Though most sales teams recognize the importance of an evolving sales strategy to close more deals, they struggle to make it happen. Which is easy to understand: it’s incredibly difficult.
Consider your own sales strategy — the channels you use and tactics you apply, for starters. Now think about whether they are helping you build a strong and steady pipeline, or holding you back in some way?
It’s a question many sales leaders need to answer quarter by quarter. Today, the vast majority of sales opportunities lie at the intersection of collaboration, automation, and human touch. In short, the solutions that most customers want — but sales teams struggle to create — requires less wheel-spinning and more transparency in order to achieve success.
Agile sales professionals are always on the lookout for new techniques and tips to improve their strategy. And what sets them apart is the ability to find a way around different challenges to get the results they are looking for.
So, the real question is: How can you do the same for your sales team in today’s changing landscape? Here are seven ways to improve your sales strategy in 60 days (or less).
1. Bring marketing and sales together to create content
In many businesses, marketing and sales don’t work together to achieve their goals. They live on two different islands with little communication or cross-pollination. This creates a variance in what the two departments consider a qualified lead or not.
To improve lead quality, you want to build a bridge between these two departments. Sales can help marketing produce smarter, more informed content for each stage of the funnel. They can also feed sales insights into customer pain points, goals, buying behaviors, lingo, and more. This helps marketing teams refine their messaging and choose more effective channels on which to publish content and advertise.
Sales can also use marketing content through different customer touchpoints — giving a quick and easy boost to your ROI. Which makes sense, considering marketing and sales have similar goals.
When put together, companies see 38% higher sales-win rates and 36% higher customer retention, according to HubSpot. If you want to improve your sales strategy quick, start by closing the gap between sales and marketing departments.
2. Invest in Chat Marketing
Sales teams should stop relying on cold calls and being overly formal to build relationships, and instead engage with leads in a place where they are more comfortable. If this sounds like a familiar problem, you may need to invest in Chat Marketing. You can use Messenger bots to engage Facebook page and website visitors with specialized content to close more deals and shorten your sales cycle.
Say you have a high-value MarTech client who requires building a strong relationship with vendors before converting. You can create a lead nurture flow with content specifically for that vertical. This could be a whitepaper, benchmark report, or a blog post. Regardless, your goal is to build trust between you and the lead.
With a chat, you can attract the right audience, deliver relevant content, and qualify visitors before they book a meeting with your sales team. No more cold outreach. No more questionable leads.
Drive more qualified leads and revenue with ManyChat bot today
3. Automate the process to book calls and demos
When a potential new client fills out a contact form on your website, the standard routine is manual outreach. You play the back and forth game through email to find the best time for a call. This kind of experience fractures the relationship between you and a prospect. By the time you figure it out, a lead could lose interest.
Now imagine when someone fills out your form, an automated message goes out with a link to your calendar. Interested leads can see your availability and schedule a meeting. Then, the meeting shows up on everyone’s calendar, and reminders are sent via Messenger, SMS and email.
A great way to automate booking is with ManyChat, Calendly, and Zoom. You can link your Calendly and Zoom accounts, then integrate those with ManyChat. When someone books a call through your Messenger bot, a meeting link is created and sent to everyone who’s joining the call.
4. Ask the right questions
The secret to being great at sales is not being persuasive. It’s asking the right sales questions to guide prospects toward the best solution. The goal is to better understand and qualify leads rather than delivering the best sales pitch.
Ryan Deiss, Founder and CEO of Premier Online Learning Community, DigitalMarketer, weighs in on this:
“Probe. Ask questions. Everybody, especially in sales, wants to ask the question that’s going to elicit the answer they can use later on in the sales process against them. There’s nothing wrong with just asking someone a question because it’s nice, because it’s the right thing to do.”
You want to discover more about their problems and create conversations that build trust. The more questions you ask, the higher your chance of closing the deal.
5. Upsell to increase customer lifetime value
Whether you’re in professional services or eCommerce, selling to existing customers is cheaper than new ones. Upselling is a healthy way to run part of your sales because it increases customer lifetime value (CLV) and saves money across the board. But you want to do it the right way, because if you don’t, you’ll end up spamming customers and losing trust.
There a number of ways you can upsell to increase CLV:
- Upsell from freemium product. Nearly 35% of companies offer a free version of their product or service. For example, David Sanchez, Founder of SEO Agency Mammoth Web Solutions, offers free Google My Business set up for local businesses. Once they start receiving more phone calls to their business, they turn to David for more paid SEO services.
- Build rapport with clients. Check-in with your clients on a weekly or daily basis, continually learning about their challenges and pains. If you build a meaningful relationship with your clients, they’ll trust the solutions you recommend.
- Remarket using Click-to-Messenger ads. Say you have an email or Messenger subscriber list ready for an upsell. You can load them into ManyChat and create a Custom Audience to send the promotion. When a user clicks into the ad, they’ll enter a bot flow that can guide users to the sale.
- Make it a quick win for customers. No one wants to go through another buying cycle. If you want to upsell additional products or services, make it straightforward and simple for clients to see results.
Both small and large teams can use these tactics to create more valuable touchpoints for customers and increase sales revenue.
6. Track the right KPIs
If you want to improve your sales processes, you want to track the KPIs that matter most to your business. Monitoring the right sales KPIs can show you not only closed deals and revenue, but also a ton of insight into your team’s performance. This means you can find new training opportunities, uncover sales pipeline issues, and even where your best leads are coming from.
Outside of the standard go-to metrics, consider tracking these useful and important sales KPIs, according to a survey by Databox.
For a full list of sales KPIs to track, read the full article: The 37 Sales KPI’s Every Sales Leader Should Be Measuring by Databox.
7. Free up time spent on administrative tasks
Sales reps these days spend less than 36% of their time selling. The rest is wasted on writing up reports, inputting data, and completing other administrative tasks. Sales automation tools are a great way to streamline sales tasks and close deals faster.
Studies show that more than 75% of companies that use tools like Facebook Messenger bots reported increased sales over 12 months. When used effectively, sales reps can devote more time to revenue-generating sales activities and have a real impact on your bottom-line.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, improving your sales strategy isn’t just a widely recognized unicorn in the office — it’s a critical way to close more deals. Remember to focus on becoming a partner to your clients and helping them, and keep in touch as much as possible. Not only can you use these tips to make your sales team better, but you could also build a competitive advantage against companies who still manually follow up with each and every lead.
