Halloween—the spookiest night of the year is upon us. But even on Halloween, nothing compares to the dread and doom of watching your competitors eat up your sales like pumpkin pie.
“How do I beat the competition?” is a question most entrepreneurs and salespeople like yourself ponder every single day. And it’s an important one! Because every time you succeed in beating a competitor, it is a sign that your audience find value in your product or service. This credibility to your business implies returning customers, growing revenue, and more market share.
In this article, we share the top 10 tips that will empower you to fly past the competitors (Bonus: Added tips on how you can execute each of them).
Let’s dive right in.
1) Create easy touchpoints for sales-ready leads
When buyers today come across a product they like, they first visit the website for initial research on the brand, product or company. This makes your website an essential gateway to valuable leads, by providing opportunities to share more information, engage and make customers for life.
So, it’s crucial that you don’t let them slip through the system, and provide means for them to contact you effortlessly for more information. And, maybe even a meeting! One of the easiest ways to engage with your potential lead is by using intuitive Call-to-Action (CTAs) and online forms. When you strategically place them across your website, visitors can easily share their contact details and connect with you.
Here’s an example of how a website will look with an online form –
And, it doesn’t take a village of developers and designers to implement this process. You can create intuitive and code-free web forms from scratch and embed them directly on your website using web forms in your CRM.
2) Optimize your website to drive conversions
We spoke about how you can capture the details of interested leads. But what about those website visitors who are not yet ready to talk business? That’s where interactive chatbots will help you out.
By running chat campaigns, you can trigger proactive messages to your website visitors and drive conversations. This will help you convert visitors into potential customers. By automating these conversations to be delivered at the right time, you can nudge them towards a specific action. This can include downloading your resources such as e-books, white paper and so on. Or, you can lead them to book a demo or a free trial.
Here is an example from Freshsales. When a website visitor lands on this page and starts going through the content, the chatbot greets them with a friendly message and encourages them to take an action listed below.
Another way to boost website conversions is by creating professional landing pages. This will get your visitors to trust your brand and explore deeper, just like a friendly salesperson who encourages customers to check out all the products.
For example, Chipotle, a popular fast-food chain, makes Halloween memorable for its customers with their annual ‘Boorito’ campaign. They’ve built a landing page with the Halloween themed creatives, encouraging their customers to shop with them online or through their mobile app. They then promote the page on their social media handles to spread the word.
Again, you don’t need highly skilled developers and designers to implement this. You can create landing pages from scratch using a drag-and-drop builder in your CRM or choose from a predesigned set of templates and publish your pages in no time.
3) Reduce lead response time
Studies show that salespeople who contact their leads within one hour are nearly seven times more likely to qualify them than those who contact an hour later. So, once a lead shares contact details, engage quickly as the odds are against you if you delay.
This means you cannot wait for the sales managers to manually assign the incoming leads to the salespeople. It will potentially contribute to the increasing lead wait time that turn the leads cold quickly.
One of the ways to be more agile with new leads is using your CRM tool to streamline the process. It would enable you to auto-assign all the incoming leads to the corresponding team and salesperson. This helps salespeople get in touch with the leads immediately and even attain the five-minute average response time expected from buyers.
4) Prioritize the right leads
When you start getting numerous leads, contacting them randomly or picking based on intuition is not optimal for closing more deals. That interested lead who downloaded your brochure and visited the pricing page 3 days ago is probably also talking to your competitors right now!
So, without differentiating between hot, warm, or cold leads, you will either overlook potential opportunities or hang on to leads who might not convert.
A CRM with AI capabilities indicates how likely each lead is to convert. It scores your leads based on their interactions with your business—web pages visited, emailed opened, links clicked, etc.
Every time a lead engages positively with you( you get to set the parameters), their score increases. However, if they unsubscribe or do not take the required action, the score decreases. This helps you:
- Weed out bad leads
- Hyper-focus on hot ones
- Increase sales efficiency
All in one go!
5) Segment and conquer
As leads come into your system through various sources, each is at a different stage of the sales funnel. And when you implement a one-size-fits-all messaging strategy, your leads will start getting mixed signals, feel undervalued and misunderstood. They would prefer to choose a business that listens to them and understands their requirements (and that could also mean your competitors).
So, how do you efficiently nurture leads from different stages with the right messaging and make them eventually buy from you?
The answer lies in personalization. When your leads feel like a message was written especially for them, they are more likely to be receptive and ultimately convert.
You can effectively segment your leads and deliver personalized messages that resonate with them using a comprehensive CRM system. It enables you to divide your prospects into various segments based on their interaction with your website, pages they’ve visited, CTAs clicked on, and more. Empowered with this information, you can nurture them with relevant and hyper-personalized campaigns that drive sales.
6) Create killer sales cadences
While personalising emails is a good practice, there are chances that your mails go unnoticed or sometimes even unopened.
Let’s take a moment to think about it. Your leads receive tons of emails every day, including from your competitors. And your email may have gotten buried in their inbox. Or, perhaps they read your email but didn’t have an opportunity to respond to it.
Bottom line, sending one email isn’t enough. In fact, even two follow-up aren’t enough. A prospect needs to hear from you at least seven times before they decide to purchase from you. And when you’re juggling multiple prospects, you might forget to follow up with each of them at the right time.
There’s a simpler way you can connect with your prospective lead. A CRM with intelligent workflows helps you create a series of automated yet personalized sales touchpoints and reminders. This enables you to schedule emails and text messages (SMS) when your prospect might be available. It also nudges you to make phone calls with timely reminders.
Here’s a snapshot of the ideal calling times that our SDR team at Freshworks put together based on regions.
7) Gain clarity in a crowded pipeline
When you’re working on multiple deals simultaneously, focusing on the important ones can be a struggle and all too easy to lose sight of high-value deals. And when these prospects begin to feel you aren’t showing the attention they deserve, the customer experience and your credibility takes a hit. They start doubting the post-purchase services and look for other options to consider.
Wouldn’t it be easier if you could visually see all the ongoing deals in your pipeline based on the deal size along with progress details? You get just that with an AI-powered CRM. It analyzes all your deals, learns from historical data, and delivers actionable insights. You get to see a birds-eye view of all the deals in your pipeline along with tags that show which deals are ‘likely to close,’ ‘at-risk,’ ‘trending,’ and ‘gone cold.’
Freshsales Suite takes this a step further by suggesting the next best actions to take to advance your deal. This helps you make better decisions that drive deals to closure.
8) Make data-backed decisions
To catch your prospect’s attention in a crowded market, you have to be creative in your sales strategy and outreach, from a robust sales process to an innovative phone call or voice mail.
But it is equally essential to pause and take a look at your progress. Not just to know if your ideas are working or not, but also to understand why they worked and replicate the success. Creating sales and marketing reports allow you to
- Measure progress and success of sales and marketing strategies over time
- Understand shortcomings of the executions and tweak your strategy accordingly
- Identify trends and analyze a pattern created over time
But amid other crucial activities such as supporting your teams, hiring and retaining talent, creating strategies to expand your customer base, you tend to have very limited time to create reports. And this is an important activity that always needs to take the front seat.
You can effectively manage all this using a CRM with powerful analytics and inbuilt sales reports templates that enable you to pull out reports in a few clicks. With these reports, you will be empowered to analyze hard data, draw inferences, and make data-backed decisions.
9) Create quotes, contracts and invoices instantly
When you juggle multiple pricing plans or products, it becomes a struggle to recall the exact price in a moment’s time. Going back with a different price quote each time to a prospect is not just embarrassing, but they will start doubting the post-purchase experience and begin leaning towards your competitors.
It can get worse when you have to rework the documents entirely every time there is an error. This results in prolonged sales cycles, slipped opportunities, and not-to-mention, very happy competitors!
The Cost, Price, Quote (CPQ) option can help you to maintain up-to-date pricing information for products right within the CRM. Equipped with the current pricing, you can generate error-free documents such as price quotes, invoices, sales contracts, etc., in a few clicks in the CRM.
The result? You can be the first to create and share crucial sales documents with prospects and quickly seal the deal. In fact, businesses powered by CPQ have witnessed a whopping 105% increase in their average deal size.
Head over here to learn more about the benefits of CPQ.
10) Always Be Closing
Networking is an important part of sales. As you attend various trade shows, seminars, and other networking events, either online or offline, you tend to meet a lot of people who are interested in your business. And you need to accurately capture those interactions in one place. Well, you can put down your notes after the event, but there is always a chance you might miss something crucial.
A handy mobile CRM app that syncs with your desktop enables you to input the details of your prospects after every interaction. You can save information such as name, contact information, and key pointers from your meeting on-the-go. The best part is you can pick up where you left off from your main system and ‘always be closing’!
Conclusion
Healthy competition always empowers you to constantly innovate and be creative in your methods. Don’t lose heart if you miss out on a deal, but come back stronger and turn your worst nightmare into the lion’s share of a delightful pumpkin pie.
Do you know more tips that have worked wonders for you? Let us know in the comments below!
