What makes a salesperson great? Typically, they have a passion for what they’re selling to their clients. They’re usually excellent listeners who properly identify, and target their prospects’ pain-points. They almost approach their pitch as a storyteller, making their prospects feel swept up in their brand experience. They love what they do, and they’re masters at it – just ask them. But there is always room for improvement – especially in sales. Your salespeople must continually grow in their knowledge of their product, their prospects’ businesses, and trends and technologies available or else they risk becoming obsolete. So how do you help your salespeople to stay ahead of the curve and remain relevant? Here are some ideas:
Marketing is your new best friend – Sales needs marketing and marketing needs sales. By sharing data and processes, these two groups stand to benefit by working together. Encourage both departments to lower their walls and to get comfortable working together and ask each other for help. When you can present a unified front through marketing and sales to your prospects, the pipeline to customer data and behavioral metrics will greatly improve your sales process moving forward.
Get Used to Automation– It’s not going anywhere, and, to be quite honest, you really shouldn’t want it to. In the past sales reps had to spend a large majority of their day on mundane tasks such as updating call sheets. In the here and now, we’ve finally realized that tasks like these are unnecessary busywork that should be automated to give them more time to do what they’re paid to do – sell. If you want this to work, ensure that your process is intuitive specifically to your team.Whatever process or program you end up using needs to be flexible enough to allow your sales reps to adjust it to fit their needs as desired.
Get Your Sales Reps Tuned Into Social Media – Encourage your team familiarize themselves with tools that aid in social listening. These tools are immeasurably as they help your salespeople to be more informed about what their customers are actually looking for. Get them to do some research and find out where exactly their target demographics are spending their Web time, and then have them tune back into those same sites when they’re researching market opinions. Let them in on the little “secret” that they can use social media to feel out buying signals that indicate upcoming purchases. It’s also helpful to help you get a better grasp on your customers’ buying habits. Have your team “follow” their current leads and prospects so that they can get their pitch timing just right.
Be The Coach You’d Follow – Lead by example. Show your sales team what you’ve learned in your career and explain to them how this knowledge can help them with their own sales strategy.
Here at Incentive Solutions we’ve specialized in sales incentive programs and increasing sales for over 35 years. It’s what we do best. If you’d like more information on how to increase your sales team’s productivity, call us today at 1-866-567-7432. We’d be happy to give you a live demo of how our programs work and to show you why our customers gave us a 95% excellent rating and would refer us on to a friend.
