“How can I sell more this year?” A question that most sales reps ask themselves at the beginning of every year. According to the Salesforce.com’s, ‘State of Sales’ report, 57% of sales reps expect to miss their quota this year. It is becoming more important than ever to optimize the sales process and stay on top of deals. In this post, we go over 5 New Year’s resolutions that any sales rep can implement to stay ahead of the game and close more deals.
Improve time management
I know, I know. This seems really obvious but, in truth, there are few that make a concerted effort to manage their time as efficiently as possible. Any time you’re spending not closing deals, is time you’re also not earning your commission. One of the best ways to improve time management is to take a few minutes at the start of every day to plan out your strategy for the day.
Create a methodology for how you want to close your deals. Use a data-driven approach to prioritize the leads you think have the highest likelihood of closing a deal with. According to ‘State of Sales’, only 33% of salespeople actually prioritize leads based on their likelihood to buy. Lead prioritization is instead often based on factors like intuition or geography. By prioritizing the deals that are more likely to close, the chances of hitting your quota increase drastically as you now have more time to focus on the harder to close deals.
Emphasize personalization
Buyer standards for what they expect out of sales reps are higher than ever. It’s not enough to just offer lower prices or a good product. Customers are starting to expect a new level of personalization with products they are getting pitched.
As such, qualifying your lead is more important than ever. Make sure that you are actually listening to what the customer is saying. Nothing is more counter-productive than a sales rep that is just ranting about their product without allowing the customer to talk about what they need from you. You can use the information the customer gives you to tailor your sales pitch as a blend of the value your product adds to them along with some personalization. This will lead to a higher success rate on deals closed.
Focus on the customer journey
Elevating the customer experience throughout the entire customer journey is one of the most effective ways to close more deals. In fact, ‘State of Sales’ claims that customer satisfaction is the number one measure of sales success. For this reason, the sales process shouldn’t be complete after closing a deal. The sales rep should also be working with the customer after the deal gets closed to make sure the customer is getting the value they need.
Understand how you are contributing value to your customer
We mentioned in a previous blog post, that a sales rep drastically increases their chances of closing more deals when they have a great understanding of their product. This is due to the fact that the rep needs to be able to display to the customer how they are contributing value. The customer needs to be able to understand exactly how they are going to benefit from your product. The needs of every customer are going to be different so the same exact same pitch is not going to work on everyone. Once you understand the needs of the customer, molding the pitch to fit the customer’s needs allows for a higher success rate.
Utilize new technology
With the advent of new technologies in the sales field, reps have the opportunity to be more productive than ever. A lot of tasks that previously took up a lot of time are now able to be automated effectively. It’s often the case that the highest performing sales reps tend to make use of any technological advantage they can get. In fact, ‘State of Sales’ found that high performing sales reps are 1.6x more likely to use compensation management tools than underperforming reps. QuotaPath is a great way to ditch the manual data entry of spreadsheets and improve your overall efficiency.
If you’re not currently using a compensation management tool or you’re not happy with your current solution, QuotaPath is free and easy to use. Sign up for free here.
