OREANDA-NEWS. January 14, 2016. Managing a sales team without full confidence in the processes and technology is a potentially crippling situation. Without the right apps to save your team from wasting time, committing costly errors, or demotivation, you may be placing a ceiling on your team’s success. Here are three common sales management fears, and the three sales apps that will help overcome them.

Fear 1: You aren’t making the best use of your team’s time

For most sales teams, the process of getting from initial conversation to deal closing involves a lot of back and forth if you don’t have the right information at your fingertips. The wrong product or services configuration or the wrong price can trigger avoidable delays and result in customer dissatisfaction.

With Configure Price Quote software, cut down on the uncertainty, freeing your team to take on more accounts or spend more time actually selling. If you’re resisting CPQ software because “creating manual documents is the way we’ve always done things,” you might be putting an unnecessary ceiling on your team’s success.

PROS Smart CPQ automates and optimizes CPQ processes in Salesforce, helping you sell easier, faster, and smarter. With Smart CPQ, you can streamline quoting, reduce costly errors, shorten the sales cycle, and increase revenue.

Fear 2: Manually inputting data makes you vulnerable to errors

Every number or piece of data you move over from one document to another provides a chance to make a costly error. Yet those sales teams not using technology risk putting proposals and contracts in jeopardy. Using apps with collaborative data migration, data loading, and data import/export functionality significantly limits the chances of making a critical error during the sales process.

One tool that can assist in this endeavor is Apttus X-Author for Excel, which transforms Microsoft Excel from a stand-alone tool into a complete user interface for Salesforce. X-Author enables sales teams to add and update records for any number of objects from Excel, while maintaining the permissions, rules, and security of Salesforce. X-Author boosts Salesforce productivity and adoption while virtually eliminating data entry errors.

Fear 3: You aren’t motivating your sales teams

Let’s face it: your sales reps are motivated by a number of things, including the success of your business, but financial incentives and competition are part of the list. Through the use of apps that manage sales incentives, you can improve your comp processes and minimize the number and severity of disputes between reps and sales leadership over compensation and performance. Though it may seem like one more tool to have to manage, the risk for sales leadership of managing sales incentives in a spreadsheet or through verbal communication is far too great.

Xactly Incent combines incentives with Salesforce to automate, motivate, and optimize sales compensation. Using Xactly Incent, companies benefit by keeping employees engaged through real-time feedback on their incentives, ensuring comp plans align with company goals and freeing managers to focus on other tasks.

If you’re looking for more apps to help improve the performance of your sales team, check out the sales category in the AppExchange.