The days of solo sales teams are over; top performers now prefer collaborative, consultative approaches to their work.
Instead of selling key features, emphasize how a product or service will add value for customers – this can create a stronger sense of connection and foster long-term loyalty.
Avoid manipulative tactics that play on negative emotions of your prospects, such as making them feel guilty if they decide not to purchase.
1. Focus on the buyer’s needs
One of the best sales tactics is listening to what your buyer needs from you. One effective method for doing this is conducting surveys among inbound leads or prospects who fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) to understand their primary challenges.
Questioning to uncover both afflictions and goals such as, “How would you like to improve in this area?” Understanding your buyers’ pain points increases their likelihood of seeing the value in your solution.
Harmonizing your sales strategies with a buyer’s purchase process is also critical, including tailoring product or service offerings to address needs, effectively handling feedback and objections, gaining commitment for further action, providing thought leadership material through webinars or G2 Content that’s highly pertinent, building long-term trusting relationships and upselling/crossselling buyers over time.
2. Inspire the buyer to reach out for ideas
Buyers need your assistance to sort through all the available information and consider all their options, which is known as insight selling. One effective sales tactic that will help you surpass your quota is this method of approach selling.
Personalizing emails that you send to potential leads will demonstrate that you care and help create trust with them – a cornerstone of the inside sales process.
Keep in mind that your buyers’ attention can naturally wain over the course of a sales conversation, to combat this use “grabbers,” which are techniques designed to quickly increase interest and reengage their attention. Tell a story or perform a number play that gradually unveils each number’s value; these techniques demonstrate your understanding of their pain points while showing them how your solutions could help provide relief.
3. Create a value case
Metric-driven sales allow your team to assess performance more objectively while helping prospects understand the true worth of your offering.
Be certain your sales team has a business case prepared and used consistently for each prospect, basing it on pain points, success metrics, and outcomes discovered during discovery with each lead – this way they won’t fall into the “big ROI number” trap!
Business leaders generally want to make money, so focusing on financial performance when framing the value of your solution provides a solid platform for effective selling. But other aspects can contribute equally as effectively; one of our clients developed an impressive cost savings case by expanding their scope beyond simple cost to include factors like supply chain costs and operating expenses in their business case.
Establishing a value hypothesis and earning permission to conduct discovery are crucial first steps for any team. They enable your prospects to get an immediate idea of the potential impacts and benefits associated with investing in your solution.
4. Follow up
Top-quartile sales organizations use advanced technology stacks and prescriptive insights to forge direct links between business results (sales targets and KPIs) and high-impact activities (leading indicators). They offload non-selling tasks to shared services centers for automation – freeing up 50 percent more team time for customer-facing work while simultaneously decreasing cost-to-serve rates and increasing revenue per sales FTE by 20%.
Follow-up emails can be an effective way of staying at the forefront of prospects’ minds and nurturing them deeper down your sales funnel. However, the timing and subject line of these follow-ups must be chosen carefully so as to not come across as spammy or annoying.
Personalize the subject lines of your follow-up emails by including details from previous conversations or sharing high-value content, while monitoring open and click rates so you can evaluate past emails to learn from successes and failures in your follow-up strategy. Pipedrive provides the perfect platform to track and optimize sales follow-ups; give it a free try today!
