Consumer spending has risen significantly over the last three years and is showing no sign of slowing down.
What does that mean for your sales team? It means that there is ample opportunity in today’s market that you can cash in on if you employ the right tactics.
But what exactly constitutes great sales tactics these days? After all, the sales game has changed drastically with consumers increasingly relying on eCommerce and rising skepticism of traditional techniques like cold calling.
While there’s no magic book of fool-proof sales tips that you can lean on to close a deal every time, there are some methods that you can employ to seriously boost your performance and your team’s.
Here’s what we think you should start doing:
1. Set Goals
Too many teams go into a year with the idea that they should just sell as much as possible. Selling as much as possible doesn’t define benchmarks though which leads to underperformance.
It can be hard to set sales benchmarks in your first couple of years doing business since you won’t have a lot of analytics to plan against. If you’re in that position, try and build sales goals off of what your company needs to sell to be profitable and what kind of volumes your competitors are moving.
2. Build an Automated Sales Funnel
eCommerce is big these days with one out of every ten sales being generated online. If your company isn’t leveraging technology to help you close deals, you’re losing money.
Fortunately, taking a step into the world of marketing and selling digitally is as easy as setting up a website, learning about this CRM platform or any number of the other ones on the market, and staying persistent.
Business is going to move to a place where the majority of products are being sold over the internet. The sooner that you hop on that bandwagon and start allowing your customers to buy on their own without your sales team needing to pitch them, the better.
3. Reengage Past Customers
Nothing closes the gap between where your sales team is at and where it needs to go quite like past customers. Past customers already know your product, probably like it and usually have the money to buy from you again.
What’s missing from that equation is incentive.
If your sales team can give past buyers inventive in the way of a new product or a coupon, you’ll score a lot of quick transactions.
4. Tailor Marketing Towards Customer Needs
Selling something isn’t about getting somebody to buy an item. It’s about getting them to buy results.
For example, somebody who buys an ice scraper for their car’s windshield wasn’t in the market for a piece of plastic with a handle attached to it. They were in the market for a car without ice on its windshield.
If you can sell results that align with your customer’s needs rather than specifically selling your product, you’re going to enjoy more conversions.
5. Understand Popular Objections
Inevitably, your product will have flaws that entice people not to buy. Your customer will also have lifestyle constraints that keep them from buying.
If you commit any of our sales tips to memory, let it be that you need to be prepared to argue against all of those objections.
For example, if your customer is going to tell you that they can’t afford what you’re selling right now, be prepared to tell them why they can’t afford not to buy what you’re selling. If there’s a product on the market that’s seen as better than yours, be prepared to talk about why that assertion is based on inaccurate information.
As a salesperson, you never want to get caught off guard by customer push back.
6. Regularly Touch Base With Your Team
Companies, markets and people change. As all of these changes are taking place, do your current goals support what’s reasonable and what’s needed?
The best way to ensure that your goals are holding up throughout a sales year is to touch base with your team so you can find out where they’re at in relation to their goals and what barriers they’re running into.
Keeping tabs on your team will keep morale high and expectations in line with opportunity.
7. Listen
Every good sales team knows that their customers are the stars of the show when it comes to a conversation. As such, salespeople need to spend less time talking to customers and more time listening to them.
What are your customer’s needs? Why do they buy what they buy? Why aren’t they interested in the products that you’re selling?
The more that a sales team knows about who they’re selling to, the better odds that they’ll have of closing a deal. And even if a deal doesn’t close, all of the valuable information that you can get from somebody by taking in their story can help you develop better products and sales tactics in the future.
Keep Our Sales Tips in Mind and Prepare to Crush Your Goals
There are more sales tips out there than a person can count in a lifetime. In our opinion, the sales tips that we’ve shared with you cut through that giant bucket of advice and communicate the “meat and potatoes” of what you need to keep in mind if you want to crush your goals.
Best of luck to you and know that we have more inspirational marketing content on our blog if you’re looking for additional tips and tricks!