Sales is as much science as it is art.  But that concept has been hard for the industry to grasp.

It’s likely you’ve heard that someone is a “natural salesperson” or that they “have the gift of gab”.  And while it can seem like those traits are just innate to salespeople, they’re really strengths in terms of understanding human behavior, connecting with people, and learning about what matters to them.

Great salespeople can’t just rely on their personality and social skills, though. A great deal of sales success comes from a solid methodology, which is a combination of process, approach, and applying soft skills to build relationships.

If you talk to top performers in sales, most of them will tell you that they rely on a combination of things to succeed:

• A repeatable, scalable sales methodology
• Strong support from leaders and managers
• A keen understanding of their customer

Deals are rarely won or lost based on spreadsheets or process details. The success of sales professionals is ​captured through what we call the sales narrative. It’s the valuable, intelligence-packed storyline that underpins every closed-won deal. The narrative is made up of small conversational details – emails back and forth, notes from meetings or calls, tidbits that salespeople capture as they learn about their customers – that together make up a comprehensive picture of the prospect’s interests, challenges, desires and interactions with the team.

But ask those same sales professionals what tools they use to capture that information so they can actually put it to use…and you’re likely to get several different – and insufficient – answers.

The godfather application for sales has long been the CRM. And these platforms excel at capturing structured data, like contact information, dollar amounts, and contact information. But they’re pretty terrible at capturing the more unstructured conversational information from that sales conversation and even worse at helping salespeople understand what to do what that information once they have it.

Some general-purpose tools have stepped in to fill the gap, like various note-taking applications or spreadsheets. But each sales professional ends up cobbling together their own set of solutions independently, everyone using something different (which hinders collaboration), and none of them are purpose-built for navigating and orchestrating the sales narrative itself. So it’s time for something new. Something built for salespeople, by salespeople, and focused on building consistent, actionable sales narratives that will accelerate deals.

TRAQ is the modern sales professional’s secret weapon. It’s designed to help salespeople excel at their work and help them stay on top of every opportunity, at every step.  It makes it easy to capture all of the elements of the sales narrative in one organized spot and apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze all that information, report on it, and ultimately help every sales professional act on the insights that will help them get deals done.

In 2021, it’s far past time for sales to have tools designed for the way we work, and the very intricate process of developing and sustaining customer relationships. Sales is as much science as art, and better, more intelligent tools will help us all rise to meet the challenges of today’s fast-moving businesses.