Thinking of how to improve sales or improve team sales performance.
Checkout the following tips:
Set Aside Time for Prospecting
Clear your calendar every day and make time for prospecting, whether it’s prospect research, identifying target companies that you’d love to sell to, or making those all-important prospecting cold calls that can help you get a foot in the door. It sounds simple, but it’s crucial to your success. Block out an hour or two on your calendar each day. If you don’t make time for prospecting, other activities will inevitably fill in around it.
Create Sales Funnels
Do you have a well-identified process for how to work with business leads? For example, do you know how to move the conversation along to close the deal? If not, you should. Create a sales funnel. This gives you chance to think strategically about every step. Consider what is involved with building a sales relationship with a new prospect. There might be different steps in the sales funnel for different products or solutions.
Rank Your Sales Leads.
Different prospects will have different levels of understanding about how you can help them and some will be readier to buy than others. Some sales leads really are “hot leads” that are ready to buy, while others will require longer-term nurturing, where you need to provide more information, answer more questions, cultivate trust, and support the prospect in making a decision. You need to rank your sales leads based on how urgently ready they are to buy, or by which stage they are at in the sales process.
Build Upon Your Current Network
Cold calling is one of the classic tools of the B2B sales trade, but when you’re reaching out to a prospect for the first time, it doesn’t have to be a totally “cold” call. Lay the groundwork for your sales process by working your network. LinkedIn has become massively valuable for B2B prospecting, because it helps you research, find out who you already know at a prospect’s organization, find out what are the levels of the organization, and start to map out exactly who are the key decision makers that you would want to reach with an introductory email or call.