Customers today are mobile, social, and busier than they’ve ever been. Salespeople must be increasingly creative and persistent to break through to prospects.
And to do that, they need to be efficient, productive, and able to sell the way they want to sell. Check out these three steps for turning sales teams into revenue-generating deal machines.
1. Understand your prospects and customers.
That’s right, the first step to selling the way you want to sell isn’t about you at all. It’s about your customers and prospects. Before you start building or changing your sales process, make sure that you prioritize getting all the most relevant customer and prospect information at your fingertips.
Salespeople shouldn’t have to dig for information, bouncing between multiple tabs and siloed applications. Understanding the consumers to whom you’re selling won’t just increase the likelihood of closing a deal, it will also free up time to close more.
When sales reps have all the relevant information they need for a call readily available, they spend less time prequalifying leads, engaging with the wrong contacts, and preparing for sales calls.
2. Match technology to processes.
Think about your current sales process, does any part of it feel like it’s just too much? Maybe you have lots of manual steps involved, or multiple hand-offs that take up time.
But if you have sales apps you use to get your job done, the apps should be completing those extra steps for you, sometimes even eliminating them altogether.
What you hate, you automate.When choosing, customizing, or building your sales software, keep in mind that the sales app should match your processes. It shouldn’t limit you from working the way you want.
Remember that while technology can be a tool to make your best ideas possible, the best solutions won’t start with software. They’ll start with a human need.
3. See what’s in your pipeline.
Before you can know where you’re going, you have to know where you are. To make more meaningful, strategic sales decisions now and in the future, sales leadership needs access to quality data on sales opportunities and activities.
With accurate and up-to-date information on current, potential, and even missed opportunities, leadership can quickly identify what’s working and what’s not. Then, they can set more realistic goals and establish processes that reinforce desirable outcomes.
Key in this equation is the adoption of the sales apps where this data is gathered. If sales reps don’t use apps like CRM and other sales tools accurately (or if they don’t use them at all), data could be inaccurate, incomplete, and even change unpredictably.
When purchasing or building sales apps for your team, make sure that they’re intuitive, easy-to-use, and most importantly, give salespeople more time to do what they were hired to do, sell. Want more tips on how to sell the way you want? Download our free eBook, Win more deals faster. By design.