Businesses thrive off of a smart and calculated sales force. The best sales reps spend more time strategically planning their approach and working with others rather than blindly calling prospects.
To more consistently win over accounts and regularly beat your revenue target, here are three things sales professionals should always remember.
Price customers differently
The old adage, "Not all customers are created equal," rings true.
Unique sub-groupings within your target audience spend differently. You may uncover a buyer's specific needs when you understand each client's order frequency, order volume and the types of products or services he ultimately purchases. Customers should further be categorized as returning customers or one-time only buyers, allowing you intelligently focus your efforts on clients who will drive long-term value for your firm.
But sellers often only discover this information long after the deal is done. Most of the time, shoppers will not reveal their hand entirely before making a final purchase decision. Therefore, part of your work requires that you identify recurring themes within former prospects' behaviors to better pre-qualify current sales prospects. That way, you will know if you can sell your company's premium offerings to a big budget client that needs to be "wowed" from the start or if you should propose a low-budget and low-risk solution for kick-starting the relationship with the expectation of upselling premium services later.
Marry marketing with sales
Without a formal ceremony, marketing should be wed with sales. The strength of your brand, collateral and promotional strategies can help dramatically amplify the number of leads you receive and the sales you close. Often, there is a multiplier effect when you execute integrated marketing and sales campaigns.
Salespeople must partner closely with marketing folk within a firm to:
- Align marketing messages with the sales pitch
- Develop digital and physical assets that can educate and excite potential buyers
- Evangelize existing customers and company loyalists
- Foster a brand name that is almost synonymous with its industry
- Identify and understand critical buyer personas
- Produce email drip campaigns and remarketing strategies
- Promote each of the business' offerings
Within most organizations, marketing and sales teams eat and work separately, relegated to their respective corners of the office. In some cases, the relationship is more contentious than it is collaborative.
For Forbes, contributor Christine Moorman shares tips for overcoming the marketing-sales turf war. By creating responsibilities that support the customer buying process, shifting focus towards your most valuable customers, enabling open knowledge sharing, and establishing shared incentives, marketing and sales departments learn to put personal agendas aside for the greater good of the company. Moorman closes the article by saying, "Doing so improves the company's bottom line and promotes a healthier work culture for both strategic functions of the company."
Partner with like-minded companies
To sell at scale, some professionals might aggressively optimize their calendars to guarantee back-to-back calls with potential clients, hire assistants to help with research and prospecting or increase their working hours. Others know those approaches have their limitations and may lead to sales burnout. Clever salespeople, instead, look to tap larger, pre-existing client bases.
Spend time learning about non-competitive businesses within your space. Most of the time, you can quickly discover winning propositions that allow each company to sell to the other's respective customer list. Through strategic cross-promotion, you leverage the loyalty and trust consumers have with partnering brands to contribute value to close hundreds or even thousands of new sales at once.
If your products or services complement those of like-minded companies within your specific industry, you can partner to sell bundled packages to potential clients. This allows you to quickly enhance your value proposition to prospects without waiting three months for your engineering and product teams to brainstorm, develop, test, and ship new offerings.
What are simple ways you became better at sales?
This article originally appeared on the PandaDoc blog and is republished with permission.