Sales is a critical part of any business and has the ability to directly impact revenue growth. It includes activities necessary to sell a product or service to an intended or target audience. Sales organizations are often challenged with the need to increase sales growth. It’s important for them to continuously improve their sales process through strategies that get results.
If you’re looking for ways to improve sales, here are some valuable strategies that you can consider implementing:
Table of Contents
#1 Intent Data
Capturing buying intent signals of your prospects is one of the best ways to increase sales opportunities. Intent data enables your sales team to avoid prospects who are less likely to buy and instead pursue those with a high buying intent. It basically allows you to know who in your target audience is searching for products similar to what you offer.
Intent data also gives key insights into prospects who are currently in an active buying stage. Statistics show that it helps with approximately 4X pipeline expansion. Furthermore, 70% of B2B technology vendors using intent data utilize it for prospecting.
#2 Contact Database
Partner with a B2B contact data provider to get access to high-quality, human-verified email addresses, direct dial numbers, and work mobile numbers to reach prospects faster. Equip your salespeople with accurate and enriched contact data so they could spend more time selling and become more productive.
With a reliable contact database, your sales team can:
- Reduce email bounce rates
- Improve email open rates
- Increase call-to-connection ratio
- Directly contact decision-makers
Additionally, your sales force can build accurate lead lists and expand their reach using a contact database. However, be sure to feed them with clean and updated contact data to prevent bad data from doing more harm than good when it comes to sales.
#3 Prospecting Intelligence
Prospecting is a highly difficult part of the sales process. Having said that, you can make it less challenging for your salespeople by providing them with prospecting intelligence tools. Yes, it’s true that training, coaching, buyer personas, and clearly understanding the target audience all play a key role in attaining prospecting success. However, prospecting intelligence takes this success to a whole new level.
For example, the free Chrome extension RevDriver helps find prospects quicker and also unveils human-verified, 95% accurate contact and company data for them. Your sales team only needs to visit the company website or LinkedIn profile of a targeted prospect after installing it. Interestingly, you can even export the revealed prospect contact data to your CRM.
#4 Sales and Marketing Alignment
Did you know? By aligning sales and marketing teams, businesses can become 58% more effective at retaining customers and 67% more effective at closing deals. Sales and marketing alignment is a powerful strategy to improve sales results. It allows your salespeople to get qualified leads and work in lockstep with marketers to target and nurture prospects better.
You can also leverage sales and marketing alignment to provide air cover for your sales team before or during their outreach efforts. This helps:
- Build more meaningful sales conversations
- Create an early impression with prospects
- Increase awareness about the solution you’re selling
#5 Social Selling
Get your sales team into the habit of using social media to generate leads, create new contacts, and build loyalty and trust with them. Most importantly, social selling enables you to have value-adding, worthwhile conversations with your target audience on their preferred channel. Besides LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest are top platforms to use for social selling.
Your salespeople can use social selling to show prospects how your solution can solve their specific problem. They can also use it to simply share relevant content with prospects. Here are some interesting social selling statistics:
- 78% of social sellers are found outselling peers not using social media
- Social selling leaders have a 51% more chance of reaching quota
- Compared to peers with a lower social selling index, social selling leaders are found to produce 45% more opportunities
#6 Hyper-personalization
Hyper-personalization involves more than just basic personalization based on demographics. It allows sales teams to connect with prospects at a deeper level. It looks to personalize every touchpoint or interaction with prospects after deeply analyzing their behavior and their detailed data.
Well-executed hyper-personalization can grow sales by 10% or more. Furthermore, 59% of consumers agree that one of the very important factors to winning their business is personalized engagement based on past interactions. Your sales team can use hyper-personalization to:
- Increase sales engagement
- Build real relationships with prospects
- Improve response and conversion rates
- Assure prospects that their unique needs are being cared for
- Deliver tailored solutions based on prospects’ specific pain points
#7 Storytelling
Add a human touch to your sales process with the help of storytelling in order to better connect with prospects, especially emotionally. Remember, it’s not always the hard facts and statistics that will attract the attention of prospects. Train your sales reps to tell stories so they could:
- Put their message in the right context
- Effectively engage prospects
- Create more rewarding and deeper relationships
- Keep their conversations alive and make them memorable
Storytelling is an excellent strategy to resonate well with your target audience and strengthen your sales pitches. You may also implement it to help prospects imagine how better their business would become if they used your solution.
Key Takeaways
- Use intent data to identify prospects who are ready to make a purchase
- Use reliable contact information to directly connect with decision-makers
- Use a prospecting intelligence tool to power your sales reps to prospect better and faster
- Use sales and marketing alignment to increase lead quality and get air cover for sales
- Use social media to connect with the target audience on channels they spend most of their time on
- Use hyper-personalization to move beyond usual personalization
- Use storytelling to humanize your sales interactions and drive an emotional connection with prospects
Wrapping Up
With all of the proven strategies explained above, you can be confident of gaining the sales success you’ve been longing for. Of course, there are more strategies you can implement to improve sales. For example, automation, asking for sales referrals, creating a strong value proposition, giving a free trial, etc.
However, you need to test and analyze each of your sales strategies to find the best combination. Once you know what works for you, your sales team will be better equipped to crush their goals and targets.
