Effective Sales Strategies For Pitching Small Business
TechsPlace | Regardless of whether you’re a new salesperson or a seasoned veteran, there are several tried-and-tested sales strategies that will help you bridge the gap between mediocre/ good and amazing. These strategies listed below, combined with the use of the free CRM tool will greatly benefit you in your aspirations for a great sales career.
Start with the benefits
Before you dive headlong into your product’s features, pricing, and promotions, you will need to impress upon the client that you truly believe that your product will be enormously beneficial to the client’s particular business needs. To do this, you will need first to perform extensive research on the client’s business and identify the unique challenges they face. Based on this, you can customize your sales pitch by emphasizing how your product helps the client in combating their weaknesses.
The CRM tool acts as central storage for all the relevant statistics and details about the client accounts, which can be accessed beforehand to prepare for the sales pitch.
Optimize sales schedules
A great salesperson knows exactly how to prioritize the different sales opportunities on their plate. Lead scoring, which is basically a point system for rating your clients from a scale of 1 to 10 according to the value they present to your company, plays a big part in achieving this goal. The free CRM tool helps to plan and optimize daily schedules to ensure that the salesperson is able to contact key prospects at the right time while also not ignoring the other client accounts.
Learn from others
For a salesperson that’s just starting out, or even for one with a few years of experience on their belt, one of the most important things to do would be to observe other seasoned salespersons’ sales strategies and try to emulate with their own distinct personal style. For instance, if you’re hoping to pitch to a relatively difficult client, it would help observe previous sales records logged by other salespersons in the CRM for that account, so you can be better prepared as to which sales patterns work and which do not.
Identify the right time
You might have developed an amazing sales pitch, but the client is not going to budge if it’s not the right time for them to invest in your product. It’s crucial to ascertain the current state of the business you’re pitching to and anticipate their business needs. The free CRM tool which houses all of the client data will help you get this information. This way, you can pitch to them at the exact moment when their needs line up with what your product is offering them.
Effective use of time
It’s a well-known fact that a salesperson needs to spend as much time as possible on productivity tasks like research, delivery of presentations, and less time on repetitive administrative tasks such as putting together product and pricing details. These type of tasks that don’t require much thought from the salesperson can be easily done by the CRM tool.
Cutting costs
Making an error in sales, and worse, correcting them, cost a lot of money to the business which reflects poorly on a salesperson’s performance. The best way to avoid this would be to get the free CRM tool which will keep track of sales quotes, orders, and price points that will enable a drastic reduction of errors.
Start small
If you’re currently adopting a cold outreach strategy, then it’s useful to start pitching to the small niche businesses that have common shortcomings which you can address with your sales pitch. This marginally reduces the preparation time for the presentations and also awards you the benefit of positive word of mouth between the small businesses, granted the pitch goes well.
This also gives you greater room for testing out different sales strategies on the smaller businesses before you’re ready to pitch to the larger ones.
Make your pitch exciting
You’ve got your foot in the door at the right time, your presentation has all the facts, and you’ve chosen a proven sales strategy based on the client’s disposition; but you still need to plan for some excitement in your pitch. You can try a storytelling approach, or choose to be interactive with the client and couple it with humorous anecdotes. Whichever path you choose, keep in mind that confidence is key.
Ensure the client feels heard
You might have a well-prepared presentation, but take care to not steamroll the client by brushing past their objections. Use the CRM tool to go through the client’s database beforehand to anticipate any objections they might have so you have a few well thought out answers prepared. In case, the client asks you something you’re not prepared for, try to establish a dialogue with them to get a better sense of what they’re asking and provide them with attentive responses.
Always follow up
Once you’ve completed the initial pitch, regardless of whether the client agrees to buy from you or not, always ensure to follow up with them, regarding the purchasing contractor to persuade them to buy the product. If the client has not given you a definitive no, then persistence is the right way to go. The CRM tool can help you keep track of this by storing information on all client interactions so you know exactly when to follow up with the client.
The best way to improve your sales record is through real experience. Trial and error of a combination of the above sales strategies will help you get there.
This article is contributed by guest author on techsplace.com.