What Is Sales Orchestration? A Guide

Today’s customer journey is a maze of touchpoints, channels, and stakeholders, and for most sales teams, it’s a difficult one to track, with vital context at risk of being lost at every handoff. A disjointed process doesn’t just frustrate internal sales teams, it creates a poor experience for buyers. The solution? Working smarter, not harder, with a sales orchestration strategy that aligns people, process, and technology to guide the customer from first click to final signature.

What Is Sales Orchestration?

Sales orchestration is a process that coordinates sales, marketing, and customer service activities around a common objective: Guide buyers through each stage of their purchasing journeys with a consistent and efficient experience. Artificial intelligence (AI) now plays a vital role in sales orchestration by providing data-driven insights, automated task assignments, and personalized content.

Sales Orchestration Explained

Sales orchestration goes beyond automating repetitive tasks or providing basic workflow support, though both are important. Sales orchestration is all about designing interconnected processes to achieve one goal: a unified approach to revenue generation. Rather than each sales representative, department, or channel operating in a vacuum, the idea is to facilitate continual collaboration and context sharing.

To succeed, an orchestration strategy needs thoughtfully structured processes; timely, accessible, and accurate data; and clear direction for and buy-in from everyone involved in the customer journey. AI-powered orchestration solutions can help by analyzing buyer behaviors, suggesting next best actions, and recommending specific content or tactics. While it may not help with the cultural element, using AI can help organizations respond efficiently while also anticipating needs and proactively engaging potential buyers.

Why Is Sales Orchestration Important?

Sales orchestration is important because it reduces the complexity of managing multiple stakeholders, channels, and processes in fast-paced sales environments. Instead of relying on disconnected activities, revenue-generating teams across sales, marketing, and service can harmonize their efforts using tools that allow them to work toward the same objectives using the same data.

AI brings added value by identifying patterns within large data sets, predicting which leads are most promising, and making recommendations for monetizing those leads. This can reduce time wasted on low-potential opportunities and prioritizes actions that are likely to drive higher revenue. In heavily regulated or high-value sales cycles, orchestration helps promote compliance and consistency by reducing the likelihood of miscommunication and missed steps.

Advantages of Effective Sales Orchestration

It’s natural for departments to guard their data and processes—aka protect their turf. AI can act as a neutral orchestrator, reducing potential interpersonal friction. For example, when a lead is qualified by the marketing team, AI can automatically trigger the next sales action, providing the sales representative with all the relevant data and even a personalized communication script. Each department’s success is more visibly and directly tied to other teams’ contributions throughout the sales cycle. As a result, turf wars are replaced by a shared, data-driven process.

When executed effectively, sales orchestration can provide these advantages via a few specific benefits:

• Actionable insights: Integrated AI tools can gather, process, and interpret huge quantities of disparate data. They can then drill into that data to generate suggested actions for each team that are more likely to drive results. Sometimes, these suggestions present entirely new approaches that no one had thought of.
• Consistency: Customer communications and offers are coordinated to support a uniform experience across all channels. Companies can determine next best actions for every situation and execute consistently, every time.
• Enhanced personalization: Sales teams love it when content, offers, and follow-ups are tailored to individual buyers because the result is often better engagement and conversion rates. Orchestration also helps marketing deliver consistently here.
• Faster scale: With the playbooks, automated workflows, and adaptive processes sales orchestration provides, businesses can grow revenue without a corresponding increased investment in resources.
• Greater efficiency: Related, AI-driven automation and process management tools can dramatically limit manual handoffs, speed up task completion, and reduce redundancies. People have more time to spend on creative tasks that can lead to new products and markets.
• Improved collaboration: Regarding culture, AI-driven sales orchestration helps discourage data hoarding tendencies in sales, marketing, support, and other teams by centralizing information and coordinating efforts.

Steps to Implement Sales Orchestration

If this all sounds good, the better news is that, if your company has started adopting AI, you can leverage that experience to launch your sales orchestration efforts. In many cases, the marketing, sales, and decision automation systems you already use have sales orchestration tools and features built right in.

Here are five top-level steps to introduce sales orchestration into a typical business—you’ll want to pull in stakeholders at the outset to get ahead of the aforementioned turf-guarding.

1. Map out the end-to-end sales process: Start by documenting all your sales touchpoints, decision stages, and the roles involved. Identify gaps, friction points, and handoff inefficiencies across channels or teams so you don’t end up automating a clunky process.
2. Integrate your data sources: The more data, the better. Connect sales, marketing, and service databases to create a unified and constantly updated motherlode of customer intelligence. Plug in AI platforms to detect data quality issues, enrich records, and tease out actionable information.
3. Define and automate workflow: Now you know what to do and what data you have. Collaborate with both business and technical stakeholders to establish best practices, such as qualification criteria, assignment rules, and approval flows. Use orchestration platforms to automate triggers, reminders, and task assignments throughout the sales cycle.
4. Queue up AI-driven insights and recommendations: Deploy tools that analyze behavior patterns, engagement signals, and other relevant metrics. Use these insights to prioritize leads, suggest next best steps, and generate personalized content.
5. Monitor, measure, and optimize: Establish tracking mechanisms for each step in the sales orchestration process and decide which KPIs and metrics you’ll use to define success. Build dashboards and reporting tools to evaluate performance based on those parameters. As you move ahead, look out for bottlenecks and continue to fine-tune your approach as customers, products, or strategies evolve.

When done properly, sales orchestration aligns your people, processes, and technologies so you can deliver consistently effective engagement throughout the customer journey. Adding AI is a win/win as it not only smooths coordination but can also dramatically improve decision-making and personalization. Now, you can scale your selling efforts and capture new revenue opportunities while giving your people time to create the next million-dollar idea for your business.

Sales Orchestration FAQs

What are the 7 stages of the sales process?

While effective selling strategies will depend on the industry and company, there are seven general stages of the sales process:

• 1. Prospecting: Identifying potential customers.
• 2. Preparation: Researching these prospects and their needs and preparing marketing materials.
• 3. Approach: Making contact with the prospect.
• 4. Presentation: Explaining the product or service and how it meets the prospect's needs.
• 5. Objection handling: Salespeople should be equipped to address any concerns or questions.
• 6. Closing: Securing the sale.
• 7. Follow-up: Nurturing the relationship and ensuring customer satisfaction.