Is trying to find THE strategy to grow your company’s sales overwhelming? Well, stop it! There is a secret and straightforward strategy to improve and increase your sales: use your sales force.
- If you see a drop in sales, the first thing to look at is your sales activities… not your strategy. Are there enough new opportunities entering the pipeline?
- The second thing to look at is your sales process. Your representatives, like 85% of salespeople, probably make proposals, presentations or demonstrations too early in the process at a time when potential customers are not yet ready to make their purchase decision.
Here are 7 elements to optimize before considering changing your growth strategy.
1. Your Sales Managers Need to Focus on Execution
In sales, effective execution is the foundation of your company’s revenues. Business owners often lament the low impact of their sales strategy on revenue growth, when it’s, in fact, good. It’s the execution that is poor.
Your salespeople are the engine that generates your company’s revenue: you need to make sure they are focused on getting information from their potential customers instead of giving them information.
After meetings with prospects, make sure that your sales managers debrief their salespeople to ensure they collected at all the information needed for the sales process.
Your sales managers should also develop strategies with salespeople on the next step to advance the opportunity and close a sale.
2. Keep Strategic Decisions at the Executive Level or Hire a VP of Sales
Hiring a VP of Sales is beneficial to businesses because it allows sales managers and salespeople to focus on the tactical aspect of selling rather than on strategic decisions.
A good VP of Sales will prepare your sales organization for upcoming changes in the marketplace as well as develop strategies concerning the competition that will increase as you grow.
A sales VP must help sales managers see problems in their blind spots. A VPs role is also to define sales strategies, in addition to creating strategic alliances and holding the entire sales force accountable for the execution of a sales process and methodology.
Delegating the VP function to your sales managers will likely have a negative impact on your company’s sales. Indeed, sales managers who have the role and responsibilities of a sales VP tend to use strategic tools to solve execution problems in the field.
This situation will paralyze the sales force’s ability to execute, as well as increase your corporate risks and cost a significant amount of capital.
3. Be Uncompromising About Improving Your Sales Process
Consistency, consistency, the important thing is to be constant! As a CEO, you know that selling isn’t just about sitting back and waiting for your best salespeople to do all their work.
It is your duty as CEO or VP of Sales to implement a reliable, repeatable sales process that is compatible with your sales culture.
4. Automate the Sales Process as Much as Possible
Do manual tasks take too long, to the detriment of sales activities? By using sales automation software, you will dramatically improve your sales process, while helping your team focus more on sales.
Automation software helps you track your prospects, facilitates pipeline management, keeps the sales message consistent and ensures your customers are followed up. If your team uses these automation tools, it will also help them better manage their time.
Several active pipeline management solutions are now available, including Membrain CRM.
5. Turn Your Marketing into a Lead Generation Machine
The most critical growth factor for a company is to generate leads. Today, one of the fundamental ways to grow is to have the ability to generate leads online with your content marketing strategy.
Many people have declared too early the death of cold calls, and it’s clear that people who make decisions have become increasingly difficult to reach. By generating your leads, you will accelerate your volume of opportunities and thus enable more constant growth.
6. Harness the Power of Content Marketing Combined with Consultative Selling
Content marketing shares free content to attract visitors, convert them into prospects and then into customers. The consultative sale takes the converted prospect and brings him to the conclusion of the sale.
Content marketing maintains relationships with potential customers, so when they are ready to talk to salespeople, your business is at the top of the list of suppliers to contact. Your salespeople can then slowly align their prospects to a sale using a consultative sales approach.
7. Stop Thinking You’re Special
Takeaway
The critical thing to remember is that there is no secret strategy, the key to success lies in executing the strategy you have defined for your business. A mediocre strategy well executed is better than a great strategy poorly executed.
Measure the effectiveness of your sales force with our calculator now to see if it has all the elements to execute your strategies effectively.
