Another year filled with opportunities is before us. And most of you are busy setting goals to grow sales this new year. Perhaps, you have spent the past few days evaluating your previous year’s sales performance and designing strategies to overcome new challenges. To help improve revenue in 2018, here are 3 points you should include in your sales strategy:
Adopt relationship selling:
Relationship selling is all about building trust and positive feeling between a sales associate and a customer at every stage of selling, regardless of the sales outcome. Whether you’re selling to a large enterprise or an individual customer, develop a personal relationship to build trust and loyalty. It’s true that a sale is a one-time event. But when you build a good rapport with your customers, they keep coming back to you. It’s like you visiting the same coffee shop every day because the barista greets you by your name, starts preparing your favorite coffee even before you order, and asks how everything is going at your work – giving you your personalized coffee shop experience.
Your little actions such as making a valuable introduction, sending helpful content, providing personalized suggestions to the prospect’s pain points help in establishing yourself as a trusted advisor. And once you have the desired attention, dig deeper to understand the prospect’s challenges and goals. And if you find the prospect to be a good fit, show how your product or service can help in overcoming those challenges and achieving those goals – a win-win situation for both you and the prospect.
Remember that relationship selling focuses on long-term returns. Always be honest with the solutions you provide and never try to convince a prospect merely to reach your sales target. If prospects find your solution to be feasible, they’ll buy from you. If not, because the prospects trust you, they’ll come back to you later when the time is right. Either way, the prospect will bring revenue.
Pick the right set of tools:
A recent study has revealed that today’s sales tech landscape is overwhelmed with more than 700 tools. There are a ton of tools that let you improve productivity, manage sales pipeline, streamline collaboration, and do more.
Indeed, you want to empower your sales team with the best sales tools available in the market. But, the real concern is connecting these tools together to ensure that that deal related data is always centralized. After all, you want different teams access deal-related data and seamlessly along the entire buyer’s journey. So when you pick sales tools, ensure that the tool gives you all the functionalities that you are looking for or atleast tightly integrates the other 3rd party tools you use. Our customers, for instance, use Vtiger CRM to not only manage contacts and sales pipeline but also to get rid of a dozen other tools that they might otherwise be using to schedule appointments, manage documents, automate emails, generate invoice, and do many more tasks. Also, to streamline data flow, our customers integrate a few commomly used softwares that they use every day.
Keep you CRM data clean, always:
Your CRM is your revenue booster. Every day your sales team turn CRM data into information to provide personalized services and customer experience, and in turn improve revenue. But when the CRM data is incomplete or inaccurate, you could end up losing 12% of revenue.
Vtiger helps you keep the CRM data up-to-date in three ways. Firstly, while importing data from different sources, Vtiger automatically checks for duplicate records and alerts users when duplicates are detected. You can choose to either delete or merge duplicate records. Secondly, Vtiger lets you automate data entry process to eliminate manual data entry errors. With required automation conditions in place, Vtiger automatically creates records and updates fields of existing records. Thirdly, Vtiger lets you set restrictions on CRM data access to eliminate accidental modification of records. You can set rules to allow users to view, edit, and delete CRM records.
Implement these 3 suggestions to drive both customer relationship and sales revenue. Do you have any questions on how to improve sales and grow your business? If you do, please drop in a comment and we’ll be happy to help!
