Best practices for a winning sales strategy
1. Perfect the sales pitch
Whether you want to sell a new product/service, promote an existing one, or gain more traction as a startup, a sales pitch is crucial in the process. And behind every winning sales pitch is a story that speaks to the challenges that prospects face.
Consider this sales pitch:
Hi Jane,
I am Rebecca from ABC Pvt Ltd. Our innovative product stores all your business data in one place and generates reports within seconds. Interested? Let’s have a 10-minute chat to discuss more.
Regards,
Rebecca
And Rebecca never heard back from Jane. What do you think went wrong?
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It talks very little about the product
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The message was not intriguing or compelling
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More importantly, it did not tell what challenge the product solves.
Let’s see how we can frame the above messaging better to talk to the prospect about
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Why are you reaching out to them
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What challenge you can solve
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How your product/service can help
Hi Jane,
As an accounts manager for ABC Pvt Ltd., I usually interact with hundreds of marketers every month.
I realized that most of them spend almost an hour of their day putting together reports, which are unfortunately never glanced at. It’s always a tedious and time-consuming task that’s never a priority for the average marketer.
At ABC Pvt Ltd we recognized this problem and created an innovative tool called CDE. This tool stores all your marketing and business data to generate custom reports in 30 seconds.
Sounds good? Let’s have a quick chat to discuss further.
Regards,
Rebecca
A winning sales pitch encourages your prospect to take the opportunity you’re offering. It connects with them on a human, emotional level and contains proof that you know what you're doing to solve their pain points.
2. Reach out to inbound leads within 24 hours
With inbound sales, the prospect is actively looking for a solution. As buyers these days are highly informed, they are likely to try out different solutions at the same time. To make it more challenging, 35-50% of sales go to the first vendor who responds to a prospect!
This means, to close a deal you should beat the competition in contacting the prospect. By being the first, you get to acknowledge their challenges, answer their questions, and, more importantly, establish a trusting relationship with them.
3. Follow up consistently
Your prospects may receive many emails in a day. Sometimes your prospecting emails might be buried in their inbox, or they might be too busy to respond to you. You will never know unless you follow up with them.
But most salespeople do not have a consistent follow-up plan. While prospects need to hear an average of seven times from you to pay attention to you, some salespeople follow up once, probably twice, and when they don’t get a response, they move on. This inconsistency slows down your sales process, resulting in opportunities slipping through the cracks.
The key to getting a response is to follow up regularly with your prospects. Setting a follow-up sales cadence will more likely fetch you a response from your prospects and not leave you in uncertainty.
Here is an example of sales cadence that you can implement:
4. Ask for customer feedback
Your customers are a wealth of information, data, and feedback related to your product. They use it daily and depend on it to ease their work. They understand better than anyone about how excellent your product/service is, as well as what it lacks.
While it is easy to weed out negative comments you will not be able to soar high in doing so. Take the negative comments as constructive criticism and work on improving those areas.
With exceptional customer support, the customer may return to purchase a higher plan or even refer the product/service to other businesses.
5. Upsell and cross-sell to existing customers
It’s shocking how 80% of your future profits could come from just 20% of your existing customers.
When your customers truly enjoy doing business with you, they will be open to more products and services from your side.
So it is a good idea to keep them on the loop about your latest products and offers, and nurture them to upsell and cross-sell your products.