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5 Trends You Should Follow In Sales In 2020

Buyers in 2019 have the power to go online and then research offerings on-demand that can be made available to them in a matter of a few clicks. These are the exact reason as to which businesses, be it big or small have a singular opportunity to sell more in less time. However, with time and budget constraints added on to your sales teams, it becomes really impossible to access every business growth technology and tool in the toolbox to select the right solution to help your business grow. Hence in this article let us look at these unique sales trends that entrepreneurs are following in 2020 to boost their sales cycles and harvest more revenue.

Buyers in 2019 have the power to go online and then research offerings on-demand that can be made available to them in a matter of a few clicks.
These are the exact reason as to which businesses, be it big or small have a singular opportunity to sell more in less time.
However, with time and budget constraints added on to your sales teams, it becomes really impossible to access every business growth technology and tool in the toolbox to select the right solution to help your business grow.

CRM adoption will grow at 13.5% CAGR over the next three years - SelectHub Click To Tweet

Hence in this article let us look at these unique sales trends that entrepreneurs will be following in 2020 to boost their sales cycles and harvest more revenue.

Personalized Emails

By now in 2019 most businesses out there in the marketplace have relevant data on their customers. Now, these data-points can include basic facts such a prospect’s or customer’s name, address, email, telephone numbers and birthday while also having information about their buyer behaviors.
For an example, if your customer frequently orders a few offerings manufactured by your company, you can send them personalized emails with an exclusive offer on that product or service, which will not only illustrate that you cherish the relationship that your business has built with the customer, but it will even reward the customers for their unwavering loyalty.

Mobile Apps

As of date, there are a few billion people on this planet who uses a Smartphone. In fact, this will not be a surprising fact to learn if you are also reading this article on your Android or iPhone.

Hence in this age of digitalization build a mobile app for your brand so that you reach the consumers of your brand directly and on the go.

This is because, a mobile app not only provides you full access to promote your offerings that match your buyer’s personas but it also helps to do it without any middle-man getting in the way, since mobile apps can let you enable push notifications to send personalized offers and messages right into the hand of your prospective customers immediately.

Social Selling

According to Forbes more than even 92 percent of B2B businesses are directly influenced by social media channels, and therefore it is of no surprise that in 2019 most sales professionals are actively engaged with customers on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Now the only reason behind this approach to sales is that high-value customers and prospects of any brand are much easier to talk to on these social media platforms.

Therefore, as a B2B brand to place yourself on the prospect’s radar, try to reach out to them with relatable and relevant content that can aid your customers buy your offerings faster and thereby provide your company with rapid business growth.

Micro-influencer Marketing

In modern times micro-influencers are the farthest picks from your social media moguls and celebrities who have millions of followers online.

This is because unlike celebs, micro-influencers are passionate people who really want to explore your offerings and provide their honest opinions about your products and services.

Moreover, the contents published by micro-influences on their blogs or social media websites are viewed by hundreds of people who take their advice as peer consults.

In fact, micro-influencers are easy to collaborate with and promote your brands’ offerings without burning a hole in your pocket.

Therefore with micro-influencer marketing, you can promote your offerings at an exclusive price for a niche audience and so in 2020 using Instagram as your best bet to find the most happening micro-influencer who is interested in your industry and thereafter push your offerings to a new market.

Customer Relationship Management

Easy to use CRM software is a business growth technology solution that aids in centralizing all your customer-related information on a unified and robust platform.

Therefore once you buy CRM it this tool can come handy when you have one salesperson handling an account or a customer by helping them coordinate without their teammates without leaving their desk.

Most CRM software solutions, be it a powerful CRM platform like Salesforce or even Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions mostly used by startups and small businesses they come with useful features like contact and lead management, sales pipeline management, quote building, workflow, and Sales Force Automation , invoicing capabilities and more.

Fortunate a lot of CRM vendors in the marketplace offer a free trial to help you and your sales teams evaluate their CRM software even before you buy CRM to see if it is the right fit for your business.

Conclusion

Therefore to conclude, it can be said that in 2020 you need to proactively empower your sales teams with these trends in the coming year and implement them as a part of your business growth strategy for finding more customers, leads and revenue growth.

Sales Cadence: Why Your Sales Team Needs A Prospecting Methodology For Business Growth

Thoughtful planning is everything in sales. Hence, irrespective of whether you are writing a sales proposal, creating a sales process, or setting up a follow-up strategy, you are required to have a well-thought-out planning to get the desired result that you want. You need to create a plan that should get leads flowing smoothly through your sales pipeline and even get them engaged with your brand. However, as one of the award-winning vendors of small business CRM software solutions, we have found that most businesses do not have any follow-up plan which in other words going by the books is known as “sales cadence” for a brand or company. This is because, in most businesses the sales reps sometimes follow-up on their leads and prospects for once (probably even twice) and thereafter when they do not find a response, they move to the next prospect in their calling list.

Thoughtful planning is everything in sales.
Hence, irrespective of whether you are writing a sales proposal, creating a sales process, or setting up a follow-up strategy, you are required to have a well-thought-out planning to get the desired result that you want.
You need to create a plan that should get leads flowing smoothly through your sales pipeline and even get them engaged with your brand.
However, as one of the award-winning vendors of small business CRM software solutions, we have found that most businesses do not have any follow-up plan which in other words going by the books is known as “sales cadence” for a brand or company.

20% want to talk during the decision stage, once they're decided which product to buy. Click To Tweet

This is because, in most businesses the sales reps sometimes follow-up on their leads and prospects for once (probably even twice) and thereafter when they do not find a response, they move to the next prospect in their calling list.

Now, this inconsistency in the follow-up strategies of the sales reps not only slows down the sales process but it also makes way for opportunities to slip or fall through the crack.

In reality, prospective customers always need to hear from the sales reps on an average at least seven times before they decide on making a purchase.
Therefore, if your sales reps have given their prospects a call or have sent their prospects an email which the prospects have not responded, it does not actually mean that the prospects are disinterested in buying your offerings.

It is not strange to hear in this era of stellar growth in digitalization that probably every one of us receives hundreds of cold emails every day and so important emails can easily get buried deep inside the mailbox.
It can also be that perhaps your prospects have read your email but did not find adequate time and opportunity to respond to your calls.

Hence, you can never know the real reasons for your prospect’s silence unless you follow-up with them.

Therefore as it is has been found in different studies done on sales cadence that even if the first email sent to a prospect does not get any response, the second email has 21 percent chances to be read, the golden key to finding a response from your prospective customers is to conduct regular follow-ups with the right sales cadence or a prospecting methodology so that it can result in a sale.

WHAT IS SALES CADENCE?

To reiterate what we said even before, a sales cadence in any business is a sequence of follow-up touch-points with a prospect that helps in establishing a connection for ushering an engagement or hastening a sale.

Hence, sales cadence is typically a schedule that needs to be created for the sales reps to follow-up with each of their prospects via telephone, social media channels, or over emails.

Therefore, sales cadence is a process and a workflow that begins at the first contact and thereafter continues to evolve through a sequence of interactions until the prospective customer is either converted into a sales opportunity or they exits the sales cadence workflow and goes back to the nurturing bucket.

WHY DO YOU REQUIRE A SALES CADENCE?

The complete idea of using a sales cadence is to diversify your sales reps’ outreach by getting in touch with more than one prospect across multiple channels that are used by your business.
This is because, while certain prospective customers might seem more receptive to phone calls, others might prefer communicating through social media or emails.

Hence, in modern times it is extremely important for your sales cadence to incorporate several channels of communication to get connected with the prospects as executing a sales cadence for your sales teams not only helps your organization but also your sales reps.

– How a sales cadence can help the sales reps?

Once you buy CRM for your organization, it is a lead management software that can help in creating a follow-up sequence of emails and calls for every prospect that is stored in the CRM database, which creates a structured framework that completely eliminates guesswork and therefore aids in maintain consistency between every interactions with the prospective customers of your brand.
Hence using sales cadence reps can close more deals in less time by following up with their prospects on a regular basis, ensuring that their leads are moving as anticipated across the different stages in their sales funnels.

– How sales cadence aid businesses?

Prospecting using outbound marketing strategies can definitely bring your business quality leads. However, without the right follow-up strategy, your conversion rates will soon become stagnant. Hence combining a sales cadence along with the right outbound sales tactics can increase conversion rates and help your business to gain its sales momentum in the marketplace.
A sales cadence is created in businesses so that every sales rep abides by the same process. Since adhering to a consistent sales cadence that works for your business is one of the most fundamental keys for predicting accurate numbers that can be generated with the help of your sales process.

HOW TO BUILD A SALES CADENCE?

Building a sales cadence is never a one-time process. This is because, sales cadences differ based on the target market’s demography, personas, offerings that you want to sell, and more.
Rather it can be said that building a sales cadence involves a trial and error approach until the time you find the right cadence that works best for your business.

Nevertheless, the basic terra-firma of any sales cadence remains the same – a timeline of how and when you should contact your prospects.

Hence, here are 7 points that all sales reps should follow while designing their sales cadences:

Know your target audience

Do research to understand your prospective customers, what their unique pain points are, which platforms they are most active on, and how your offerings will provide a solution to their problems.

The medium of communication

To reach out to your prospects a good sales cadence must include phone calls, emails, social media channels, text messages and more.
Hence, make a quick list of the channels where your prospective customers are most likely to remain active.

For example, if your prospect is more responsive to Facebook Messenger than emails or phone calls, use that to your advantage by including it into your cadence list.

The number of contact attempts

As we have suggested even before, you in most cases need to contact your prospects at least seven times to get their attention, and so an ideal sales cadence should have anywhere in-between 7-14 touch-points for conversion and sale.

The interval of the touch-points

If you do not want to get on your prospect’s nerves, never touch base with a prospect more than thrice in a day, since less is more in this case, unless you want to lose your deal.

Moreover, make sure that you space your cadence in such a way that you give a day or two before contacting your prospects once again.

The duration of the cadence

The effective length of a sales cadence begins from the first touch-point when your sales rep receives a prospective customer and remains until the sale is concluded, which according to researches done should be about two to four weeks.

Nevertheless, this, of course, depends on the prospect’s nature of engagement with your phone calls, social media messages, and emails.

Target segmentation

One of the best approaches to build your sales cadence is to first categorize your list into tire accounts. These tires can be numbered – one, two, and three.
You can do this segmentation of your prospects by categorizing them by their company size, industry, personas, regions and others.

For example, while enterprise establishments who are your prospective customers can fall in tire one, mid-market, and small and medium businesses can fall in tire two and three respectively.

Identically, you can categorize your prospects based on their professional hierarchy whereby decision-makers can be included in tire one, mid-level managers and lower managers can fall in tire two, and three respectively.

Now, once you have segmented your prospects in your lead management software into tires, you can easily design a cadence for each of these tires based on how you must approach them, the number of touch-points they need, the duration and respective channels needed to perform these cadences.

The content is king

Finally, the chances of your prospects getting back to your reps and your brand primarily depend on the quality and uniqueness of your content.

Hence to catch the attention of your prospects, your content must be informative as well as intriguing, since even if you have an awardable sales cadence but a poor content, your cadence strategy will never take off the ground.

EXAMPLE OF A GOOD SALES CADENCE FOR B2B SALES

As we have stated even earlier that sales cadences can vary according to the personas you are reaching out, the size of the company, the target industry, and many more variables.

Nevertheless, here is an example of an ideal sales cadence which can help you to approach a company’s top-level executives:

Day 1

Send a personalized email

To do this start by finding out more about your prospective customer using social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Thereafter understand your prospect’s business and find out how you can benefit them by selling your offerings.

After this research has been done, send a personalized email using the data gathered about your prospect, accompanied by a connection request on LinkedIn.

In this email you can congratulate your prospect on their recent achievements, elaborate a little so that the prospect understands that are well-aware of their industry and end the email as to how your solution can help boost their businesses’ productivity.

Day 3

Send an email pitching your offerings

To do this empathize on your prospective customer’s pain-points, elaborate on specific business use cases and express your thoughts as to how your brand helped them to overcome these dark areas of problems.

In this email, explain why you are reaching out to your prospect, their pain points and the solution that you can provide to alleviate their issues. You can also talk about any of your prospect’s competitors and how your business has helped them on similar lines.
In the end, ask your prospect- what is the best way to get 15 min of their precious time?

Day 6

Send the first follow-up email

This is your first follow-up email; therefore keep it short, simple and crisp. Remember the goal of this email is to find a simple “Yes” or “No” from your prospect.

In this email, you can say that you just wanted to follow-up and see if your prospect has received your previous emails. Ask your prospect if they will allow a short phone call or an email exchange and thereafter decide if they would like to take the discussion further for knowing more about your offerings.

Day 8

Make a phone call (leave a voicemail and an email if unanswered)

In this step in your sales cadence make the first call to your prospect (preferably during the evening) and if it goes unanswered leave a voice mail with your name, company’s name and phone number, requesting the prospect to call back at their convenience.

You can also drop an email to your prospect saying you tried to call them and have left a voice mail in their absence.

Day 11

Send the second follow-up email

This email should essentially talk about the features of your offerings that are in relevance to your prospect’s pain points.

Day 13

Send the third follow-up email

In this email, you can send more success stories and case studies of how your offerings have helped others in uprooting problems associated with their businesses.

Day 16

Breakup email

This must essentially be the last email in your communication chain, in which you should for the one last time highlight the challenges faced by your prospect and remind them how your solution can help them to overcome their pain points.

Always remember to end this final breakup email in a positive note, so that you can leave an open door for future potential collaborations and opportunities.

SALES CADENCE- BEST PRACTICES

The best time to make cold calls is from 1000 Hrs till 1230 Hrs and thereafter from 1400 Hrs till 1600 Hrs.
The worst time to make cold calls is from 0800 Hrs till 1000 Hrs.
The worst time to call is the best time to send emails to your prospects.
During cold calls talk less about yourself and try to learn more about your prospects.
Never make use of more than three touch-points in a day. For example, if your prospect does not pick up the phone, leave a voice message and an email, but make sure that you do not exceed three touch-points on the same day.
When you receive “No” from prospects try to understand the reason for the rejection which will help you to identify patterns and improve on your offerings.

HOW TO MEASURE AND TRACK THE RESULTS?

Manually following up with your leads and prospects can be really challenging, especially when you are dealing with a very high volume of leads.

Therefore, buy CRM and use this lead management software that can leverage technology to automate the sales cadence with Sales Force Automation (SFA) tools.

Now once you have a sales cadence to know if it is working and judge the success of your strategy here are four metrics that you need to track with the help of your easy to use CRM software:

Email open and click-through rate
This shows if your email has caught the prospect’s attention, and makes you aware when there is room to change or tweak your email outreach strategies.

Email open to reply ratio
A high email reply rate signifies that your email contents resonate with your prospect’s pain points and if it is not it means you need to rework on your email content’s verbiage.

Call to appointments ratio
Tracking this metric helps you to understand your ideal customer’s profile and lets you decide on the market and industry you should focus on (and also hold off) for selling your offerings.

Bounce rate
In a gist, this shows how clean your email list is as a high bounce rate calls for pruning the email list in your CRM database.

CONCLUSION

A sales cadence makes sure that your prospective leads do not fall through the crack and are steadily moving across the different successive stages in your sales funnel.

Therefore test the sales cadence that you build and adjust it if needed until you discover what best works for your business.

Buy CRM- Since A Successful Business Comes From Building A Successful CRM Strategy

Customers are very important when we think of any business; nevertheless, most businesses do not have a proper plan and clear strategy to capitalize on existing and prospective customers. This is where comes the role of CRM software which ensures you provide the best possible service, keeps automated business practices in place, ensure customers never face billing-related problem keeping both reminders and bills on time. Hence a complete five-star service is what Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM brings for your business. The major benefits that your business can get from business growth technology like CRM software include.

Customers are very important when we think of any business; nevertheless, most businesses do not have a proper plan and clear strategy to capitalize on existing and prospective customers.
This is where comes the role of CRM software, since once you buy CRM it ensures that you provide the best possible service, keeps automated business practices in place, ensure customers never face billing-related problem keeping both reminders and bills on time.
Hence a complete five-star service is what Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM brings for your business.

Each year, 70% of businesses state they plan to increase spending on bsuiness growth technology. The figure remains the same in 2019 - SuperOffice Click To Tweet

The major benefits that your business can get from business growth technology like CRM software include:

Understand customers better with enhanced and increased knowledge

When you have more and better information about your customer you are better placed to take a decision on what service you can deliver delivered irrespective of whether it is selling an offering or communicating something to your customers.

Improve process to find a better return on investment

Once you buy CRM and set up your business processes aided by an easy to use CRM the main improvement that you can see is more conversion of the leads, better interaction with customers leading to a more satisfied and happy customer base.

Better coordination between sales and marketing teams

The functions of the marketing team lead to better sales output. The major gap between sales and marketing teams has always been a lack of a dedicated channel of communication. Easy to use CRM is a business growth technology that bridges the gap and creates connections that result in a more cohesive operation between the employees in your company.

Create a world-class customer experience

As a vendor of award-winning small business CRM software, working with several businesses we have learned how to bring better customer experience and how it can change the ways most people do business in their company. CRM software builds standard processes that help not only the in-house employees in business but also networking partners and external agencies associated with the company.

Empower customer service team

It has been a worry of most customer service desk of not able to provide support because of the lack of a unified and answerable system operating for all departments within the company. CRM is a business growth technology that makes every department within the organization liable to deliver its job on time and builds a better and coordinated system to help customer service teams to provide world-class services to the consumers of their brand’s offerings.

Plan the ways marketing budget is spent and improving on the existing ways

Want to check how your email marketing working or how the sales team converting the prospective leads? Want to know whether leads are being followed up in time and with correct details? Buy CRM to end all your worries and get them solved overnight. Additionally when SFA (Sales Force Automation) is integrated with easy to use CRM it helps in creating a better-planned marketing campaign and thereby aid in improved business functionalities.

Help in accurate decision making

Easy to use CRM empowers you to take correct decisions based on many facts and data stored in the CRM database . With the power of data, this business growth technology helps you to know the working styles of the employees and whether their service gets delivered in time, which helps the management to take on time, better and accurate decisions for consistent revenue growth.

Find better and new prospects with the use of modern technology

These days easy to use CRM can be integrated with social media which helps you to stay connected with your prospects and customers. Social media listening enables CRM platforms not only to ushers a more cohesive work culture in the organization but it also increases point to point delivery of the work faster bringing more liability on each head. This is how better and improved prospect finding starts and continues for sales growth.

Build long term relationships

CRM brings many important things on Sales Force Automation which your customers need like an immediate and timely response of their queries, easy availability of information, and automation of business process helping them stay with you for more by keeping them happy and satisfied over time.

Takeaway

Therefore with the clear intent to keep customers happy and to keep all other related processes well placed and automated buy CRM to keep your entire organizations focus on not only keeping customers satisfied but also reduce churn leading to increased business growth.

4 Principles to Go Beyond Just Customer Satisfaction And Achieve More

Before we discuss about the use of business growth technology to go beyond just customer satisfaction and achieve more, here is what the research from Gallup (an American analytics and advisory company based in Washington, D.C) and other research organizations says: “If you are trying to boost up your rate of repurchases and overall customer loyalty, then for that customer satisfaction is never just enough.” This is because, in order to increase the advocacy levels and customer loyalty of your brand, you need to exceed customer satisfaction. Rather you need to buy a business growth technology solution like easy to use CRM and conduct a customer feedback program that will provide you with all the insights to illustrate how to improve.

“If you are trying to boost up your rate of repurchases and overall customer loyalty, then for that customer satisfaction is never just enough.”

This is because, in order to increase the advocacy levels and customer loyalty of your brand, you need to exceed customer satisfaction. Rather you need to buy a business growth technology solution like easy to use CRM and conduct a customer feedback program that will provide you with all the insights to illustrate how to improve.

If you are trying to boost up your rate of repurchases and overall customer loyalty, then for that customer satisfaction is never just enough. Click To Tweet

Therefore, here are four fundamental guidelines for creating a solid customer feedback program after you buy CRM – since failing to follow them can make you veer off course.

However, primarily we must know what can good customer feedback do for our businesses?

High-quality customer feedback can provide your business with the desired insights to take your company’s customer satisfaction scores to the next level.
In fact, at its best, customer feedback is a discipline that is research-driven which therefore requires solid insights to improve the customer experience of your brand.
This is because customer feedbacks help in exploring friction points, customer successes, and missed opportunities in your business and hence it is a way to stay on top of customer issues with your business processes and offering(s).

Customer feedback can address critical customer-facing questions like:

Did our representatives answer your questions in totality?

Was your product repaired to your desired satisfaction?

Perse, it can also tackle strategically placed concerns like:

What would you like us to do to make our customer service better than our competitions?

How can we boost our customer satisfaction and also sales?

When these questions are asked correctly customer feedbacks can provide you more insights, greater accountability and a lens in the details that will ultimately boost the happiness of your customers.

Now, onto the Principles…

Principle #1

Be Objective

What is the point in doing a customer feedback survey using your email campaigning feature in easy to use CRM, if the data captured cannot reflect what is really going on with your customers?

We say this because we have observed several customer satisfaction surveys and many other customer feedback methods that suffer from biased and uneven representation of facts and data.

The complete guideline for the objectives can fill an entire book; nevertheless here are three best practices:

Use an accurate sample
Try to find out, by asking yourself, how well the customer feedback sample represents your customer base.Ensure that your sample is statistically valid, random and representative. That implies if only one type of customer is providing feedback then your data can be skewed.
Abolish bias
Eradicate leading statements, double-barreled questions, skewed scales, and other subjective constructs.For example, instead of asking the customer in the feedback survey: “How satisfied you were with our services?” (Thereby suggesting that the customer was at least somewhat satisfied) ask questions that are more pertinent and neutral like “How would you rate the quality of our service?”
Ensure replicability
The information collected from the customer feedback surveys in your CRM database must be such that any analyst with your data should be able to apply your methods and finally arrive at the same conclusion, be it by coding, assessing or categorizing the data.

Principle #2

Use the Best Methods

Even though in general surveys are the default method for evaluating the customer satisfaction of any brand, however sometimes there are even better tools.

These other methods for evaluating and measuring customer satisfaction include:

Mystery shops
This customer satisfaction gauging method reveals real insights into customer service, especially in specific scenarios. In fact, this is also a great way to compare your brand to your competitors.
Customer interviews
This customer satisfaction gauging method provides an in-depth view of your customer’s expectations pitted against their true experiences and is also a great way for uncovering issues that you did not know to ask about.

Principle #3

Engage Your Customers

Creating the right engagement is the ultimate foundation stone of customer satisfaction. Therefore keep your surveys relevant and short as if they are too long or ask irrelevant questions, it can alienate your customers.

Now, in the context of your surveys it means:

Ask compelling questions
Use conversational style verbiage in your surveys so that your customers feel at ease and actually want to share their experiences with your company.
Use dynamic logic to keep the questions relevant
All customers are different, so apply branching logic to allow your customers to answer only those questions that apply to them.
Add small tokens of gratitude
Thank your customers for their effort and time by providing them things like gift cards, priority codes and others, so that they will give their valuable feedbacks even in the future days to come.

Principle #4

Take Analysis Seriously

This is where insights found from easy to use CRM software platforms and other business growth technology solutions come into play.

Provide your customer feedback processes its due diligence and use the right insights to find the signals among all the noises while doing your analysis, which implies:

Evaluate what drives your outcomes
Simply viewing and analyzing the NPS (Net Promoter Score) and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) score is not enough. Rather you must prioritize them to take your next steps and actions.
Parse and categorize the comments
Segment your customer feedback data to uncover themes by scientifically categorizing and parsing unstructured data like open-ended comments of your customers in your CRM database.

Conclusion

These principles are all interconnected and therefore naturally affect the outcomes of each other. Hence, do your research before creating your customer feedback survey and sending them using Sales Force Automation in your CRM.

As we even said earlier, customer feedback is a research discipline, and so if you are not scientific in our approach, you will not be able to gain any actionable insights that can boost customer satisfaction and thereby grow your businesses’ bottom line.

Time-Tested Tips On Prospecting For B2B Sales Professionals

Even if you are using an easy to use CRM tool prospecting is one of the most important stages of the sales process- and yet it still remains as one of the more difficult ones. In fact, in a certain report, it states that 42 percent of salespersons named prospecting as the most challenging stages of the sales process. But why is it so challenging?

Even if you are using easy to use CRM tool prospecting is one of the most important stages of the sales process- and yet it still remains as one of the more difficult ones.
In fact, in a certain report, it states that 42 percent of salespersons named prospecting as the most challenging stages of the sales process.

But why is it so challenging?

Well, this is because; prospecting as an activity is never as thrilling as closing a deal. Hence it is mostly postponed for when the “other important things” are done.

50% of buyers like speaking over phone, compared to 70% of reps. This percentage increases the higher up the ladder (VP or C-suite) you go.- Spotio Click To Tweet

However, without a sales pipeline filled with excellent leads, no other fresh sales are going to happen. This is the reason why it is so important to understand that it is prospecting which kick-starts sales and ascertains to a lot extent, whether or not a deal is going to be closed in time.

Over here the logic and math are simple:

The more prospects you have the more chances you find to close a sale, as each prospect equals an open opportunity.

Now, even though traditionally speaking, it was always the marketing teams that had been entrusted with generating leads for sales, however, it necessarily does not mean that sales reps should abort their own prospecting efforts and only wait for sales qualified leads to pour in.

Therefore, sales reps still have to embrace ways for prospecting and harvesting self-generated leads.

There is another more fact that you need to acknowledge about prospecting- leads will not just fall on your lap, and so you got to take actions for something to happen like book a consistent time in your work-calendar to prospect every day, which will go a long way in making sure that this important activity happens on a regular day-to-day basis.

Therefore here are 5 trending tips on sales prospecting, which is one of the most time-consuming and challenging tasks that sales face for finding potential customers who are the right fit for their offering(s).

Create an ideal prospect profile

Take some time to discover what your ideal customer’s profiles look like after doing research on the information stored in your CRM database.
Find out who are your major customers, who are the worst customers, who are your most profitable customers or which customers are least profitable and thereafter create a profile for each of these groups.

Never assume that just because a customer is there in your easy to use CRM database they fit your brand’s ideal customer profile.
In fact, it has been found in a new study that more than 50 percent of your prospects are not fit for whatever you are offering to your customers.

If you are doing an ABM (Account-Based Marketing) once you have completed this homework, use the profile list and also your existing company list in your easy to use CRM to find other businesses that match your existing company’s profiles which will help your sales to focus on the bigger catches in the sea.

Actively work on your call lists

You have got the warm lead list, cold call list and even list of lost leads in your CRM database .

Therefore, prioritize on each list and find out time each day to call the people in the lists after writing down a list of questions for all the prospects in your database.

Never underestimate the power of phone calls. In recent research, it was found that 67 percent of consumers accepted calls from new sales reps within the last one year and 27 percent of sellers declared that establishing phone calls to new contacts is extremely effective for sales growth.

Hence while making your calls learn about the needs and wishes, pain points and most importantly where your leads are in their decision-making processes, since if you can uphold an interesting conversation the act of qualifying leads tend to become a lot more easier which in turn boosts conversion and sales growth.

Send personalized emails

Never think that email marketing as a sales tool is dead.

Since in reality, it is just the opposite as email marketing using an easy to use CRM software is alive and kicking, as more than 80 percent of buyers say that they prefer to be contacted by brands via email, as stated in a study published by Rain Group.

Nevertheless what is really dying as we speak is mass or bulk email, as with 26 percent higher open rates than bulk emailing, personalized emails are now on the run.

Therefore, after primarily ensuring that the contents in your emails are customized and tailored to each prospect’s needs, your first task is to astonish your leads on how much you are aware of their company, and thereafter make sure that the contents are specifically addressed to your prospect’s needs.

Additionally, to make your leads open and read your emails, ensure that your personalized emails looks well on handheld mobile devices, as in the modern times even more than half of all emails sent are opened on Smartphone(s), and so emails that are mobile-optimized receives 15 percent higher click-through rates than those that are not.

Ask for referrals

Nothing can be more beneficial for any business than having happy customers since customers who are happy with your offerings spread the happy word.

According to research, more than 91 percent of B2B buyers are influenced by word-of-mouth when they make their purchasing decisions and hence in the B2B landscape referral-based sales closing ratio stands in between 50 to 70 percent.

Hence ask your existing customers for referrals, since the truth remains that only 40 percent of salespeople do so.

Now, if you are not sure when to ask for referrals, the best time to ask for a referral is just after the sale is made as this is when according to research more than 83 percent of customers would remain happy to make a referral for your brand.

Therefore share whitepapers, send an invitation to events or email other contents that you think would be valuable for your customers, just to make sure that your brand stays on top of your customer’s minds.

Build your social media presence

If you are still unsure, let us assure you that social media is not a fad, but is really here to stay.

Perse, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and other similar social media websites are channels that your potential purchasers visit to know more about your offerings.

Now, according to social selling statistics as more than 91 percent of B2B buyers are presently involved and active in social media, and more than 65 percent of sales reps use social media to fill their sales pipelines, therefore, if you have not created your social profile, do it immediately as social media presence adds to your prospecting arsenal, without replacing your other prospecting activities.

Finally- Follow up, follow up, and do more follow up

It can be concluded by stating that as your fruits of labor normally do not show up on the very first contact with your leads, timely follow-ups are an excellent means to build up relationships and demonstrate trustworthiness and your determination for selling to your prospective customers.

Therefore, use Sales Force Automation in your CRM to set follow up reminders with your prospects as according to research it has been found that you always have 21 percent more chance to find a reply to your second email if the first email goes unanswered.

Therefore let us begin our journey for B2B prospecting right from here, after reading this blog, as it is high time that sales reps and businesses must start paying attention to their buyers, leveraging their contents and understand who their buyers are and what all they need for providing your brand a rapid business growth.

Many Benefits of the Importance of Sales Force Automation in Businesses

Increasing competition, longer sales cycles, fragmented lead data, and expanding sales reps together can be a woeful situation. The more effort you put to generate sales, the more likely you are to feel perturbed by reduced productivity. The Solution: Hence, instead of trudging and slogging for more hours, you must consider how you can get the same job done in lesser time. The solution is simple, find ways to work smarter instead of harder. For when it comes to sales, there is no superior way to accelerate your job than implement a sales force automation software and find the importance of sales force automation in businesses.

The Solution: Hence, instead of trudging and slogging for more hours, you must consider how you can get the same job done in lesser time. The solution is simple, find ways to work smarter instead of harder. For when it comes to sales, there is no superior way to accelerate your job than implement a sales force automation software and find the importance of sales force automation in businesses.

Sales force automation software eliminates the time consuming but necessary tasks associated with selling, freeing sales reps from the mind-numbing, repetitive behind-the-scene chores, enabling them to what they do best- Sales.

Sales force automation in CRM helps in 30% increase in sales closures- IDC Survey(2017) Click To Tweet

Unlike other business solutions which cater to specific zones, sales force automation is applicable for all size of businesses. Therefore, irrespective of whether you a one-man establishment working out of your garage or an employee of an organization that offers hundreds of products, SFA software helps in abbreviating sales cycles to assist in increasing sales and so boost productivity.

What is sales force automation?

SFA is more of an automated process that mechanizes and incorporates distinguishing parts of business processes right from client contact administration, representative execution assessment to handling of sales estimates.

In other words, SFA connects every simple component of any business and allows a consistent flow of information through various branches that would otherwise require serious conceptualization over different levels and so the importance of sales force automation in businesses is considered as one of the most indispensable parts of all effective organizations.

Features of sales force automation

Sales force automation is perfectly designed to deal with most business responsibilities if not all. The features of SFA are subdivided into the following zones:

Managing sales territories
Managing opportunities and tracking competitors
Sales forecasting
Managing orders
Up-selling and cross-selling

Managing Sales Territories

Lead routing and tracking sales territories are the bulwarks that create efficiency in a sales process. Therefore, instead of using the traditional spreadsheet and obsolete software, it makes more sense to use a good easy to use CRM or an free lead generation software that allow you to better manage prospects and leads from the time of their initial capture till the sales are closed.

This is what best small and medium business CRM software along with SFA can do for greater integrity and higher efficiency of the sales process:

Automation of lead processing along with better management of sales territories that helps in winnowing out drilling for individual records and aids in saving time, money, and energy
Assign leads based on already set proper business rules, which eliminates conflicts over ownership of leads and sales territories
Send email notifications to the sales reps to follow up on leads and prospects instantly and thereby improve superior service quality, ensuring a higher number of closed deals

Managing Opportunities and Tracking Competitors

For any company to achieve growth and success it is necessary that it must manage and take advantage of every sales opportunity that comes on its way. Another importance of sales force automation in businesses is that when it is a part of an easy to use CRM software it can provide the organization with the following benefits that include:

Find the advantage of maximizing the greater number of sales opportunities and not having to rely only on aggregate lists
Find which deals have been lost and which were won, an intelligence that can help to educate your sales team
Respond to sales inquiries in a better way creating improved chances of driving return sales and building loyal customers
Keep track of the customer transactions individually from the time of their first contact till closing of the sale

Forecasting

Best CRM for small business along with SFA can also provide your sales teams with more teeth, tools that can aid them in making accurate sales forecasts, which include:

Calculation based sales forecasting using quotes/orders/opportunities
Recurrent revenue as well as booking revenue forecasting
Make sales much more predictable by fine-tuning the forecasting methods and making it more accurate with the help of CRM software

Managing Orders

Managing orders with the help of an SFA enabled easy to use CRM software can aid in streamlining the entire order fulfillment procedure and even cut down unnecessary paper works that in turn provide the sales team more time to sell. It also helps the customers to receive their orders in a timely manner, which boosts customer satisfaction and makes them more loyal in the long term to the company.

A good CRM solution must be built around customers and their orders taking into account:

Dashboards
Reports
Customer intelligence

Best small business CRM solution will also allow your sales reps to work their deals via a sales pipeline right up to the time that the sale is effective. With sales force automation you will also be in a better position to convert an estimate into an order with a single click of the mouse without the hassle of involving any great amount of paperwork.

Importance of sales force automation in businesses also represents good order management which will provide your business a means to access latest order information so that seeing the status of the order, your sales reps can understand when it is the ideal time for doing a follow-up.

Customers, on the other hand, can check their order status in a real-time environment via your customer care center or website with the implementation of SFA in a CRM software.

Up-selling and Cross-Selling

The tougher and harder is the competition, the more likely it is that it may erode your customers’ loyalty and thereby affect your company’s bottom line. This is why you need sales force automation in your CRM software, which can show you the history of your past customer orders and then create automated and customized email campaigns to up-sell and cross-sell your products.

SFA helps managers to analyze past sales information, understand order history and the customers’ demography that can help in creating email campaigns that are customer segment specific to improve revenue.

Conclusion

According to the recent IDC survey, the importance of sales force automation in businesses has produced:

30% increase in sales closures
18% decrease in sales cycle timing
14% drop in sales administration time

Which are substantial reasons for utilizing SFA in your easy to use CRM software for your business in the modern scenario if you look forward to staying in the top of your league.

Step for Finding the Importance of Sales Force Automation User Adoption in Small Businesses

One of the most knotty and predominantly critical problems in implementation and finding the importance of sales force automation or SFA software system in business of any size is getting enthusiastic acceptance of the project. For without active participation and buy-in from the sales team members who will use and manage the CRM system, SFA will almost certainly fail. This is a vital problem since the very nature of sales force automation system and CRM software, in general, is so often based on change.

This is a vital problem since the very nature of sales force automation system and CRM software, in general, is so often based on change. Customer relationships are not in the real sense of the term an IT project. Although, IT is important and all easy to use CRM implementations involves computer systems, but customer relationship management strategy and customer-facing business processes are much more deep-seated and fundamental than that.

The Global Sales Force Automation Software Market size is expected to reach $7.4 billion by 2023, rising at a market growth of 10.6% CAGR during the forecast period.- PRNewsWire Click To Tweet

In other words, best small and medium business CRM software strategies and the importance of sales force automation involves re-engineering business processes on every aspect, which touches the customers. This re-engineering of processes usually means a lot of changes in the way things are accomplished and this alterations usually produces anything right from sheer skepticism to out-and-out resistance from the employees in any organization at multiple levels.

Luckily, getting user acceptance of SFA process is a known challenge. Over two decades sales force automation of all sizes has delivered a chain of change management techniques to create, the much-needed acceptance for implementation of the SFA process.

All these techniques hinge on having active, involved, and visible support from the very top of the organization. It is a commonly known fact that if the highest levels of management are not is support and does not understand the importance of sales force automation, CRM selection or the value of your SFA project implementation, your chances of success will diminish consequentially. Therefore, the management of your organization has to accept the importance of sales force automation and buy-in before you even start implementing a customer management software solution in your company.

Nevertheless, beyond that all-important executive sponsorship, there are also several other management techniques which have to be woven into the sales automation implementation process for successful implementation of SFA system and CRM, as illustrated below.

#1. Listen To Your Stakeholders

All stakeholders in your organization, including the management and the sales force, along with your marketing team members and your customer support executives, need to put in their ongoing input in the SFA project.

This input from the members of these teams in your organization must start at the very initiation of the SFA software selection process, rather even before you select an SFA or an easy to use CRM package.

Your team must help you to prioritize and identify your company’s needs and provide suggestions for helping them to meet those requirements.

Try to identify lacunas and pain points in your current customer management system and sales process and then excavate the root cause for those sub-optimal performances. It is the combination of software automation and business process improvement, which will ultimately provide you with the best and the most lethal weapon in securing user adoption of SFA in your organization.

Now, listening to your stakeholders means more than just asking your employees for their opinions during the easy to use CRM software selection project.

Identify members of your organization who are ready to work with the CRM implementation team, provide continuous feedback to the management, and become champions for the project to their co-workers. Doing this will create an opportunity for change and provide an opportunity for tuning your work process when the system or its prototype goes alive.

#2. Meet the Stakeholders’ Needs

People working in sales can be very difficult to satisfy, and so if your SFA system does not bring success for the stakeholders it will most likely fail. Rather it can be said that there must be substance behind the strategy that defines the importance of sales force automation and its hype, for the new system must deliver measurable and tangible value for each stakeholder’s constituency.

Therefore, training in the new enterprise software system is most important to meet all the stakeholder’s needs. Everyone who is going to work on this SFA system, from the management to the sales team members, and the sales admin staffs, need to be thoroughly trained in the new system for understanding the importance of sales force automation in businesses.

This training should provide your staffs with necessary how-to guides, cheat sheets, and on-demand availability of support personals to make it easy for everyone to quickly learn and become adequately proficient in the SFA or automated customer management system.

#3. Sell It Internally

Even the best product or service in the world does not sell by itself, particularly if it means bringing something that is going to change the way people do things.

As in any type of sales job, focus on the benefits to the “customers”, understanding that different groups of stakeholders in your organization are going to realize different benefits while recognizing the importance of sales force automation implementation in your company.

For example, proper SFA implementation in sales is going to lighten the paperwork and help your sales team to sell more successfully. Likewise, the top management will be able to get a clear and comprehensive view of what is going on at the customer level and find accurate sales forecasts by proper implementation of SFA.

In other words, you need to clearly tailor your message to the end users of the SFA system for making them understand the importance of sales force automation implementation in your organization.

#4. Celebrate Successes

Once your SFA project moves ahead you will find several opportunities to stage your successes. Celebrate your success, however small they may be to build momentum and break down the resistance while implementing SFA and adopting the easy the use CRM for your organization.

One way to ensure early success is by implementing SFA systems for those parts that are most likely to be successful. Grasp the low hanging fruits for building a progressive support system for finding a successful SFA implementation journey.

This can be anything from making your salespeople get the message from their customers quickly to a process that escalates the ability of your sales team to constantly up-sell or cross-sell their products and services to their customers.

Look for the niggling little pain points, that can be corrected quickly.

Evolve a stepping stone strategy from ‘contact management’ to ‘account management’ to ‘activity management’ and ‘opportunity management’ for creating success stories with the SFA and easy to use CRM implementation in your company. Once the basics are covered by can advance to ‘sales quotation management’, ‘competitive intelligence management’, ‘mobile access’, ‘marketing automation’, ‘social media integration’, ‘partner relationship management (PRM)’ or various other capabilities, which can produce more excitement for your sales team by the implementation of SFA system in your organization.

#5. Keep Selling

One common reason for failure for SFA system projects is negligence in utilization after implementation of the SFA system. It has been often observed that for all unsuccessful SFA projects and easy to use CRM implementation the utilization of the system falls off from 90 percent down to 20 percent or even lesser in the course of the very first year after implementation of SFA system in the organization.

It must be always kept in mind that for finding the importance of sales force automation and customer relationship management once the software is finally live, you must continue using it although almost certainly you shall find things and features that will not work quite the way you want them to do.

Like the majority of big enterprise-software projects, most SFA and best small and medium business CRM software, need sharpening and tweaking as your co-workers actually start using them.

Therefore, keep an allowance for customization of the SFA and CRM software along with your implementation plans, so that you can make changes to meet the end users and the stakeholder’s needs for finding the importance of sales force automation and customer relationship management in your small and medium businesses.

Tag: Sales Force Automation