To increase your sales performance, you need to stay alert in your search for skills and techniques. Here are some helpful tips to take sales reps to the next level.
In today's sales world, there is one thing you have to get right if your organization is going to succeed — "performance". If your sales team doesn't perform well consistently, your company is not going to hit the goals in a given time period. As a sales leader, you need to ensure your sales reps have the right training and coaching available for them to do their best. The first step is gathering the right resources and tools to improve your sales performance.
Below are 10 simple tips to get your sales team on track to reach goals and improve your sales performance in an easy way.
1. Build Trust with Prospects and Customers
The way to access the peak of sales performance is to understand the customer and prospect mindset and change your practices to serve the current days buyers. The prospects or customers you are selling to is more educated than it’s ever been due to the rapid change which has happened in the Internet age, so few old school techniques may not work today. Intuitive, intelligent selling helps reps leverage the complexity of the modern work environment to provide valuable thought leadership—and ultimately close more deals.
Customer communication has changed in recent years, but whatever the method, it is undeniable that building customer trust is key for reps in order to succeed. To win this trust, a rep must make building rapport a priority by first connecting with the customer by empathizing with their needs.
2. Listening Build Trust, Listen First then Speak
“The 80/20 principle is one of the great secrets of highly successful salespeople and organizations.” The same principle of 80/20, when applied for listening and then speaking can do wonders for the sales rep when it comes to building trust with the customers or the prospects. As a sales rep, 80% of the time should be given to the prospect or the customer and allow them to share their pain points in detail and then sales rep should majorly focus on the product/service/offering which can address those pain points.
The sales rep should also be asking further questions to get more clarity when required and then answer all the points focusing on the pain points. The sales rep must avoid taking more about their company, it's business processes or anything which is self-absorbed! We are not saying that key points should not be told about the company, what point we want to focus is that again during that 20% speaking time further 80/20 principle should be applied i.e. 4% focusing on self and 16% on prospects or customers pain point.
3. Ditch the Pitch and Have Real Discussion
The word, “pitch” usually leaves a bad taste in the mouth of sales reps, customers, and prospects—ultimately impacting your sales team performance.
Salespeople sometimes think that they should talk to someone, but that’s not an effective way to communicate. It is not a good idea to call/talk to someone with an intention to sell its company product/offering/service, nowadays people can smell this easily and they avoid being sold. A good pitch is one where you ask questions, listen to the prospect, and offer them a solution to a problem.”
You should have 1-3 questions, ideally 3 questions which the sales rep must ask the prospects before telling anything about the offering. When the prospect answers those question and the sales rep decide if the offering is fit for the prospect then only the discussion or presentation should move forward. Many times sales reps spent their time giving presentations or explaining a product and after the presentation or discussion tell that they are not looking for such offering, sounds similar to you? The key is to ask questions to qualify the prospect and then give a presentation.
4. Focus Every Interaction Around Experience
Every time a sales rep talks to someone, they should be focused on ensuring the conversation provides the strongest customer or prospect experience possible. This means sales rep must put himself in that person's shoes and understanding the pain points they facing in day to day working.
Your sales reps should keep the conversation around the problems a customer/prospect is facing and the best way to solve those problems. To improve your sales performance, reps should be able to explain the customer/prospect that how they are going to experience the change with the offering of your company. The more sales rep go this way, the easier it is for the customer/prospect to take a purchase decision.
5. Let the Data do the Talking
To make the conversation with the customer/prospect easier the sales rep should have valuable insights, data points, or other resources that can back you up. Providing them with solid market info-graphics, actionable information, and comparative analytics of using your product/services versus not having those gives them the strong impression that you understand their business and have their best interests at heart. Again, this is another factor that establishes trust between the sales rep and the customer/prospect.
6. Focus On Keeping Your Customer for Life
“Once a customer, always a customer.”
Once a customer has purchased your product or the services your company offer, this should not be the end of your relationship with them. Focus on keeping a strong relationship with your customers. This will only create more trust and add value to your product and the company. There are few advantages of doing so like the customer is going to purchase again in future if the product/service your company offer without giving a second thought about changing the vendor which will ensure regular flow of business without any major investment of time and money which is spent in acquiring a new customer.
7. Offer Potential Customers Something Really Great, for Free
Your ideal customer is far more likely to buy your product/service if you give them a preview to try out. Shoot a short video of your product in action, give them a free piece of really great content and get your customers excited for what’s next. If you can offer the product/service for a trial period i.e. 7-15 days to the prospect that alone only will increase the probability of closing the sale. If the trial establishes the fact that the offered product/service is going the help them then you will be able to save a lot of time in convincing a prospect to buy your product/service.
8. Handling Objections During the Sales Process
Nothing defeats, I repeat "Nothing defeats" a sales rep faster than an unexpected objection. Most salespeople invest hours perfecting their sales process without giving a second thought to what comes afterward. But even a perfect sales process can be ruined by poor objection handling. If you are tired of losing sales to responses like, “Your price is too high,” “Now isn’t a good time,” or, “We would have purchased if these features were there,” it’s time to get serious about overcoming objections. Instead of hoping your prospects won’t have objections (they always will), spend some time preparing for them in advance.
9. Communication is the Key
When prospects and customers reach out to you, always respond to their needs quickly. They should feel that your company believes in the prospect/customer and is always available for any help. If they feel so, they’ll stick around longer and will do more business with you, making it easy for your sales reps to improve sales performance. Regular communication is also important even after a sales rep has closed the deal, keep the communication active, you may consider even sending some reports/industry news related to the customer. This helps to build a long term relation with the customer.
10. Define a Crystal Clear Sales Process
Salespeople must have a crystal clear sales process. This process should be followed by all sales reps to get similar results. Based on the feedback and experience this process will get so balanced in a few months that it will help the company and the sales reps to predict the sales numbers. Most of the sales reps fail for not having such sales process and every time they try something to get the result, we can say that approach as "Spray and Pray".
We hope this post may have given you a few ideas to move the needle in the right direction. We urge you to try out these tips within your company and see the results yourself, we are sure you will get good results.
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