The way customers make purchasing decisions today has completely transformed.
Now, they have lesser attention spans, are more resistant to traditional sales pitches and tactics, and prefer to research the right products and services by themselves.
This continuous adaption in consumer shift calls for the sales teams to focus on well, continuous adaption.
There are some timeless strategies sales reps implement to convince a prospect. And, then there are modern sales techniques — giving you an absolute edge in this ever-evolving customer journey.
With the blend of both, you complement to create a winning sales plan.
This article brings an all-inclusive list of 9 strategies to make better sales experiences, close more deals, and attain a stronger bottom line.
Using Words that Motivate Action
Being specific in your sales pitch using actionable statements can help you propel your sales pipeline moving in the right direction, faster.
For example, instead of saying “I understand price is a concern. We can offer a discount” come up with something like “To ensure the solution fits your budget, we can tailor a payment plan that spreads the cost over a flexible 6-month term. This way you can leverage the benefits immediately without a large upfront investment.”
Sales Insight: Instead of asking vague questions, ask personalized and specific answers that include clear next steps for the prospect. This reduces decision fatigue and enhances the chances of closing that sale.
The Power of Storytelling
Storytelling serves a specific purpose in sales — to make that emotional connection with the client. With today’s consumers’ short attention span, creating stories in your pitch or about your product can fuel your sales journey.
In sales, this technique is about sharing a concept, an experience, or an idea that resonates with the products or services you offer.
A well-crafted story captures the attention of prospects and connects them emotionally as it removes the barrier of facts and figures, complex technicalities, and communicates value.
Sales Insight: One way to compel an engaging story is to make the customer a “hero”. Instead of making your product the protagonist, frame the narrative of how your offerings let the customers overcome obstacles, and achieve goals.
Organized Lead Management
From lead generation to sales conversion, a structured lead management system lets you (and your team) effectively manage the prospect data and create a predictable sales pipeline for streamlining the conversion process.
A proper lead management tool:
Assuring you have quality leads flowing in the sales pipeline
Centralizes all the leads data in one place
Provides valuable insights by tracking key metrics. Like the number of deals won, total touchpoints, etc.
Eliminates monotonous tasks as the business scales
Sales Insight: Constantly review your current lead management process and optimize it as per your business goals and objectives.
Social Selling
As a sales team, it’s obvious to focus on a channel with more than 5 billion active users. Selling on social media demands more attention now than ever.
Social selling is a strategic approach for businesses and sellers to connect with their prospects and build relationships via social media to empower purchasing decisions.
Making your team reach out through social networks facilitates targeted outreach and prospect engagement.
Sales Insight: Optimize your social media platforms and leverage the benefits of testimonials. Create content to build reliability and smoothly lead them through the buying process.
Offer Enriching Customer Experience
How often have you heard the phrase “The customer is always right”? This is not just a quote but a tenet in the sales industry.
As a sales rep, creating bonds with customers is the foundation of success.
There may be times when customers may have a wrong opinion or come up with a clear denial. Instead, of correcting them you need to figure out ways to agree with them.
Sales Insight: To create and maintain strong customer relationships, you need to know their preferences, and past interactions at every touchpoint, and ensure you have a positive answer for their every query.
Like, if a prospect says “Your product will help me with managing tasks but it won’t make a difference to my business” you can counter such a situation by saying something like “You’re absolutely right, just managing tasks is not enough. Hence, our task management software makes your employees more productive. Here’s how”.
Understanding the Pain Point
By having an overview of a prospect’s problem, the focus shifts from merely selling a product or service to offering a solution to their challenges.
Instead of making a standard approach to selling a product, now’s the moment to figure out and address the inconvenience they are facing. Then, you personalize your proposal and advance further.
It builds trust in their eyes before you bring the promotional part to seal the deal.
Sales Insight: Asking open-ended questions, being an active listener, and showing genuine interest will enable you to win the prospect’s trust and credibility, allowing you to set the stage for a meaningful and successful engagement.
Overcoming Major Objections
If you’ve been in a particular industry for a long time or have a product specialization of what you are selling, you can certainly outline the major objections your prospects are dealing with.
To tackle this situation, crafting a narrative early on is important for all the major roadblocks your prospect might propose.
Sales Insight: Draft or note all the objections you’ve faced and also brainstorm the ones you feel could be an objection. Come up with suitable answers beforehand, so that you are well-prepared at the touchpoint.
Highlighting the Benefits of Transformation
There might be times when you’ll find yourself facing double challenges — first, the competition, and second, the prospect itself.
Suppose, you’re selling CRM services and your lead is currently using Excel and spreadsheets to run their workflow. In these cases, you need to highlight the benefits of your services and showcase why they need to break free from outdated methods.
You must come out at the top despite several objections like the client’s familiarity with the old model, challenges in adopting a new solution, and others.
Sales Insight: Framing your pitch around the challenges and opportunities with the client’s current approach, highlighting the limitations of the status quo, and illustrating solutions should be at the top of your sales process.
Sales Automation
Sales automation is the process of accelerating and optimizing the sales process using software and technology.
In this modern competitive business world, manually entering prospect data, making important notes, reminders, etc in a sales interaction can be time-consuming, and with an increasing volume of leads, the efficiency of sales reps can take a downhill.
Hence, sales automation is a robust and advanced technology that’s efficient, scalable, saves time, and manages the complete sales cycle of both leads and customers.
Sales Insight: Using software like a CRM lets you identify the bottlenecks in your pipeline. By implementing its automation tools and workflows you can identify the repetitive tasks and integrate automation seamlessly with your current systems and processes.
Boost Your Sales Game Using These Pro Tips!
As you can see in this article, sales techniques follow a more tailored approach, where the dynamic is buyer-centric as consumers look to lead their buying choices.
This compilation of sales strategies along with pro tips the “sales insight” will help you to move your selling process forward.
But remember, closing a deal is only a part of the sale. The game is more than creating a relationship, it’s about making everlasting connections so that they become repeat buyers and bring in more customers.