In this blog we are going to take a deep dive into the sales coaching world, looking at sales strategies for increasing income, tips for boosting sales productivity, improving negotiation skills in sales, and ways to stand out in a competitive sales industry.
If you are reading this, you are probably a salesperson or part of a sales team. You might be running a small business as a sales coach, looking to increase revenue and improve your sales process. Your profit margin will be on your mind, and you know that providing excellent customer service to your existing customers is a priority. You will want to deploy a sales strategy to increase sales, and you’ll be analysing your entire sales cycle. The sales industry is a complicated beast, so you want to stand out. We will be sharing some sales tips and sales strategies that will improve the customer experience and drive your margins way up.
So let’s begin. Here’s how you can learn the top sales strategies for increasing your income and maximising your earning potential in the sales industry….
We will be covering personal branding and networking for career advancement, how to develop an efficient sales team for success, and the importance of continuing education and professional development.
The Sales Coach Network can help you on your journey and guide you towards increasing revenue and improving the state of your business.
We are going to share 13 effective strategies to improve income in the sales industry, so listen up!
1. Have Clear and Well-defined Goals
If you don’t know where you’d like to head, you’ll scupper your ability to get there. To better your chances, it’s an idea to start with a plan, and write it down. Be clear and specific with what you want to achieve. Break the goal down into steps. Have smaller goals to reach throughout the year and reward yourself when you reach them. Track your progress – we feel good about ourselves when can see our improvements. Acknowledge your weaknesses and take note of any setbacks. Be accountable and get a friend to make sure you follow through.
2. Qualify Prospects the Right Way
Each prospect should be subject to a thorough qualification process. Qualifying prospects involves evaluating a lead against your ideal customer profile. It helps you identify sales leads that are a good fit for your product or service. Your team can close more deals by prioritising selling to qualified leads. Qualifying prospects, on the other hand, helps you identify sales leads that are a good fit for your product or service. The first step of the selling process, prospecting and qualifying, involves searching for potential customers and deciding whether they have the ability and desire to make an investment.
3. Focus on Repeat Customers
Repeat customers are the bread and butter of your business. Of course, you should be seeking out new business wherever possible, but never underestimate the power of those who are already on your side.
A repeat customer is a customer who has purchased from a company multiple times. They are profitable because they have already shown a willingness to invest with the company, and are therefore more likely to make future investments. A repeat customer is more likely to buy from you again and again, they are easier to sell to, they spend more on each deal and they spend more at key times.
4. Add Complementary Services or Products
Don’t be afraid to upsell and offer additional products to your customers. Complementary services or products are those given to an audience/a customer without charge. This term is often used in the tourism and hospitality industry, but it applies to sales coaching too. A complementary good is a product or service that provides value to another product or service. In other words, they are two things that the customer utilises in conjunction with one another.
5. Hone Your Pricing Strategy
Pricing is key, so you want to get it right. A pricing strategy is your high-level plan for setting the best prices for your products and services, keeping in mind costs and your customers’ perception of value and what it is you’re selling. The pricing strategy you choose may vary from one service to the next, and it will likely change over time.
6. Use Effective Marketing Strategies
Effective marketing strategies (like this very blog!) will help significantly in driving new business and retaining existing clients.
First and foremost, you’re looking to educate with your content. You should also personalise your marketing messages, be led by the data you have available, invest in original research and use video. Livestreaming is an option, as are explainer videos. You could also host or join a podcast. Live content has the ability to generate greater impressions than posts published in newsfeeds. Marketers can appear as guests on established podcasts or start their own.
Local SEO is your friend too. Find an expert who can elevate your presence in search engines.
You should also set up automated email marketing campaigns. If you like, you can even test out augmented reality.
7. Review Your Online Presence
An online presence matters, there is no two ways about it. Whether you are promoting your services via google searches (SEO), LinkedIn, Facebook or any other means, nailing this aspect of your marketing will pay huge dividends. Be patient! It can take several months for a strategy such as SEO to take hold and have an impact. Bide your time and work on your online presence elsewhere while you are waiting for results from SEO.
Build an email list. This is a non-negotiable that will set you up nicely.
Master SEO. Search engine optimisation makes all the difference.
Create value. Every step of the way you should look to optimise this.
Be active online. There’s nowhere to hide nowadays; you need to be out there.
Analyse your results. Proper analysis will dictate the direction you are going in.
Have a social media presence. This is unavoidable nowadays.
Make a website. Again, you won’t be able to get anywhere without a high-quality website. Devote the required time, it’ll be worth it.
Produce content. Content is king as we have already said – you should be ready to produce lots of it.
Personify your brand. Reputation is everything and you must lead from the front.
Experiment with online advertising. This can be tremendously fruitful when intelligently deployed.
Be competitive. Know where you want to compete and be sure to do it.
Develop relationships. Relationships will make or break your business, so set strong foundations.
Show up where your audience is. They are not always going to go to you, so you must go to them instead.
Automate your process. Use technology to your advantage.
8. Communicate More with Your Clients
Some would say that you can never communicate too much with your clients. Naturally, you don’t wish to hassle them, but make sure you are on top of each interaction and responding swiftly to queries and questions.
Build a relationship. Take the time to be professional and personable with your clients. Get to know them and take note of what they’re telling you. Listen to clients: active listening is a skill like any other, and you need to practice it. Stay involved in the conversation and make sure to ask clarifying questions if you’re not sure you understand something. Use analogies, which are great to explain complex or technical issues or descriptions. Develop customer service standards too. Internal customer service policies, standards and benchmarks ensure that your employees communicate with your clients in a consistent way. This gives you peace of mind that your staff provide the same high-quality service each time clients interact with your business.
9. Provide Continuous Training for Continued Success
Your training schemes need to be consistent in order to be effective over time. You will want to have these following a pattern. Salespeople respond better when they are motivated and monitored. This doesn’t mean you stand over them through every stage, as it is important to harness their independence. Just be mindful of the impact consistent training can have over time – don’t neglect it.
Continuous training plays a key role in increasing the productivity of your sales team. As they constantly engage themselves in honing their skills, they eventually become efficient at their work. This enables them to have better and meaningful conversations with their customers.
10. Build a Winning Sales Team
Teamwork makes the dream work. Here’s how it’s done:
Build a culture of engagement. Ensure that your team and your clients are consistently engaging.
Identify the skills that matter most and hire for them.
Set clear expectations. If everyone knows where they stand, you stand a better chance.
Give your teams everything they need to succeed. Find the resources that will make your team tick.
Monitor critical sales metrics. These will vary throughout the process so it’s important to keep an eye on them.
Give consistent feedback. Feedback is important for any team.
Share customer success stories. If you highlight where the team has succeeded, it can serve as a guide for next time.
Encourage salespeople to set personal goals. Goal setting is imperative as we have highlighted above.
Use data to identify engagement issues. Data is your friend in all aspects of business, use it well.
Always solve for the customer. The customer is your number one priority. Be at their beck and call.
11. Identify Potential Roadblocks
Stumbling blocks abound in the sales industry. You can’t go through your career expecting that everything will fall into place all the time.
Sales roadblocks are the challenges that salespeople face when trying to close a deal. These can include anything from the client’s budget to the competition. Overcoming these roadblocks requires creativity and persistence.
There could be:
Too many non-sales activities
Not enough inbound leads
Lack of training
Misalignment on qualification definition
Lack of customer/account data
Poor salesperson or territory assignment
Lack of content and collateral
Poor brand awareness
Competitive marketplace
A product or solution that isn’t working
Insufficient sales development technology and tools
Assess where you are at on each of these points, and take swift action to rectify.
12. Utilise Sales Tools to Step Up Your Game
The tools you deliver to your team should be used wisely and regularly. A sales tool used to be physical (pen and paper) in the past. While many of those tools are timeless and always available, they are not always the most practical or efficient for companies in the 21st century.
Today’s sales tools are digital software and websites that help make sales more efficient and successful by streamlining your data. They allow for internal and external communications to be instantaneous so everyone is on the same page. While many work alongside traditional email, these sales tools are truly a step up for customers and co-workers. Today, there are hundreds of options to address needs perhaps you didn’t know you had for your company.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
Email Management
Sales Productivity
Customer Success
Data Integration
Prospecting
Look these up and see whether any of them might come in handy.
13. Monitor and Improve Sales Performance
You need to track your own performance and that of your team often.
You can track:
Total Revenue
Total revenue can be measured on any time scale, typically monthly, quarterly, or annually.
Average Revenue Per Account/Product/Customer
The average revenue brought in by a single product, service, account, or customer helps leaders and managers to understand where they should focus their attention and resources.
Market Penetration
Understanding your market share is important because it measures where your business is compared to the expected growth outlined in your business or sales plan.
Win Rate
Win rate, or the opportunity-to-win ratio, is the measurement of successful deals or deals that close, in comparison to the total deals made – including those that are open, lost, slipped, or in another pipeline phase. Basically, win rate measures sales effectiveness or the ability of a sales team to conclude negotiations.
Year-Over-Year Growth
Although growth can be measured over any timeframe – such as month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter, or year-over-year – annual growth showcases high-level execution of strategy and whether long-term growth goals have been achieved.
Lifetime Value (LTV) of a Client
Lifetime value is the revenue that can be expected throughout the duration of the average relationship with a customer. Once a relationship and rapport have been established with an account, your team would ideally nurture this existing relationship to keep them satisfied and grow the lifetime value of the account.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
What is the likelihood that your customers will recommend your product or service to their network?
Quota Attainment
Quota attainment tells you whether a sales rep has reached their sales quota within a given time period and what percentage of their quota they have reached. This is an important metric to measure because low quota attainment rates can be a symptom of more complex issues within the sales team, including inadequate coaching.
Pipeline Coverage
Salespeople at all levels must understand the health of their pipeline compared to their quota. This sales metric will be a leading indicator towards quota attainment – if you don’t have an adequate pipeline to cover your quota, it’s going to be extremely difficult to achieve your goal.
Sales Expense Ratio
It’s important to understand how your sales costs, direct customer acquisition costs, and indirect operating expenses compare to your revenue. The higher your sales expense ratio, the less profitable your sales organisation will be.
So there you have it – 13 ways to improve your income in the sales industry. Still feeling stuck? Contact The Sales Coach Network today and begin your journey with us. It’s as simple as booking a call or downloading our brochure.
What are you waiting for?