The goal of any business is to drive more sales hence the need to deploy different sales strategies that will work at different stages of the buyer journey. The sales strategy you will use when you first get in contact with a lead is different from the strategy you will use after converting the lead into a customer to encourage repeat business.
Having a sales strategy helps in creating a vision, developing a path to be followed by the sales teams and providing critical data and numbers that ensure you meet your business objectives. Even in the face of the increasingly competitive business environment, a sales strategy will help to boost growth rates, hit target revenues and increase profit.
How then do you transform your sales strategy to drive sales, hit revenue targets and increase profit? Here are 3 tips to help you create a powerful strategy
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Create a well-articulated customer engagement process
If you have conversational intelligence tools, you’ll have insight into who your customers are and what they are looking for. With this information, you need to make it easier for them to not only discover but also engage with you by working out a customer engagement process. Aim at deepening relationships with leads beyond the initial engagement to establish clear objectives to establish long term relations.
Most importantly, target the right customers so you identify their traits and come up with a personalized outreach mechanism. Outlining communication efforts by providing prospects with information that is both educational and salesy. This is important as it helps to build trust, promote better engagement and drive value as prospects interact with your brand.
Although you may not necessarily make a sale at this stage, the relationship you are building as you guide prospects through the discovery stage will set the stage for activating the buying process. By the time prospects get to the buying process, you will experience notably higher and faster conversions.
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Leverage data to discover and prioritize your leads
The B2B sales space has seen a significant transformation over the past years that you can no longer ignore the power of analytics and data. Dealing with today’s informed buyer requires that you know what they want. Knowing leads alone is not enough. You must also have a mechanism of qualifying and prioritizing the new leads to close more sales. You need quality data to manage your leads funnel to be able to score leads successfully. Having access to data helps you to know what is working, the areas you must improve on as well as identify opportunities for sales strategies. Ranking leads by their suitability and engagement level means your sales teams will be empowered to hold customized sales conversations at the appropriate time in the sales cycle.
The ability to qualify leads eliminates guesswork so that your teams can drive more sales as they can easily identify the leads that are ready to buy. Even then, this requires that you invest in tools that provide you with solid data such as a sales enablement platform along with conversational intelligence software. A sales strategy that is backed by data means you can be sure of forecasting that is more accurate resulting in higher conversion rates and more revenue as sales reps can make smart decisions and precise predictions.
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Have a clear sales process
As your prospects show readiness to buy, your sales team must have clear conversion funnels and sale paths to close a sale. First, they must offer a swift response because a slow lead response may be prohibitive. Although the sales process may vary from business to business, there are some basic elements of the process you should implement that include determining lead status categories, lead conversion paths and, status ageing threshold, an opportunity for staging, prospect feedback loops and the deal approval process.
Defining your sales process will ensure your teams use the sales tools at their disposal to determine and measure progress. The ability to create a world-class sales strategy will make it easy for your sales teams to forecast sales, amplify what is working and improve what is not. While creating a practical sales strategy can be a challenge, you can use these tips to make it easier to create a plan that your teams can use to drive sales.
Even then, you need to revise your sales strategy periodically to ensure that it is relevant and effective owing to the changing nature of technology. Ultimately, building an effective strategy goes beyond lead generation by helping you identify the right opportunities and how to approach them.