Best Sales Tools and Strategies for Better Business Performance
As a business it’s essential that you understand and implement effective selling strategies. When you don’t have the necessary skills to initiate and close a sale, you’ll lose money and ruin your reputation. Your selling strategies influence whether your customers decide to buy your products or services or turn to your competitor. Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to get to the top of your “game” here.
Know Your Target Market
Small Biz Trends says you should always start by defining your target market. You can’t do business with everyone. Even if you believe the whole world could benefit by using your products or services, you still must start somewhere. From there you can build up your momentum.
Once you’ve defined your market, create a huge list to delve into and repeat the sales process a few times. Having too small of a target market will decrease your odds of success. Sometimes this means you must merge two similar target markets so the numbers work in your favor.
Know Your Product Well Enough to Show Without Telling
Your product needs to be able to speak for itself. Of course, you need to know your product inside out too. Knowing its features and benefits allows you to answer your customers’ questions and handle any objections they may have. Since this is your product or service, this shouldn’t be difficult for you to do – read the accompanying marketing brochures and sales letters, test the product, and continue asking questions. As you probe deeper into things, Chron says it’s normal to be excited about sharing this information with your clients, but don’t While this may sound strange, customers are more impressed when they can see your product or service in action. Whether this means offering samples or free trial access, you need to find a way to let your customers explore things for themselves, so they can get a better idea of how your product or service will fit into their lives. This will make the sales process run smoother too.
Demonstrate Confidence but Know When to Bail
You need to be extremely confident in what you’re selling. Customers will know when you’re either inexperienced or afraid and start demanding steep discounts or concessions from you. It’s up to you to not only stop this from happening but to also convince your customer that they’d be foolish or crazy to buy from anyone else. CNBC says that this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be afraid to bail. Wishful thinking only propels you into a world of wasted effort so if it becomes clear that a deal doesn’t make sense or will take too much time and effort to close, stop pursuing it.
Use Copper
Having a good CRM software (such as Copper) in place to rely on helping you with finding enough resources, properly pricing your product or service, and managing your business well will help propel you towards success. CRM software also helps you successfully streamline projects, which helps you grow. This is why businesses are spending over 12 billion dollars each year on this software. According to the latest stats gathered by Trackvia, CRM software can increase your revenue by 41%, improve your customer retention by 27%, and drive down your marketing and sales costs by 23%.
Consider a few Other Noteworthy Tools Too
CRM software is great, but it isn’t the only tool that can help your business today. Neil Patel says some of the top sales tools for boosting results, improving efficiency and organization and helping you generate more revenue include:
- HubSpot is a sales platform that can handle all your sales process’ needs. It contains tools that boost every aspect of your inbound sales strategy (e.g. email templates, sales content). This tool will even help you learn more about your prospects and locate the decision maker. When installed on your website you’ll learn who visits your website, what company they own, and what pages they’re viewing so you know who’s showing interest and can target the right type of prospects. Sales teams, sales managers, and sales professionals will all benefit from this tool.
- LinkedIn Sales Solutions is the world’s largest professional network with over 450 million registered users throughout the world. It even provides you with the tools you need to mine for prospects. With its Sales Navigator you’ll receive custom lead recommendations; have access to an advanced search that helps you find the right leads; be able to measure and track your social selling results; and receive real-time sales updates.
- Calendly is a better way to schedule meetings with your prospects than with the traditional back and forth of email or even a phone call. This is a powerful appointment scheduling tool that you can use to schedule anything and everything – including sales calls, sales meetings, interviews, and demos. This is because it has a lot of great features, the best one being its simplicity of use: Just share your personal link with your contacts or clients and they can select a time that works for them. There’s also a team scheduling feature that allows you to view your team’s availability from one page.
- Zoom does away with your need to have an in person meeting simply to conduct demos. This is a video and web conferencing service that over 300,000 customers rely on today. There are many great features here including mobile screen sharing for iPhone and iPad lets you easily conduct meetings while you’re on the go; webinar capabilities; being able to easily share a meeting with one or more contact; group collaboration; and the ability to host a meeting with or without video, or with screen share only. All these things are made easier by the fact that you’ll have HD video and voice, dynamic voice detection, and full screen and gallery view. Even your clients will enjoy using this tool because it’s easy for them to join a meeting – simply create a meeting and invite those you want to join in. It’s really this easy to use this advanced technology.