As the year winds down salespeople are focused on meeting or exceed their year-end quotas. Sales leadership is planning 2015 goals and strategies. Here are some sales strategies you need to consider as you build out your 2015 plan.
A good sales strategy will keep your sales team busy doing what they do best, selling. It reduces the pressure to meet the numbers and should keep your sales engine humming. Turn sales enablement into sales acceleration with these tactics.
Demand Generation and Lead Management – Fill the funnel with minimal effort with these two categories.
Inbound Marketing – focuses on developing quality content that attracts people to your product and company. It provides them with the tools they need to do the research on their own so that they can be an informed buyer. Inbound marketing helps your content become more relevant to the people who have an interest but are not interruptive.
Outbound Marketing – focuses on buying ads, email lists, paying for leads or data, and using an outbound sales as a service company. These methods generate demand from people who may not know they need what you have. Based on some of the results from outbound marketing, you should be able to move some of these people into your inbound marketing engine. Outbound feeds inbound and vice versa.
Social Prospecting – creating or changing the conversation about you and your product. Social can be a powerful tool and contains elements of outbound and inbound. Social prospecting leverages your customer advocates (those who follow you and sing your praises) to spread the good word or positive reviews about your company and product. Social prospecting also leverages your employee advocates to spread your message to their network of trusted fans and followers. Beyond that, social prospecting is about listening to what people are saying, identifying them as a potential buyer, and then engaging them with your outbound marketing content. That content will drive them to your website and move them into your funnel.
Sales Support – removes high-value but non-selling activities. Some would argue that this is low-value however there is tremendous value in this role if used correctly. Sales support services move your sales team from tactical to strategic initiatives. The person functioning in the sales support role works in tandem with the sales rep to nurture leads along the buying process until they are fully ready to buy. This person is also responsible for re-engagement or reviving leads that have gone dark. They keep your lead management tool updated providing you with accurate forecast and probability to close reports.
Systems – streamlines the sales process. There are a lot of administrative functions that a sales rep has been given. If you aren’t using a sales support service they will become bogged down with these tasks keeping them from selling. Task your Sales Operations leader to review your sales processes and streamline them as much as possible. Conduct a review of the technical systems that have been put in place and their design to ensure they are as efficient as possible. The technical systems and documented processes should act as a sales enabler, not a sales prohibitor.
With the right mix of sales strategy elements, you will enable your team to achieve another great year of record-breaking sales.
Last updated on September 14th, 2020 at 06:45 am
