Sales strategies are essential to nailing down the objectives and goals of your business’s sales. Solidifying the correct strategy for your business may be the make or break to your success. Whether you’re focusing primarily on clarifying your buyer or differentiating from your competitors, here are 5 sales strategies that will just keep giving!
1. Clarify your core differentiator
Just as much as you want to bring in sales prospects, you want to ensure you’re bringing in the RIGHT prospects for your business. You want to ensure that your business is the right fit for your client just as much as they are the right fit for you.
Some differentiating questions to ask the prospective client may be what made them initially choose to work with a certain competitor. You may also want to ask why they might be interested in making the switch to working with your business. The goal of asking these questions is to help identify their pain points and pinpoint the gaps that your competitor was not able to satisfy.
If your business is able to help a client the way someone else couldn’t, you’ve successfully identified your core differentiator. Clarifying your unique factors will help your business determine your main focus and in turn, help develop a stronger sales strategy.
2. Target a specific market segment
Before choosing which market you want to target, you first need to identify which market segments are available to you. This can be much easier than attempting to analyze data points and can simply begin by looking at the market. Ideally, you want to find a market segment that isn’t over-saturated and will give you a strong opportunity to enter the market.
Once you’ve determined your ideal market niche, then you can start to nail down the details of who falls into that niche. This may include significant research on the type of buyer that exists in this niche. You want to detail what they’re looking for, what they’re currently looking for, what their budget may be, etc. This information can be collected by asking questions and surveying people that you know to fall into this category.
Based on the information that you find from this research, you want to determine if the niche segment is worth pursuing. If you collect information that leads you to believe that your product or service will not adequately meet the needs of the niche that you have identified, take the time to reassess and identify a different niche market that aligns better with your business.
3. Establish a specific qualification system
While you want to build sales and establish a customer base, you need to ensure that you’re bringing in the RIGHT customers for your business. If the customers that are reaching out to you don’t match the product or service that you’re offering, then it’s not worth your team’s time to continue to pursue them as leads.
Some questions to ask yourself when looking at a new potential customer include the following:
- What’s their company size?
- Do they work in your industry?
- Do they have the budget to afford your offerings?
- What challenges do they face?
- Is your contact the key decision-maker?
- Does your business have the capability to solve the question or problem that they’re experiencing?
While it may be tough to consider letting go of a potential sale, it’s important to recognize as early as possible which customers are likely to be successful leads and which are likely to end up being a waste of a salesperson’s time. It’d be a shame to invest the time in a lead that clearly doesn’t align with your business offerings only to end up losing the sale in the end anyway.
4. Automate your follow up process
Make it easy on yourself! If you can, automate it. The use of CRM and email workflows can make everyone’s lives easier. Allow yourself and your team to focus on projects that require their devoted attention and leave basic follow up to your CRM.
Workflows can be simple to set up to automatically send various follow-up emails based on your interactions with sales leads. Workflows are based on triggers and actions in response to the trigger. For example, a trigger may be a client filling out a form or completing a questionnaire. Once the form is submitted (the trigger), the workflow leads to an email that may prompt them to provide additional information (action) about what their needs are.
Workflows have the potential to be as simple or complex as desired but allow you to take the busy work of initial surface-level interactions off of your sales team’s plates. Additionally, timing can be a difficult factor for adequate follow up. No response from a lead may not necessarily mean a rejection but the email may have gotten lost, accidentally deleted, or fell off their plate. Workflows can help follow up even if your sales team has started to write them off.
5. Create a call outline
Let’s face it, cold calling is inevitable in sales. You ensure that your team’s cold calls are worth your while. Make sure they’re utilizing an effective outline that can be personalized and tailored to each lead. It’s important to include the following elements when creating an outline for your team:
- Introduction: Who are you and why are you calling them
- Opening: Your first opportunity to personalize. Why might they be a good fit? Do you have something in common with the lead?
- Reason: What are you offering? How can you help them?
- Offer: Show them your value. Share past successes.
- Questions: Gauge their interest and see if they have any questions for you. Assess if they’re a good fit for your business.
- Conclusion: What are the next steps? Provide a clear call to action.
These 5 steps are easy steps to streamline your sales strategy and simplify your process as much as possible. Once implemented, these tips will keep giving overtime for prolonged success. For more tips to improve your sales team, contact KelNet founder, Kelli Yount.
