts that hold similar positions or were involved in similar deals, their influence and role in an account, and other relevant insights. It then provides verified recommendations from those insights, even if the contacts are not in the reps’ CRM.

Buyer Intelligence has long been a cutting-edge differentiator for XANT. It uses insights from all interactions on the platform to build comprehensive buyer profiles. Insights are then verified with third-party data, anonymized, and encrypted to preserve personal information.

“PeopleFinder saves reps from wasting valuable selling time looking for prospects or targeting the wrong ones,” says Chris Harrington, CEO of XANT. “A rep can log on and immediately get contacts recommended that are relevant to their most recent targeting, additional members of the buying committee, or existing contracts that are up for renewal. No time is wasted, they just go straight to selling.”

“We saw a need in the sales industry to connect reps to buyers faster,” comments Mark Littlefield, VP of Product Management at XANT. “PeopleFinder automatically gives reps new contacts regularly right in their Playbooks menu. They can immediately have the contacts’ name, title, account, company, role in the buying committee, and any phone number or email connected with that contact before them. No more wasted time, just connecting with prospects. It’s a massive time-saver for reps.”

Find more information on PeopleFinder and Playbooks here.

THE PROBLEM: 

Sales reps spend on average 35.2% (or ⅓) of their time selling. That’s only 14-hours in a 40-hour workweek. Meaning they spend nearly 65% of their time on other activities—including looking for contacts. 

Even when they have contacts, reps can still run into time-wasting roadblocks like targeting the wrong prospects or getting deep into a deal only to find there are other important members of buying committee that they haven’t considered.

So, how do you ensure reps aren’t wasting time and focusing on the right contacts? 

That’s why we crafted PeopleFinder. 

THE SOLUTION: 

PeopleFinder provides intelligent contact recommendations to reps reducing wasted time and quickly connecting reps with the prospects most likely to engage. 

The number of people in the buying committee has surged in recent years, leaving many reps to fall short of closing deals simply because they don’t reach enough of the right people. For example, if you have two key contacts on file, Playbooks will identify and provide contact information (validated with third-party data) for additional decision-makers who can influence the deal—significantly increasing your chances of closing the deal. This contact information comes with information about the individual such as their level of influence, role in the deal, etc. 

HOW IT WORKS:

When a rep logs onto Playbooks, there is a yellow, clickable “NEW” on the menu—when clicked it provides all-new, recommended contacts that haven’t been used yet. 

PeopleFinder is a massive time saver that solves the issues of reps wasting time looking for contacts or tracking down the wrong ones. XANT’s Buyer Intelligence draws from the records of all users of XANT tech to build buyer profiles and identify individuals who might be part of the buying group or other contacts information for other similar personas—this information is then verified with third-party data. Recommendations include contacts outside of their CRM.

Simply put: PeopleFinder suggests the next best person to contact, additional members of the buying group, and provides their level of influence in the deal to help reps get to selling faster and close more deals. 

PeopleFinder is the secret superpower your reps need to get more of the right things done. Demo Playbooks today to learn more about PeopleFinder, Buyer Intelligence, and what your team needs to take the guessing work out of selling and close more deals. 

High-performing SDR teams focus on the fundamentals — rapid lead follow-up, better lead quality, proper automation implementation, and optimization of processes. Instead of constantly doing more of the same motions to build pipe, they’re focused on building systems that utilize data and their SDRs’ productivity to its full potential.

The Variables of Successful SDR Teams

SDR organizations spent 2020 adjusting to remote and digital selling. Equipping and supporting a remote workforce quickly took time and effort. Many SDR organizations have adapted to these changes and are focused on understanding their new normal.

Understanding the activities that matter most to your business and your sales cycle can help guide your strategic plan. Our research found that the top 50% of the attainment group prioritized dials, emails, and some social selling techniques. These variables should be taken in context with other data like customer needs and buying cycles.

The benefit of analyzing this data is to understand which activities provide the best outcome and then push your SDR teams to prioritize the tasks that matter and stop wasting time on the tasks that underperform.

Less Hunting, More Targeted Outreach

An SDR’s time is valuable. Putting their skills to the best use means nurturing contacts that are most interested and most likely to want to continue a conversation with sales rather than hounding uninterested leads.

Automation tools and honing in on lead scoring to identify the best contacts is one way SDR teams can make sure their activities yield the best result. Our research found that when it comes to sales types, quota attainment remains fairly consistent. However, marketing SDR teams succeed best when they’re in lead/contact-based teams.

Regardless of team focus, SDRs achieve attainment when they’re talking to interested prospects. Doing the work ahead of the first contact by scoring leads properly, generating interest through marketing, and building automation allows SDRs the time they need to focus on the contacts most likely to close.

Replace Guessing with Guided Sales Engagement

The first step to a successful SDR team is knowing your unknowns: which actions garner the best results, what do your teams need to be successful, how do you find and nurture the contacts that want to hear from you? To answer these questions, you need data to counteract gut instincts and insights where your SDRs and reps can use them the most. Then your SDRs can move from haphazard and indiscriminate sales activities to the ones that work.

Playbooks by XANT gives your sales leaders the visibility, accountability, reporting, and guidance they need to make reps their most effective. Instead of spamming contacts with email or endless cold calling prospects that aren’t interested, SDRs can spend time on the most important tasks and be more creative and targeted in their outreach. Automation takes onerous manual tasks off their plate and lets them do more with less effort and better results.

Building a successful SDR team relies on good strategy, structure, and data. Reaching attainment in the new sales landscape will take creativity, experimentation, and a robust system that can support your team no matter where or how they work.

As a result, many sales technologies saw rapid growth, and sales teams shifted their priorities and strategies. We recently surveyed 450 top sales dev leaders to evaluate their teams and technologies and learn what’s changed in the sales development world.

Here’s what we learned about the top sales organizations and what they’re doing to drive success.

Lead Quality and Account-Focused Strategies Dominate

The goal for any sales rep is to have a full calendar of highly qualified prospects to speak with each day. Sales development is the critical link between marketing and sales to develop and pass leads to sales reps.

Since our last State of Sales Development study in 2017, we’ve seen a significant shift in the ratio of account executives (AE) to sales development reps (SDR). In 2017, 2018, and 2020, the ratio has declined from 3.0 to 2.5 to 2.0, with 2020 marking an average of 2 account executives for every 1 supporting SDR.

As more sales teams adopt account-focused strategies and improve their lead quality, we expect to see this number continue to decrease. Implementing targeted programs that qualify leads quickly, efficiently, and with a standardized process will cut down on the amount of time SDRs spend with leads that aren’t driving pipeline. CRM and sales engagement (like Playbooks)  will better guide SD reps’ time and activities.

A lower AE/SDR ratio has other benefits. When this ratio is too high, SDRs can get too many irons in the fire and find it more difficult to operate efficiently. AEs benefit from having more interaction with their SDRs and SDRs get mentorship and coaching more consistently.

SD Teams Under Sales More Likely to Hit Quotas

One of the most important implications for an SDR team is where they report: marketing or sales. This decision is based on several factors, including which team has the budget and resources to hire, train, and develop SDRs; the qualification strategy; lead management; and more.

From 2017 to now, we saw a significant increase in the number of SDRs rolling up into the sales organization and away from marketing. In 2020, 75% of SD teams now report to sales, 15% report to marketing, and 10% report to revenue or sales ops.

Many factors are driving this shift, but as the handoff from marketing to sales improves, SDRs in most organizations have found better alignment within sales. And in some organizations, SDRs are an important recruiting pool for future AEs, so the more SDRs understand the needs and priorities of AEs, the better prepared they’ll be for that next role.

Our data also shows that when SDRs report to sales, they are more likely to hit their quota. In 2020, these teams were 15.2% more likely to hit their quota than those that reported to marketing—62.5% of SDRs who reported to sales hit their quotas, as opposed to only 47.3% for marketing reports. That 15.2% difference is a major contributing factor in revenue for any organization.

What makes the difference in performance for SDR teams? Even though the lines between sales and marketing increasingly overlap, the SDR position is rooted in sales-centric principles. Sales leaders build a culture of measurable revenue outcomes that envelop SDRs while marketing leaders tend to drive more leading revenue indicators (lead to contact conversion, stage 1 to stage 2 conversion, pipeline creation, etc). This small shift makes a significant difference in the outcomes of your SDR teams.

Account-Based and High-Velocity Sales

The composition of sales development teams has changed as many sales organizations implement tools and technology to understand more about their customers. Thanks to innovations related to digital and data technology, SD teams have more information now than ever before about their customers’ buying behaviors and communication preferences, and now have automated processes to match.

Between 2017 and 2018, the industry rotated towards exclusively account-based models (47.7% of respondents indicated it was their only model). However, since 2018, sales organizations have realized the mistake of turning away from speed-to-lead and the high-velocity that support them. Today, a majority of teams use a hybrid model to find a balance based on the types of leads and accounts they’re engaging.

As teams become more sophisticated and precise in how they generate and nurture their leads, create and refine their processes, and keep a watchful eye on their metrics, they’ll be able to incorporate more high-velocity techniques into their teams. 

How you structure and manage your sales development team has a significant impact on your entire sales organization. Sales intelligence is driving significant changes in sales teams and allowing sales development teams to spend less time on rote manual tasks and more time developing leads and their skills to improve the handoff to AEs.

Sales leaders who implement these changes quickly are seeing large gains in their attainment and can do more with less budget. Playbooks by XANT includes the tools sales development teams need to be successful in 2021. Schedule a demo here. 

Sales leaders can now utilize Playbooks to ensure teams are in alignment with compliance restrictions and following best practices. Create customizable preset guidelines that adhere to regional restrictions and prevent reps from going rogue. These features include:

Call Compliance

• Configuration with regional call recording and monitoring restrictions 
• Local call restrictions configuration (i.e. designate when calls can be made by area code according to local regulations)
• Call recording access restrictions (i.e. designate who can access certain call recordings)
• Dynamic call record pausing (i.e. event-based, as when someone provides credit card info)
• Do not call restrictions configuration 
• Over-dial prevention 

Email Compliance

• Email opt-out configuration 
• Email sync blacklisting 
• Embedded email opt-out enabled 
• Invalid email address detection 
• Locked email templates 

Workflow Compliance

• Workflow priority enforcement (i.e. enforce adherence to an established priority order for records to be worked)
• Workflow skip  and adherence reporting 

CRM Compliance

• CRM merge field limits
• User data access controls (i.e. configure which fields are available and shared)
• CRM sync logging and customizable sync controls (i.e. detailed activity logs, with CRM sync configuration)

“The largest enterprises are taking on the massive digital transformation. At XANT, we know you can’t afford to ignore compliance. More information is at risk, and more measures need to be taken to protect it,” says Chris Harrington, XANT CEO. “We built Playbooks to enable salespeople to do their jobs and to do them in a better, safer, more efficient way. These features help to make that goal a reality.”

Learn more about XANT’s new compliance features and how to utilize them here.

See the full list of XANT’s compliance features here.

Customers should feel safe interacting with your reps and know that their information is secure. Managers shouldn’t have to worry about reps accidentally breaking compliance rules or unintentionally going rogue. Building a culture of security for your customers and consistency for your team starts with compliance. 

So, how do you ensure your team is following the rules and winning at the compliance game? In sales, it’s aligning communications and infrastructure to regulatory standards and guiding reps with guardrails that can be measured and enforced. Failing to cover either facet of compliance can result in both legal action and missed targets. Not to mention, it’s a turn-off to current and potential customers. 

One Forbes article suggests building a culture of compliance with:

• A management culture that encourages compliance.
• An organizational chain that allows access to the CEO or board.
• An established, formal program for internal compliance.
• Sufficient resources dedicated to the program.
• Tools and training to enable employees to comply.
• Systems and protocols for monitoring, identifying, and correcting possible violations. 

Building this culture of compliance is much easier and more effective with a platform built from the ground up to ensure your success in these areas. That’s where Playbooks comes in. 

What You Should Consider Tackling 

Driving a winning and compliant sales team means following the legalities of compliance as well as providing reps with a proven structure for their workflow. In Playbooks, you can set customized compliance restrictions based on location (global, regional, etc), time (date, day of the week, etc), or other activity (repeated dialing, outbound calls, etc). Playbooks in the only sales engagement platform with this level of compliance and this kind of solution. Use Playbooks to meet your compliance needs and run a highly functional, effective, and compliant sales team. 

Compliance applies to several areas of sales—mainly call compliance, email compliance, data compliance, Play compliance (if you’re a Playbooks user), CRM compliance, and general compliance. Below, we’ll dive into each of these sections—including some legal requirements and other team-specific workflow requirements, and what Playbooks can do to enable it.

Call Compliance 

This one is a doozy. Sales reps spend A LOT of time on the phone. One study found that 92% of customer interactions happen over the phone. With that kind of investment of time spent on the phone, it’s important to get it right. Some call compliance areas to consider including:

• Call recording and monitoring restrictions— Some regions may have restrictions on if (or what portion of) a call can be recorded or monitored live. 
• Local regulations call restrictions— There may be local restrictions for when reps can call. For example, in the state of Utah, you cannot cold call on July 24th. Why? Because it’s Pioneer Day, a state holiday.  
• “Do Not Call” restrictions— Contacts that are on a “Do Not Call” list cannot be cold-called. There are several “Do Not Call” lists to keep track of and reps may not know if their contact is on one of those lists. 

These are just a few things to look out for in your cold-calling compliance. Sales engagement tools, like Playbooks can be a safeguard to ensure your team is up to date and following these rules. Playbooks can be used to:

• Create rules based on area code restrictions (only applicable within the US). Set these rules to avoid monitoring, recording, or cold calling when it’s not legal. 
• Get alerts for the numbers you are dialing based on the area they live in (coming in May 2021). For example, if you are calling a number in Texas and the state is currently in a “state of emergency”, reps will be notified and can redirect accordingly. 
• Dynamically pause call recordings. Pause a call recording at any time, like when you’re taking down credit card information, to avoid recording illegally. 
• Set up your platform to alert
• Automatically block numbers that are on national “Do Not Call” lists. 
• Avoid over-dialing and over-calling. Alert reps when a record has been contacted that day. Managers and admins can also run reports to see how many calls reps are making to each contact. 
• Customize fields on your call log. Add custom and dependant fields to keep track of metrics that matter.

Email Compliance 

In this digital era of sales, salespeople spend 21% of their day writing emails and send an average of 36.2 emails per day. Having fool-proof (and fully legal) email methodology is vital to a rep’s success. Examples of email compliance include:

• Email opt-out— Sender must allow an opt-out option and comply with opt-out requests.
• Email blacklisting— Emails may be marked as “private” and cannot be added to your CRM.
• Email send limits— Inboxes may have limits, and when they’ve reached that limit, emails will no longer reach them. 

Here’s how Playbooks helps you follow email compliance, produce reliable results, and create the best email experience for your prospects:

• Block emails from being sent to those who have opted out. And include an embedded email opt-out link that will automatically update your CRM, to make things simple. 
• Detect invalid email addresses. Prevent spam scores from increasing by avoiding sending emails to invalid addresses. 
• Create custom email templates. Admins can create and lock certain email templates for reps to use. Reps can also customize email templates within the bounds set by administrators. 

Data Compliance

The new landscape of sales relies on data to get the job done. That said, sales orgs must comply with relevant data, privacy, and security laws. Playbooks has several features that help you comply with these laws and keep your data secure, including:

• Encrypt data in transit and at rest.
• Anonymize data in use.
• Control which features are available to individuals and groups.

Workflow Compliance

A consistent and reliable workflow means consistent results. Ensure reps are following the workflow most likely to set them up for success with these features:

• Workflow adherence reporting— Review levels of activity complete on steps in a workflow.
• Custom sorts— Make sure reps focus on the best records first, resulting in higher compliance and higher conversation rates. 
• Playbooks PriorityMode— Managers can create a custom order for reps to work records and reps are unable to break from that order.
• Skip reporting— Reps can choose to skip a task within a Play, but they are required to explain why. Data is saved to the CRM.
• Play Adherence Reporting— Administrators and managers can run reports from the CRM to see how many activities are being completed inside of a Play or outside of a Play. 

CRM Compliance

CRM is the main source of knowledge for many salespeople—it is no longer an optional tool. In 2020, CRM ranked as the most attained tech tool for sales teams. But having CRM is not enough, how you use it will make all the difference. Here’s how Playbooks builds on and augments your CRM:

• CRM merge field limits— Through Playbooks PriorityMode admins can ensure that reps work records in the order in which managers define. 
• Access user data access— Customers have complete control over what fields are shared with Playbooks platform. Only fields that are shared can be accessed by Playbooks.
• CRM sync logs— Detailed logs (including activity data like calls, emails, etc.) are available for customers to review the activities that have been synced to the CRM. 
• Customizable sync controls— Admins can determine how Playbooks syncs activities back to the CRM. Common configurations are to sync as the user or the access user.
• API limit toggles— Set the maximum number of API calls that Playbooks can use over a 24-hour period. 

For a full compliance and security checklist click here. 

Creating a Mindset of Security and ConsistencyThough there are several boxes to check when it comes to compliance, going beyond the checklist and encouraging a mindset of compliance will help your team connect with buyers in a more significant and effective way. As stated previously, compliance is about building a culture of security and consistency. Consider how you would like your information dealt with by a company. Establishing a sales system that not only complies with legalities but also ensures customer’s peace of mind and helps reps succeed through consistent and reliable cadences is all possible with Playbooks. Demo it today to find out how.