HOW will you improve sales in the next two months?
How will you close more deals to meet your 2016 revenue target?
The following tips are designed to help you quickly ramp up pipeline activity and sales results:
1.) Reward the Sales Behavior you Want:
If you are in sales management, it’s time to develop sales kickers to ramp up end of year sales activity. Identify specific goals/targets to improve sales results. Monitor the following:
- Outbound calls per day
- New prospect calls, demos, or meetings scheduled
- Sales proposals sent out
- Conversions:
- Call-to-meeting conversion rate; Meeting-to-quote conversion rate; Quote-to-sale conversion rate
- And of course, the Holy Grail: any metric related to closed deals! (Reward by # deals; total revenue; % margins; average revenue/sale, etc.)
2.) Make Use of Your CRM System:
This is critical. To improve sales results, you must use a CRM system designed to keep track of numerous accounts, contacts, and follow up activities. Are you a small company or solopreneur? Using a proper CRM system is key to your growth.
- Don’t think that your Excel spreadsheet with lists of prospect names, notes, and dates is scalable. It’s NOT. Trust me on this one. (P.S.”Free” CRM systems don’t work well in the long run either. Your best bet is to invest in a real CRM system, like Salesforce.)
- Get organized! Without proper use of a CRM system, you will be losing opportunities left and right down the line. To win business, prospects will expect you to “Do what you say you’ll do, when you say you’ll do it.
- Be organized in your approach.
- Keep track of all conversations and correspondence in one place, and schedule reminders for follow up activities at specified dates/times.
- Reporting to Inform Business Decisions!
- As a bonus, if you set up your CRM system properly, you will be able to run insightful reports, providing invaluable sales trends and data not otherwise available.
(New to Salesforce? If you need help setting up or making the most of your Salesforce system, we can help. Contact us for more information.)
3.) Develop a “Content Arsenal”:
- Identify trending industry topics or topics of ongoing interest to your prospects.
- Develop content accordingly – What industry problems does your solution help to solve? Offer general tips, educational advice, or thought-leadership to assist in resolving such challenges.
- Develop plenty of content in an array of formats including: blog articles, e-newsletters, white papers, case studies, webinars, and eBooks.
If you need help developing, editing, or finalizing marketing content, please contact us.
4.) Promote your Content Regularly:
Next, take the content developed in #3 above, and USE IT. Develop a marketing PLAN that includes promoting your value-added content on scheduled, consistent basis:
Actively promote your content through various marketing channels: email marketing, social media, your corporate blog, an e-newsletter, etc.
- Note: Your initial email content should simply offer a “teaser” of the full content. Do not give away the entire article in your email…
- You want people to take action, and “click through” to receive the full content. Then you can call on the click throughs to follow up on their interest and inquire about their needs.
Consistency is key!
- Deliver content on a regular basis to build trust, brand recognition, and awareness. That way, when these prospects are ready to buy, they will think of YOU first!
- When leveraging email marketing, be sure to send campaigns at regular intervals, once or twice every month.
Use an email marketing service to promote your content. Track all opens, click-throughs, and opt-outs.
Create a website landing page to direct “clickers” to sign up to receive your newsletter, attend a webinar, or to receive a white paper.
Follow up on all email click-throughs with a personal phone call within 48 business hours.
- Make the most of these warm leads.
- Determine their interests, needs, and next steps…
- If you need help with creating demand generation programs, we can guide you to assess your existing business assets in this area, and recommend ways to fill in any gaps as needed.
- Remember, the goal of each of these steps is to ultimately improve sales, so leave no stone unturned!
5.) Are you Casting a Wide Enough Net?
You need a targeted list of contacts to market your services to:
- Do you honestly have a large enough LIST of contacts to market to and grow your business?
- Marketing to a limited database of home-grown contacts will yield limited results.
- Be sure you’re casting a wide enough marketing net, or your efforts will fall flat!
To be most effective, your marketing outreach will require fresh leads on a regular basis. That’s the only way to continue to add qualified leads into your sales funnel.
Where are you going to get enough new leads?
- You must invest in a high-quality list of decision-maker contacts in your target market.
- Be aware – not all marketing list services are created equal.
- If you need recommendations regarding marketing list providers, please contact us and we would be happy to help steer you in the right direction.
The results of the above steps? You will now have:
a.) A list of interested “hand raisers” who have requested information.
b.) The opportunity to further build your credibility and brand within your target market.
c.) A pipeline of warm prospects to call on.
d.) Improved sales results.
It’s time to improve sales results. What are you waiting for?
Call 888-887-0556, or email: [email protected]
Wishing you much success!