The new year is underway and many businesses are eager to fine-tune their sales strategies. Think of your 2020 sales strategy as a guiding light your team can use to illuminate your way to a successful year. With the right sales strategies, your organization will be empowered to hold a customer-first mindset, educate prospects, drive higher conversion, and improve ROI. If you’ve made a New Year’s Resolution to improve your sales organization’s strategy, here are some tactics you can employ for better results.
Build Stronger Customer Relationships
The rise in technology has made a profound impact on the sales strategies companies use to convert leads into paying customers. The constant online noise has forced businesses to search for approaches that drown out the competition. Technology will continue to progress throughout this new decade. However, no tactic is better for business growth than building strong, long-lasting customer relationships.
Businesses that place more focus on customer relationships have a better grasp of their prospects and customer’s needs. And as an added bonus, stronger relationships increase word-of-mouth marketing and return customers. To cultivate and nurture customer relationships, you must focus on a variety of engagement techniques. Here are a few ways to build better customer relationships that will differentiate your business from the competition:
Increase Personalization Efforts
Consumers are more connected and informed than ever before in history. The rise in technology has forced businesses to change the methods they use to reach and engage with potential buyers. Personalization efforts strengthen the customer experience throughout the marketing and sales process. By observing customer’s behaviors your organization can enhance the buying- and post-buying experience. Additionally, personalizing the customer experience can bolster relationships, improve customer loyalty, and increase sales.
If you’re looking to employ a personalized approach to your sales efforts in 2020, start by auditing your customer outreach workflow and identify gaps or areas that can be improved with personalization efforts. From there, you can begin to develop messaging that addresses prospect’s individual concerns and segment audiences for personalized emails and website experiences. Additionally, you could bring on an outsourced sales team to employ face-to-face selling tactics in tandem with your online personalization efforts.
Cultivate the Human Connection
Your customers are people, not robots or data in a CRM. Data can tell us a lot about a potential customer, but it likely won’t tell you that their favorite band is Fleetwood Mac. Eventually, you need to pick up the phone or meet your prospects face to face to build stronger relationships. Incorporating the human connection in sales will provide insights into customers’ challenges, ambitions, fears, and doubts. Ultimately, customers are more likely to purchase from a brand they know and trust. Placing a focus on face-to-face sales is necessary for developing real, human relationships.
Keep Sales Representatives Motivated
Unmotivated teams can negatively affect your bottom line. In fact, businesses that have low employee engagement rates see 18% lower productivity, according to Gallup. Salespeople need to be motivated to keep optimal levels of performance. Sales leaders have a duty to motivate, engage, and support their teams. Every sales rep should know how they can help the company reach its sales goals. Here are a few tips to keep teams focused on your company’s mission:
Collaborate Amongst Departments
According to Salesforce, 73% of sales teams say “interdepartmental collaboration is vital to the overall sales process.” But often, sales and marketing are siloed departments working toward separate goals. Marketing designs sales communications and enablement collateral and creates leads for the sales team. Sales reps use the marketing materials to convert leads into customers. Siloed departments can create gaps in your overarching strategy and damage any progress you’ve made. Ultimately, the two teams should rally around one goal by aligning processes and communicating more effectively. Data should be easily shared across teams to pinpoint better leads and establish stronger marketing to sales hand-off procedures.
Sales Strategies Are Constantly Evolving
Sales processes should be continuously adjusted to fit the needs of your organization. As customer, market, and industry needs change, you must be able to quickly adapt your processes for continued long-term success.
What strategies are you using to reach your 2020 goals? Share them with us in the comments below.