The first instinct of many businesses in the face of recession is to go into the crouch position and start cutting costs immediately. Cutting costs is certainly one strategy to help maintain a healthy bottom line, but shouldn’t you and every other business owner consider an additional second option: trying to maintain or even increase sales?
While it can be difficult and expensive to invent new ways to generate sales leads, you can certainly do a better job closing more of the leads that you already have. And that’s the subject of this article: even in times of uncertainty, you can still increase your revenue to higher levels than it was previously, if you handle your business correctly and improve your existing sales activities in the two following ways:
Optimize Your Sales Team’s Operations
You might have a team of three to five people who try to contact leads and sell quantities of your product. Let’s suppose that John is your star salesperson; he has the highest close rate and has been the top performer year after year. Here’s what he does:
John is a terrific salesperson; if he issues a quote, then he is probably going to make a sale. Your other sales people, Jack and Jill, are not nearly as good as John is. Here’s what they do:
Jack and Jill waste a lot of leads by delivering boilerplate pitches and they waste a lot of their own time by not making sure that they are pitching to qualified leads only. This is why John’s performance is far superior to theirs.
So how many Jacks and Jills do you have on your sales team? How much more money could Jack and Jill earn for your business if you took the time to understand John’s sales process?
Think about it. If Jack and Jill learned John’s sales process they would:
- Spend more time pursuing qualified leads only;
- Tailor pitches to suit the needs of specific clients and close more leads;
- And lastly, Jack and Jill would close leads faster and thus actually pursue and qualify a greater number of leads.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to improving your sales process—you can also use a sales funnel to analyze where leads are being lost most often and retune your marketing efforts there.
Close More Leads by Customizing Sales Pitches
Good sales people know that cold-calling clients and delivering a scripted sales pitch, without accounting for the needs and pains of potential clients, is an ineffective way of conducting business. Moreover, you get better results by tailoring pitches to the needs of individual clients.
Your sales people don’t have many chances to make first impressions, so why not impress your potential new customers by:
- Beginning by speaking exactly to the customer’s pain;
- Identifying the problems that create the customer’s pain;
- And following up with an articulate explanation of how your company and its products or services can solve the customer’s pain.
No two customers’ pains are going to be exactly the same so it requires some due diligence on the part of your sales people to determine what those pains are—but it is well worth the effort. It gets the attention of your potential customers and it speaks directly to their concerns; ultimately, this will help you close more leads.
So the next time you set about designing a PowerPoint presentation for a sales pitch or a prospecting meeting, bear in mind the pains of your potential customers and offer solutions rather than products.
If you’d like to try optimizing your sales team’s process with a flowchart, feel free to download a free trial of SmartDraw.
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