Tag: Sales Management

7 Undemanding Ways to Earn Trust and Confidence of Your C-Suit Prospects

Unless you are selling Boy Scout popcorns to your friends and families, remember your prospects are not making their purchasing decisions based on how they know you. C-Suit prospects are far more concerned with buying their company’s products and services from someone they respect and trust. Hence, if you want to be a trusted advisor and close more sales with high-level prospects, stop trying to be everyone’s friend. Rather, be intentional about earning the trust of your C-Suit prospects.

Unless you are selling Boy Scout popcorns to your friends and families, remember your prospects are not making their purchasing decisions based on how they know you.  C-Suit prospects are far more concerned with buying their company’s products and services from someone they respect and trust.

Hence, if you want to be a trusted advisor and close more sales with high-level prospects, stop trying to be everyone’s friend. Rather, be intentional about earning the trust of your C-Suit prospects.

Here are 7 undemanding and easy ways to get started:

1. Check body language

Body language often plays a vital role in influencing how a prospect looks at you even before you get a chance to introduce yourself or utter your name. In fact, according to Barbara Pease the author of the book ‘The Definitive Book of Body Language: The Hidden Meaning Behind People’s Gestures and Expressions’ states that tonality and body language accounts for more than 95% of how you are perceived by your customers and prospects. Hence, it is critical that you need to pay serious attention to those little details. Since research shows people are always more inclined to trust those who seem similar to them, so try matching each prospect’s body languages. Does your prospect lean in, stand tall or crosses his/her arms? Pay close attention to your prospects and customers and match your body language to create an invisible connection with your prospects.

2. Be a handshake Pro

Handshakes typically can fall on a scale between super strong to passively soft. If the handshake with your prospect falls on the opposite end of the spectrum, you will both immediately feel disconnected. Hence, try to avoid that ill at ease situation by acting like a handshake pro. Pay close attention to your customer’s or prospect’s approach and then match it instantly. Studies on human behavior show that this is an excellent way to connect with any prospect, and it also increases the likelihood that your prospect will believe in your words and trust you for the rest of your meeting.

3. Show your expertise

C-level prospects often consider themselves as experts in the own fields. However, the good news is as a professional you are also an expert in your field. Nevertheless, while high-level professionals only see the challenges they are facing in their organization, you can observe the industry trends from a wider bird’s eye view. Therefore, when you meet any C-level prospects, begin your meeting by listing a couple of common challenges that you have seen and then ask if any of those rings true to your prospect. Once you do this, your prospect will appreciate your valuable insight and start trusting you as an expert in your field.

4. Match your prospect’s tonality

In most cases, while making a sales call, what you say is not as much important as to how you express it. Tonality is what constitutes the volume and pace of your speech. Although the meaning of ideal tonality differs from person to person, so the safest bet is to match your tonality with that of your prospect in this arena. Try to gauge whether your prospect speaks loudly and quickly or softly and slowly and match your tonality accordingly so that they can remain comfortable talking to you.

5. Trade enthusiasm for a low-key approach

To make your offer sound irresistible you do not always have to be overly enthusiastic. Rather, being too excited does make most salespeople sound cheesy. Record your next few sales calls and playback them to yourself later. Do you feel that your voice sounds louder than it should have been? If it is so, slow yourself down and focus on forming a genuine connection with your prospects with a low-key approach.

6. Keep an unwavering focus

C-level prospects only care about themselves. However, unfortunately, the same stigma can be placed on most salespeople. Therefore, if you are too hasty about pitching the features and benefits of your products and services that you are offering, you will be marked as someone who is little more then necessarily eager about closing the sale. On the other hand, if you let your prospect talk, you will earn their trust when they recognize that you are a person who cares to understand and is ready to serve them according to their needs.

7. Dig deep into challenges

It is just not enough to find out what your prospect’s problems are, superficially. Instead, if you dig deeper to find out your prospect’s deepest frustrations you can establish yourself as a trustworthy expert. Doing this will not only create a massive value around the solutions that you present later on to your prospect, but it will also make you stand apart as a knowledgeable salesperson, someone who is different from the crowd.

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Are you still struggling to earn the respect of your C-level prospects? Let us know in ConvergeHub how you will use these tips to adjust your sales approaches in the future, in the comment box below.

How To Find The Ideal Prospects In Your Sales Pipeline

Although a healthy sales pipeline helps your team to meet its targets, but are you getting an insane number of customers into your sales pipeline due to the success of your team. Indeed, sales team requires healthy pipeline for its growth, but then again chasing anything that moves will surely cram your pipeline and make it fall sick. It has been often observed that having a large number of prospects those who do not fit your ideal customer profile prevents your team from reaching its optimal performance. Here are some of the most important facts about customers to help you find a healthier and more manageable pipeline.

Although a healthy sales pipeline helps your team to meet its targets, but are you getting an insane number of customers into your sales pipeline due to the success of your team.

Indeed, sales team requires healthy pipeline for its growth, but then again chasing anything that moves will surely cram your pipeline and make it fall sick. It has been often observed that having a large number of prospects those who do not fit your ideal customer profile prevents your team from reaching its optimal performance.

How To Find The Ideal Prospects In Your Sales Pipeline

Here are some of the most important facts about customers to help you find a healthier and more manageable pipeline.

  1. Your customers should be at the core of your sales related processes
  2. Not all customers are equal
  3. Contrary to popular belief, your customers are not always right
  4. There are always many wrong types of customers for your business model
  5. Only having more of the right type of customers makes your business profitable

Here is how these 5 points go together:

Primarily determine your ideal customer and then focus your company’s resources (time and talents) to nurture only those prospects who fit the profile.

This is what happens when you do that:

  • Your team has a greater likelihood to close more deals and so your conversion rates improve
  • Spending less time in closing deals leads to speeding up of sales velocity
  • You have lower customer attrition rate which decreases sales funnel leakage over time

Who are your ideal prospects?

People may want or need your product, but that does not make them your instant customers. There are many teenagers who may feel that they need to buy a Ferrari, but the Italian car making company largely ignores all these prospects in favor of a highly niche market they can do business with.  On the other side, there are also many individuals and organizations those who are unaware of your products and services but may eventually turn out to be your long-term customers.

This is true, that globally successful businesses rarely sell their products and services to everyone. As the small business mentor, Ray Silverstein rightly quoted while warning entrepreneurs:

The bigger your market, the greater the likelihood you’re wasting your time with undesirable prospects.

Hence, to run a successful business you need to find, nourish, and engage the ideal and best type of customers for your business, by which you can channelize your precious talents and time where they can generate the most value for your organization.

So how can you determine your ideal prospects?

For ConvergeHub’s sales and marketing team, the idea customer is “the person with whom you can find the best strategic alliance across the table”. They are the one with whom your product meets the customer’s needs and your team’s sales cycle synchronizes with the customer’s purchasing behaviors.

Hence, to find out your ideal customers it is best to use a CRM for examining the customer’s historical data and review the metrics, which answers several key questions such as:

  • What are the most common attributes of the types of customers who have the highest conversion rates?
  • Which types of customers deliver the deals with highest monetary value?
  • How long it takes an average customer to reach the final decision while purchasing your products and services.
  • How the customers who buy your products and service process purchase decisions?

A fit pipeline is better than a fat one

So to conclude unless you are very confident in your ability to find a prospect that fits your ideal customer profile, perform counterintuitive measures and trim your sales pipeline. Based on your sales cycle, clean your database of less than ideal prospects or maintain three kinds of the pipeline (hot, lukewarm and cold).
Therefore, depending on how you close your prospects you can find who fits your company’s ideal customer profile.

How Right Sales Reporting Helps You To Close More Deals

Performed rightly, sales reports can help managers quickly spot issues, analyze performances, and take necessary action to aid businesses to sell and grow faster. Moreover, good sales reports are also capable of providing income related business forecasting, budgeting plans and resourcing oriented business decisions for predictive sales. Hence, in nutshell, the bottom-line is, sales reports are priceless for any organization. Here are 3 types of sales reports that all businesses must have for understanding their growth.

Let us face the reality. In sales, there are few easy closes. According to studies on sales and marketing, only 2 percent of the first meetings with the prospects culminate in an on-the-spot sale, while the rest 98 percent of leads needs to be followed-up, advised, entertained, and therefore nurtured through the sales processes. This is why you need sales reporting.
Even when your customer count is in the single digits, you still need to keep track of your customer’s activities over weekly meetings and remember their details by putting them in a spreadsheet. However, as it happens with most businesses, as your sales team and customer pipeline grows, it is natural that you tend to lose your overview of this crucial process, especially when you as a small business owner have responsibilities to shoulder beyond sales.

This is exactly why businesses need a sales reporting system.

Performed rightly, sales reports can help managers quickly spot issues, analyze performances, and take necessary action to aid businesses to sell and grow faster. Moreover, good sales reports are also capable of providing income related business forecasting, budgeting plans and resourcing oriented business decisions for predictive sales.

Hence, in nutshell, the bottom-line is, sales reports are priceless for any organization.

Here are 3 types of sales reports that all businesses must have for understanding their growth.

Real-time sales report can be documented in several types, but these 3 reporting formats are easy to create and so can be recommended as an utmost necessity for your sales strategy:

1. Daily Sales Report

Daily sales reports are not to measure outcomes; rather it is a measurement of the number of activities that have been performed with your leads and prospects within the last 24 hours.

It helps you to evaluate how many emails or calls your sales team is sending every day so that you can monitor your sales rep’s individual performance and identify their inefficiencies.

Therefore, daily sales report is a key sales performance indicator to ensure that your team remains successful while performing their day in and day out activities.

2. Weekly Sales Reports

Beyond the granularity of the daily sales reports, weekly sales reports help in revealing any immediate trends that you need to address with your sales process.

Apart from this, weekly sales reporting also provides a good enough reason for a sales team meeting to help you address sales related pitfalls before businesses are lost.

Having a well-formulated weekly report also allows you to have a direct and data-oriented conversation with your sales team.

3. Monthly Sales Report

Monthly sales reports are meant for understanding your sales performance curve and highlighting on any seasonal trends that can affect your business. It helps you to understand the state of your sales funnel, your conversion rate, and your overall team performance and so are not related to any immediate and preventive actions that you may need to take for your business growth.

How can you put together a sales report?

The ideal sales reports make use of metrics to let you become aware of how deals are progressing. Here are some of the most critical things that you would most certainly want to measure in your report:

Tools that you need to build a sales report

Although sales reports can be generated from spreadsheets, as your company grows spreadsheets gets complicated. Hence, creating timely sales reports are infinitely easier with purpose-built tools like CRM.

Customer Relationship Management software not only helps in combining detailed reporting with its user-friendly interface but it also aids in monitoring your sales process and your team.

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Hence, sales reporting when used wisely not only help in tweaking your sales process to perfection, but it also guides your business forward by helping you to close more deals.