The importance of positive sales results in business can never be overemphasized. The business survival relies on how well salespeople are performing. This is, in fact, a pill many business people don’t like to swallow. And when you combine result oriented sales team with innovative technology, achieving sales targets become easier.
You may argue it; the essence of commercial business is to make profit. Before you can talk about profit, you need to make sales in quantity/number large enough to take care of all operating costs including salaries of everyone in your organization. It then means no sales no revenue. And when the revenue gained is less than the total operating cost, expenses, and taxes, it is termed as a loss in economics. So, you undoubtedly need positive sales results to remain in business for a long time.
However, the admirable trait of successful salespeople is their inherent ability to close deals against all odds and make everyone happy. It seems these sales champions have the magic wand or some sort of gem that works invincibly for them. No matter how high the sales target is, they have what it takes to achieve it. What is it in their sales toolkit that makes achieving sales results an easy cruise?
From experience and research, those salespeople that unrelentingly focus on those activities that matter most in sales process achieve great feats.
I highlight here seven things every sale person must imbibe to always meet and exceed sales targets and make sales process experience so pleasant:
Deep Knowledge of Your Product/Solution
This seems so obvious but deep product knowledge is honestly one of the few things that separate the boys from men in deals closing. The top 1% of sales reps truly understand their product or solution to a fault. Salespeople should be able to explain in details how each product works, the benefits it offers prospects, and the reasons why it is the best bet for their customers.
Identify People in Purchase Decision
The sales funnel in any business depicts three important stages- awareness stage, consideration stage and purchase stage. Knowing which stage your customer is can help you communicate with their pain points and fast-track them to a closed deal. A customer at the awareness stage needs content or information that will educate him about the product while a customer at the consideration stage needs to know more of product benefits and reasons to commit his hard earned money. At purchase stage, prospects are ready to make a purchase. This is the point your checkout process must not be so frustrating if you are an e-commerce business.
Understand Customers Concerns
Your customers are humans. They will naturally want to minimize their risks. You need to analyze their buying process and concerns at every stage. For instance, if your business sells analytics software, you may require prospects to drop their details to download a free trial. They might have concerns which range from possible email spams, identity theft, to limited time to fill in the trial product form. If you have not identified likely concerns and ways to attend to them, you will always lose customers who would not bend their rules for you. And probably, they will not even get to experience your product to make an informed buying decision.
Entice Prospects with Valuable Offer
Dropbox, cloud based file sharing software usually comes to mind when you are looking for a product embedded with a sales process. They manage to get you to use their product for free with limited but unbelievably large enough space. And when your storage capacity exceeds free account, you wouldn’t have a choice than to pay for more space. It is a creative sales strategy with high success rates.
Chain-like Sales Actions
One of the frustrations sales managers have is an inability of sales reps to close deals on a large number of qualified leads. Somewhere along the line, the lead drops off. And the reasons may not be sales reps not doing enough in generating more leads, it often revolves around a disconnected sales process where every sales step is weakly linked to the next phase. Like my former boss used to say, you don’t leave a sales meeting without agreeing on the next line of action with prospects. Sale process needs to be carefully designed to ensure the journey of a prospect eventually ends in a closed deal. Every action should contribute to moving a qualified lead through to the end of a sales funnel. When a prospect comes to your site via inbound tactics, you should have a clear-cut link to a landing page where he can sign up for a free trial. With this, you have prospect details that can be used for an email campaign. This grounds you in the hearts of prospects.
Automate Sales Process
According to Garner research, companies that automate lead management see a 10% or greater increase in revenue in 6-9 months. Successful salespeople leverage an innovative technology solution to remain mysterious. The key stages of sales the funnel is automated- from awareness creation to nurturing and qualifying leads and eventual selling and closing deals.
Pipeliner CRM’s Sales Activities feature helps you to define what should be done in each step of your sales process using their CRM solution.
Measure, Analyze and Improve
At every stage of your sales funnel, you need to measure sales metrics for performance monitoring. How do you know if you are making progress or not if sales metrics are not closely monitored? Where is the lead leaking points in sales funnel? Where are the blockages occurring in the sales funnel? When you have all these data coupled with in-depth analysis of your sales process, your sales team are able to sincerely improve their sales process and get better sales results.
In conclusion
Your sales activities success lies on how well you are able to focus on elements that matter most in sales process. Your prospects will not lower their criteria just because they dealing with you. Today’s consumers are highly sophisticated, and always looking for the next solution to spend on for necessity and pleasures. When you demonstrate rounded knowledge of customer’s needs coupled with well-designed sales process to meet those needs, they will choose your products over your competitors, and your sales results will remain positive.
