How to Improve Your Sales in 2022
TechsPlace | Here are some tips that will help you to improve your sales in 2022.
How often do you hear from consultants that before you can optimize your sales team, you need to clean up your existing customer base?
Hire a sales enablement manager
It is a profession that has a lot of opportunities, and it pays well. You can read a sales enablement job description to understand the importance of such a specialist in your team. Sales managers are needed even in times of crisis. Now there is an acute shortage of these specialists. The market for goods and services today is overcrowded, and buyers have become much more selective and demanding. Therefore, the role of a sales enablement manager is much more important than many people think.
Analyze your customer base
Take the following 6 steps to increase sales to your existing customer base:
- Do ABCXYZ analysis to segment customers and determine the frequency of purchases;
- For customers who haven’t reordered in a while, offer a product or service for free or at a discount;
- Conduct a customer survey to measure the NPS Index. This will help to collect dissatisfaction, increase loyalty and return lost customers;
- Control the time spent by the managers of the client department: implement the Workday Map, identify unused resources and non-core time spending on the daily work of managers;
- To sell complex B2B solutions: train B2B sales techniques to technical staff, experts, and product managers. Put them to work in tandem with sellers.
- Make it a habit to get referrals from your regular customers. 90% of new customers will make a positive purchase decision after reading a positive review.
Implement content marketing
Content marketing is a strategy to increase sales with valuable information instead of advertising. Give customers information that is of maximum value to them and receive maximum profit in return.
What marketing tools use content marketing:
- SMM (advertising in social networks);
- e-mail distribution;
- corporate youtube channel;
- corporate blog;
- banner advertising;
- paid publications;
- special projects (branded minisite);
- conferences, research, PR.
Useful content has 3 beneficial effects on your customer:
- Valuable content builds trust in your product and your sellers. Give customers content that will be valuable in their daily “business life”. Write articles, posts, and letters, and shoot videos so that the information in them helps the client to strengthen his business. You can always decide what content will deliver the expected result: educate the customer, empower them, lower their costs, improve their business processes, or inspire them to learn more about your product. As a result, you will see an increase in customer engagement in communication with your managers, and this will increase sales.
- Content marketing will give you a lasting return on every platform you post. Your blog, page, or group in the social network, regular e-mail newsletter – all these tools will have a lasting impact on the client. Useful blog pages will be relevant for more than one year, you can use correctly composed letters in the email newsletter more than once, and SMM publications will also work for you for a long time.
- Valuable content helps to increase the flow of clicks to your site from SMM advertising, articles on third-party sites, and email newsletters. The increase in conversions affects organic issuance – you rise in the search results.
Search engines also “see” how long a customer has been on your site. If the content is interesting, the time spent reading and staying on the page increases. Your position in the search results goes up. A “warm” potential customer with a specific query usually does not view more than 2 pages of SERPs. Therefore, it is very important for you to be in the TOP-10 or TOP-20 search results.
Conduct staff appraisals
To qualify, do the training – develop quality materials with which you will first train your employees on your product and the rules of work in your company, and then test this knowledge.
If you do not have these materials, develop them. These documents will form the basis of your Adaptation System. With their help, you will begin to rotate sales enablement managers very quickly: fire those who do not fulfil sales plans and introduce new ones.
Strengthen reporting and metrics
Often the result of sales for the past year does not give an understanding of how exactly to increase sales in the next year. Let’s say that last year you completed the plan by only 60%. Does this mean you need to upgrade your sales plan? Or leave it the same?
Make a SWOT analysis of the external and internal environment. When preparing your SWOT analysis, delve into the metrics of your sales pipeline. Find out what works and what doesn’t.
What are your web traffic sources? Which ones convert best into leads? What are your conversion rates from one stage of the sales process to another: from lead to MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead), to consideration of CP (Sales Qualified Lead) and to close? How many CPs, calls, and meetings lead to a deal?
Once you have a detailed analysis with numbers, you can generate scenarios that will help predictably increase sales in 2022.
For example, you may decide to invest in pay-per-click advertising. Or you can develop measures to prevent churn, which will mean more strict control over follow-up activities and the implementation of an up-sale campaign in order to increase sales in an already attracted client. There is probably an opportunity to increase sales by shortening the sales cycle while maintaining the volume of transactions. Or maybe you will understand that sales should be tightened because there are leaders whose performance is many times higher than average.
Sales performance analysis will allow you to develop from 1 to 3 working strategies to increase sales.
This article is contributed by guest author on techsplace.com.
