Do you need to increase your sales to meet your KPIs?
Sometimes it seems the only option is to ‘work harder’ – make more calls, send more emails, push yourself harder. But this is an extremely short-term solution and is just as likely to result in burnout as in more sales.
To make more sales, you need to work smarter, not harder. You need a better sales process. With a few tips and a little time, you can transform your sales process and generate more sales and more revenue in one month.
What is a sales process?
A sales process allows you to break down each lead’s journey and discover which parts of your sale you can improve on. There are three key stages: attention and awareness, engaging prospects considering your solution, and converting those leads into customers through your sales pitch.
With a better process, your team can make more sales. Communication is key. Is your team clear on the specific steps a lead has to go through to become a customer? Or do they just pick a prospect from your CRM system and start selling?
While improving your process sounds hard, in just four weeks you can easily make impactful changes that will result in more sales.
A more efficient sales process in four weeks
A better sales cycle means identifying your customers’ buying journey and aligning your sales cycle to it.
Each week, you should focus on a different part of the journey and make small steps to increase sales.
Week 1 – Understand your sales pipeline and your audience
Week 2 – Make sure your marketing is targeting the right audience
Week 3 – Decide how you find and focus on the ‘best fit’ leads
Week 4 – Put a process in place to check your results and keep optimizing
While you might be concerned that ‘overplanning’ will take time away from making your sales call quota, you really need to know exactly what it takes to sell your specific service in your specific industry.
For the next four weeks, take some time each day – an hour is plenty – to think about exactly how your team is conducting sales.
Week 1 – Map your sales cycle
Week 1 is about the bigger picture: How do people buy in your industry?
Think about your sales pipeline, from prospecting to closing the deal. What does it take for someone to do business with you? How do they find you? How do they contact you? How do they buy from you?
As you ponder this, one model to consider is the AIDA framework:
- Attention
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
The starting point here is that you cannot expect to answer the phone and immediately close the deal. And the more complex your service, the less likely this is.
Align your sales stages with the logic chain that people follow. There might be 5 steps – or ‘touchpoints’ – that people follow, or 50. It helps to know roughly how people shop for your solution.
You are a guide who needs to help your leads see how your solution adds value to their business. This guided conversation – or series of conversations – is how you progress prospects through your sales cycle.
This approach is more about ‘enabling sales’ rather than ‘pushing product’. Ask for the sale too early and you’ll put off the customer. When you are clear on the stages that your prospect must advance through, you will provide a better selling experience for your customers.
Checklist:
- Break down your sales pipeline step-by-step
- Note the top 5 objections
- Note the top 5 benefits
- Structure your sales calls around the buyer’s decision path
Week 2 – Increase lead quantity
This week is about demand generation. How do people find out your business even exists?
Once you have understood your sales cycle and the decision-making process your customers must go through, you need to find the right people to start conversations with.
At first glance, an easy answer to the demand generation problem is to launch more campaigns. But it’s unlikely you can just shake the magic money tree and get more budget to get more leads.
When we talk about lead quantity, we also need to talk about lead quality. There’s little point in getting more leads when they aren’t likely to convert. Ideally, you want more qualified leads.
With the same marketing budget, you can increase the number of qualified leads by targeting the right people. Specifically targeted campaigns are cheaper and more effective. Without needing more budget, this means you can launch more campaigns that directly reach your target audience.
Once these more targeted leads enter your sales pipeline, you might decide to spend more time and nurture these prospects rather than constantly adding to the funnel. Of course, you always need to be reaching new people, but don’t ignore existing leads. If properly targeted, they might just need more attention when closing the deal.
Checklist:
- Identify your best customers and the qualities that make them the ‘best’
- Make a list of common demographic information including job title, education level & location
- Ask yourself if you could transfer budget from non-targeted campaigns to targeted campaigns
- Decide whether it is more effective to target new leads or nurture existing leads
Week 3 – Improve sales team efficiency
Week 3 is about moving prospects through your sales cycle faster. In other words, increasing sales velocity. Your team only has so much capacity, which should be focused on your best and most valuable prospects.
Be realistic about who is a good fit as you work on deals in your pipeline. Conversations should be two-way: Are you truly best positioned to deliver value to the prospect? You need to spend the most time on the deals where that is true.
Part of lead management is understanding where prospects are in the buying process. Nurture then sell. Ask questions to build a true and clear picture of the prospect’s situation.
HelloSells can ask your prospects questions to help you get clarity on the status of your pipeline. With clear scripts and trained agents, you can qualify leads, ask follow-up questions, and progress deals.
Checklist:
- Discover which problems you are best at solving
- Ask yourself ‘Am I selling to the best fit, or the next deal?’
- Focus your energy on the ‘best fit’ leads where you know you can deliver value
Week 4 – Improve stage conversion rate
Week 4 is a retrospective. Now that you’ve implemented a well-considered sales cycle, how do you create a feedback loop and make sure things continuously improve?
We believe in guiding prospects through the sales process. Knowing your best customers, what they care about, and how to convey that you’re the best choice, is key.
When you’ve identified the specific steps from awareness, interest, desire, and action – the AIDA framework – you can begin to optimize your sales cycle.
Ultimately, the question is how can you ‘do more’ with the traffic you generate? Are you doing the simple things that fill your pipeline and keep prospect moving through it?
Track how people move through your sales process. Identify stages where people get ‘stuck’, and generate ideas on what you can do to keep the conversation flowing.
Checklist:
- Shorten your lead response time
- Give prospects a choice of communication method
- Track conversion rates
- Try new things – and note the effect!
- Build momentum with more sales each month
Build momentum. Make more sales each and every month
To state the obvious: A better sales process means more sales. Rather than ‘work harder’, recognize your existing process and then work to improve each step in it.
A month is more than enough time to achieve a significant upturn in your sales. Better targeting, faster response times, and clearer lead qualification are likely to deliver an immediate uplift in completed deals.
To supercharge your sales team, the key is to keep getting better. Track the volume and the quality at each stage of the sales process. Every month, take time to think of experiments to improve both.
HelloSells is your lead capture and qualification solution
HelloSells knows sales. Your sales cycle is about people. While you work on improving your sales process, we’ll talk to your customers. People don’t want to be sold to, they want their problems solved.
When you use our lead capture service, your customers get a friendly interaction that makes them feel cared about rather than sold to.
After talking to you about what makes a great customer, we’ll offer a friendly and professional response to your prospects, qualify your leads, and pass them straight to your CRM system.
Your sales team will have more time to spend on the deals that matter most to you, which will mean more deals and a better overall sales experience for your customers.