Opinions expressed by businesskinda.com contributors are their own.
Selling products and services to customers is the lifeblood of any organization. This is especially critical for small businesses and new entrepreneurs. Without a constant influx of new customers, many businesses risk losing their source of revenue and profit. But has it changed? Yes it has.
The challenge is that the traditional sales model has become largely irrelevant. In the past, a salesperson would engage customers early in the process and help them identify and understand their issues. In today’s digital world, customers have numerous resources at their disposal to solve their challenges and find their own solutions. In many cases, customers have already made up their mind about their preferred solution and even the vendor they want to use before even a salesperson is involved.
To make matters worse, surveys have found that salespeople spend only a small percentage of their time (about 35 percent) on sales activities. Most of these inefficiencies are the result of poorly maintained customer databases and ineffective lead screening by the marketing department.
Entrepreneurs need to take a new approach to improve their sales efforts. The game has changed. The modern sales process starts with new marketing strategies that can help develop leads before your sales team gets involved. Using simple strategies can significantly improve the results of your sales activities.
Contents
1. Focus on nurturing leads
Today’s sales process takes significantly longer than in the past. A study found that most B2B sales last at least four months. This requires companies to spend more time and effort building trust and nurturing relationships. An effective strategy is to proactively deploy targeted content. This will help demonstrate that your company is the expert and lead them to potential solutions. Your ultimate goal is to prepare them for the sales process.
- Informative Content: There are a wide variety of options when it comes to providing information to customers, including email distribution lists, blog posts, how-to videos, and podcasts.
- Multi-channel marketing: Since the sales process is longer, maintaining customer relationships requires more interactions. Most customers need at least 10 touches before deciding to purchase a product or service. Bombing them on a single platform can be overwhelming. Targeting them across multiple channels can improve the quality of these interactions.
- Personalization: Generic cold call scripts and sales letters are no longer effective. Customers want to feel special and not just another number in the sales cycle. Being able to personalize communications and content can improve their experience with your business.
- Involve the sales team early: Marketing has taken the lead in building customer relationships early in the process. But you still want your customers to be engaged by a real person. The sooner you do this, the more influence you have over their decision-making.
Related: 7 strategies to win back customers after Covid
2. Create a lead scoring system
Unfortunately, too many companies focus on demographic criteria to qualify leads for their sales force. This often leads to poor quality leads that take up a significant portion of your sales team’s precious time. If your sales force targets buyers who aren’t quite ready or poorly researched leads who aren’t decision makers, you can incur significant costs.
Instead, companies should develop a scoring system that allows the sales force to focus on buyers with the greatest potential to convert. For example, you can assign points to leads based on their activity, such as opening certain pages on your website, downloading free information, or signing up for email lists.
Related: How do your sales leads rise?
3. Automate the marketing process
Only a small percentage of the customers who view your marketing content or visit your website will eventually convert into real sales. By automating marketing tools and processes, low-quality leads can be naturally filtered out of the process. By leveraging tools such as social media scheduling, sales funnels, and automated email campaigns, you can increase your effectiveness. It also helps you scale your marketing to communicate with thousands of potential customers at the same time.
Related: 5 Marketing Strategies Entrepreneurs Should Start By 2022
4. Align the sales and marketing team
Often bad leads and ineffective sales processes result from the marketing and sales teams working towards different goals. By aligning your sales and marketing efforts, you can create a comprehensive strategy that leverages the strength and expertise of both teams.
The sales team can help the marketing team better define their customer persona to improve the search for quality leads. At the same time, the marketing team can help the sales team better understand their market research to understand which levers work best with particular customers.
In short, marketing is constantly changing and so are you as an businesskinda.com. As Ferris Bueller says, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop every once in a while and look around, you could miss it.”
Janice has been with businesskinda for 5 years, writing copy for client websites, blog posts, EDMs and other mediums to engage readers and encourage action. By collaborating with clients, our SEO manager and the wider businesskinda team, Janice seeks to understand an audience before creating memorable, persuasive copy.