A good salesperson knows the importance of finding new customers and bettering your sales process. In order to help you out with that, we’ve created a short list of sales tips that will help you sell more effectively. 

These tips will work no matter the industry you’re in and they won’t take up too much of your time. We’ll also cover different stages of the sales cycle to give you a detailed overview of your sales process. 

Automate your sales process

The best way to save time while improving your productivity and efficiency is by automating your sales process. Automation will help you with repetitive tasks, leaving you more time to focus on the creative parts of your job. 

Parts of your sales process you can automate are: 

• Generating leads
• Qualifying leads
• Proposal process
• Scheduling sales calls and meetings
• The follow-up process 
• Upselling and so much more

The very start of your sales process refers to finding new leads and directing them through your pipeline. 

If you want to secure new clients, you’ll need to be able to quickly respond to requests for proposals. This means you need a reliable tool that can help you create high-quality documents in minutes. 

We recommend Better Proposals, a tool that comes with prewritten proposal templates you can customize to your needs in no time. You won’t have to worry about structuring your proposal from scratch, nor will you need to spend time figuring out how much text you need to write or where to include your pictures. 

All Better Proposal’s documents also come with the digital signature option, as well as payment integration, meaning your clients can sign the document and pay the first fee through the proposal itself. This way, no one has to print out documents, scan them or send them through snail mail. 

Work on active listening

In order to truly connect to your client base and get to understand their needs, goals and wants, you need to listen to them. There is no way around it. Sticking to the same sales script on every sales call or meeting will leave you with a low conversion rate.

What customers want nowadays is personalization. They want you to customize your approach to them and make the whole experience enjoyable. The sales proposal will help you get ahead in the clients’ minds. The customer is more likely to buy from a company that offers this kind of deal, so it’s worth looking into.

The best way to work on your communication skills is by practicing. Create workshops for your team and help them better their sales approach. 

It’s important that when your clients are speaking, you’re not thinking about what else you need to cover in your pitch, but truly try to understand where they’re coming from and think of ways to help them. 

The better you understand their issues and how your solution can help them, the more you can customize your approach. 

Focus on benefits instead of features

What your potential clients are most interested in is how your product or service will help their business. That’s why you need to focus your sale pitch on the benefits. 

Make sure you ask enough questions that you can specifically outline the benefits your solution can bring to your clients. The specifications of your products can be secondary, but first you need to hook them with specific benefits. 

For example, if you’re offering web site development, you should say that a new site will help the client sell more and build a loyal customer base. 

Once you’ve piqued their interest, you can talk a bit about your features and how you compare to your competitors. Since the first impression is so important, make sure to start by focusing on benefits. 

Make sure to follow up

If you’re not following up on your sales calls, you might be losing a lot of revenue. With research showing that only 2% of sales occur during the first meeting, you need to develop a bulletproof follow-up strategy. 

Whether you choose emails, calls or other ways of communication, make sure to test out your content. Create email sequences and divide your clients into 2-3 groups in order to test out which type of content works for them. 

Make sure to use a good CRM that will help you follow the customer journey of your clients. That way, you’ll know exactly where in your funnel are they and how to structure your approach. 

You should also be following up on existing clients in order to upsell and cross-sell them. These are people that are already familiar with your products and services and therefore, don’t need a lot of persuading. 

Listen to customer feedback

Your customers are the best QA testers you can find. They will tell you if something doesn’t work, isn’t intuitive and more. 

Since they are the ones using your products and services, it’s important that you listen to their opinions and feedback. The better you understand what they like and don’t like about your solution, the easier it will be to develop new products and better your services. 

Make sure to provide your clients with a fast response that addresses all of their questions. If you choose to ignore your clients, it will lead them to frustration and in the end – your competition. 

Even if you don’t have a solution ready, make sure you explain to your clients that you understand their worries and are working on improving your solution. It will show them that you’re listening and care about them. 

Conclusion

Your sales process should constantly be worked on and improved. The best way to do that is to put your client base at the focus of all your strategies. They are the ones that should be directing your next moves, instead of your team. 

If you create new solutions and think that your audience will like whatever you put out, you’ll quickly realize that you need to change your approach. Make sure to always keep your audience at the centre of your decision-making process. 

Our guide will help you figure out what needs changing and how to create a better sales process that helps you sell more while fostering a loyal client base.