TimothyIt’s quarter 4, how are your sales numbers looking? Flat? Are you struggling to hit your sales quotas? Do you need something extra to get the team motivated and meeting aggressive goals?
In a quest to address this huge concern for anyone in business I took the liberty of engaging in other business practises to see what works through asking sales leaders about their preferred favourite techniques for increasing sales and threw in a few tips which have been tried and tested too.
My desire is, as the year is left with four months, the make or break to your revenue and a prelude to 2020 it’s important to finish strong.
- Be decisive on the mission and get everyone motivated to help more people
Let’s face it. Sales is repetitive, and it’s easy to fall into a rut and simply go through the motions of pitching a product. Regularly remind yourself and your team of the company mission, who you serve, and why your customers benefit from your product/service.
It’s also smart to speak about the consequences for your reps and the business if they don’t move deals forward. This can give your team an extra level of motivation and urgency to meet and exceed their quota.
Start all your meetings with your company and sales team mission statement or use the coined acronym M-SPOT for Mission, Strategy, Plays, Omission, and Targets). It keeps the main thing the main thing.
People don’t always need a promotion or discount. What they need is a reminder of the value of making a decision; the pain you will alleviate, and the benefit they will receive.
Coming up with three bullet points that redefine your business’ value — from the customer perspective — can put people back into the right mind-set of helping and supporting, not just taking and selling.
- Practice marketing
By nature all true marketers track their traffic and corresponding conversions. This allows them to see where they might be experiencing a dip in their inbound volume.
Furthermore, if sales leadership has this data, they can expand upon it with deal-related data. Looking at the numbers like this, it should be clear where marketing and sales need to increase their activity volume to ensure goals are met.
It should be spelt out clearly that it is marketing and sales leadership’s job to help ensure sales reps have more at bats during these quieter months.
- Top vs toi, remember that “time of purchase” doesn’t mean “time of impact”
How long does it take for your customers to extract value from your product? One day? One month? One quarter? Or one year? As a rule of thumb, reps need to use the sunny months to sell to “time of impact” rather than “time of purchase”.
Loads of businesses have their busy season at back-to-school time, winter, or pre-holiday season. Set them up for success now to ensure they get the most from your partnership when they need the impact most. A classic example will be most gas accessory companies sell their heaters during winter while the work is done just before the season.
- Use the summer to get more leads
Salespeople should constantly refine, improve, and iterate on their craft. And summer is a great time to simply get more and more practice and sell out more opportunities of getting better at it.
Start your meetings with a tighter agenda, sync calendars for next steps on the end of each call, follow up with your prospects with value-added content that matters to them.
Where it counts, get better email open and response rates by sending a more bespoke, personalised message. Get as many attempts and improve your craft. You might learn and improve something.
- Know your numbers
Speaking of sport, know your stats. Analyse your personal business and commit to improving at least one KPI over eight weeks.
Could you improve your transaction size? Number of transactions closed? Depth of touches on your leads? How about shortening your sales cycle length? When you know your stats, you own them, love them and improve them.
- Have fun
For some people, sales can be long-haul day. For others, every deal is a fresh opportunity to help a business or person solve a challenging problem.
Practice empathy: Practice being in your buyers’ shoes. Improve your business acumen and better assist your clients in achieving their goals. And don’t forget to smile. Your prospects can feel it.
- Increase your closing percentage with team selling
When our team gets in a pothole, we shake things up by trying something innovative, like pairing people up.
There are many great variations to this technique. Have two reps work together on one contract, or connect a senior person with a junior person. You can even split the team into pairs for a contest. Or have someone listen to another rep’s calls to give effective feedback.
Team selling makes sales fun, instructional, and different. Plus, customers typically like the extra attention.
- Run a solid promotion that gives great value to the boarding process
Instead of offering a discount on your product, offer more value from the purchase. Customers like additional attention, help, and support after they’ve made the purchasing commitment.
Offering a simple 90-day check-in or providing labour to run a campaign that saves the client time and effort can really move the dial. Call current customers and ask for referrals. A simple question, When was the last time you got a call from a vendor who thanked you for your business? If never, then do something about it. I know I would be impressed to get a call from a vendor on the service we offer.
In conclusion, don’t let sour selling sour the last quarter of the year. Infuse new life into your sales process by regularly trying out new techniques . . . besides, there’s no harm in learning and when it doesn’t work the way you want, relearn.
Bongani Ndlovu