Improve Your Sales: 6 Strategies You Should Never Ignore

Sales are key to success. If your sales are down at the moment, you might need to relaunch your strategies.

 

The great thing about improving your sales strategies is that you don’t need to incur too many new fees. Instead, you just need to be a bit smarter with how you use your team, and you need to understand more about what your customer needs and wants.

 

In this article, we’ll show you how selling could be a lot easier with 6 of the best sales strategies you should never ignore.

 

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Prepare Your Team

 

No matter how good a seller you personally are, you can’t take on all parts of the sales process by yourself. You need to work with your team – and you need to prepare them.

 

Spend time with the right people in your company formulating a sales and marketing strategy. This should be the foundation of your sales process from now on.

 

Make sure your team know what’s expected of them, and to this end keep your lines of communication open. Be upfront with your sales team, be honest, but also be open to feedback. Listen to them and create an atmosphere where people can talk and voice their opinions.

 

It’s also a good idea to find leaders in your group and give them the recognition they crave. Install them as the leader and invite other team members to learn from them. This way, you can bring rough diamonds to the top, too.

 

Find ways of boosting morale, too, as this will encourage stronger teamwork. Perhaps create social events so your team can bond.

 

Review Your KPIs

 

Your sales process can only improve if you’re measuring it. If you’ve set goals, you need to then track and measure them to make sure you’re on course for victory.

 

And if it turns out that you’re not on course for victory, you need to then make the necessary adjustments to get your team back on track.

 

Here are some of the top sales KPIs you need to be reviewing:

 

• Churn rate
• Customer acquisition cost
• Lifetime customer value
• Average sales price
• Overall time in the sales cycle
• Sales-to-date this year
• Sales-to-date this month

 

Learn About Your Customers

 

No one knows what your customers want better than your customers themselves. Learning more about them will make it a lot easier to develop a fruitful sales strategy. Moreover, it will also help you to source better products that sell.

 

There are lots of ways you can learn about your customers in 2019. For example, social listening allows you to find conversations people are having about your brand. There are potential nuggets of information you can use from these conversations to improve the way you sell to your customers.

 

You can also use a tool like Drift to start 1:1 conversations in real-time with your website visitors. The tool presents a great opportunity to say “hello” to anyone who stops by and ask questions to uncover deeper insights about your prospects.

 

Survey Monkey, meanwhile, is a popular survey tool that helps you solicit customer feedback.

 

However, there’s nothing quite like picking up the phone and asking your customers a few questions directly. How can you serve them better? What can you do differently? What do they like about your business and what do they dislike?

 

Superior User Experience

 

Your website is critical to your sales success – and your website needs to provide an awesome user experience in 2019.

 

Firstly, this means using the right hosting service that not only allows you to build a great website in the first place, but which improves site speed of your site. Preferably one that comes with a WordPress page builder pre-installed with WordPress.

 

Then, you need to take care of all the ‘little things’ that are actually really major things. This includes adding an SSL certificate to your website to build trust. Indeed, simply adding this certificate can boost engagement.

 

It includes using Artificial Intelligence to personalize content and recommend products based on customers’ previous browsing and shopping habits.

 

It also includes a website that’s super easy to navigate with everything clearly laid out, and educational and informative content that helps to build trust.

 

Up-Sell and Cross-Sell

 

Up-selling and cross-selling are both going to become crucial to your sales success.

 

When you up-sell, you encourage customers to buy a more expensive and more valuable item than the one they’ve just bought.

 

When you cross-sell, you encourage them to buy a related item – or an item that complements the one they’ve just bought.

 

Cross-sells have been proven to work better on checkout pages than up-sells. To make sure your cross-sells work, always clearly mark the current cost of the customer’s total order on the checkout page.

 

Don’t discount up-sells. To get the best out of them, limit their price at 25% more than the original product at the most, and feature customer testimonials to act as social proof.

 

Thoughtful Customer Service

 

Lastly, the better your customer service is, the more sales you’ll generate. Great customer service encourages loyalty, builds trust and takes away problems that would otherwise stop a customer from going through with a purchase.

 

Keep all lines of communication open with your customers. And while you can use digital assistants to respond to queries, nothing beats a human touch. When a customer just isn’t getting the answer they need, have one of your sales team talk with them directly. At all times be personable, friendly and understanding.

 

Conclusion

 

These are 6 sales strategies you can no longer ignore. Use and implement these tips and it shouldn’t be too long before your sales and your whole business is growing.

 

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About the author

Michelle Deery is a professional freelance writer for Heroic Search and has been writing content for over 7 years. She specializes in writing about sales strategies that boost the bottom line for businesses. You can find her on Twitter, LinkedIn or Gravatar.