Are you looking for new ways to boost your sales and grow your business?
In order to keep growing your sales year after year, you need to constantly revise and improve your strategies, stay on top of the latest trends and experiment with new tactics.
In this blog post, I’m going to share 4 tips and strategies that will help you boost your sales:
- How to leverage sales enablement to boost your sales performance
- How to use personalized marketing to improve your sales
- How to work with influencers to grow your sales
- And how to use data and analytics to boost your sales and sales performance
Leverage sales enablement to boost sales performance
Before you start selling, you need to make sure that your sales team has everything they need to be able to sell successfully:
- Knowledge about your business and the products or services you’re
selling An easy way to communicate and collaborate with the team- The content they need to nurture prospects and convert them into customers
- And the tools they need to facilitate the process
If you don’t give your sales team everything they need to sell, they won’t get the results you’re looking for. However, if they’re properly trained all along the way, they know everything about your business and your products, and they have the tools they need to help them, they can just focus on what they do best: selling.
That’s where sales enablement comes in. If you’re not familiar with the term, it basically means providing your salespeople with the information, the content, and the tools they need to sell more. However, this is easier said than done.
This isn’t a one-off process, for one thing; you need to keep coaching them as business objectives change and new products and features are introduced.
The easiest way to go about it is to use a sales enablement software – this facilitates the process for everyone involved: it’s easier to provide the information and the content needed in one place and your salespeople will be more productive with their time if they can get everything they need to sell from one place.
You can try something like MindTickle, which puts a lot of importance on onboarding, sales training, and analytics. You can pretty much automate the entire coaching and onboarding processes by automatically assigning learning
Another good option is Repsly, a CRM tool with sales enablement features. You can use it to provide your sales people with easy access to any information they need about prospects and customers, as well as to analyse their performance and track your sales KPIs in order to help you optimise your strategy.
Use personalized marketing to increase upsells
Personalized marketing is quickly becoming a necessity. If you’re not familiar with the term, personalized marketing is all about leveraging data and technology to deliver personalized content to your leads, prospects, and customers.
You’re likely to be already be using some form or personalization in your business – such as marketing automation -, but personalized marketing is more than that.
Here are some examples of personalized marketing to help you better understand the concept:
- Changing the content of your website based on the visitor (for example, if they’ve looked at a certain product on your website before, you can show them that product again, as well as other similar products that they might be interested in)
- Sending personalized emails, such as abandoned cart emails, or emails with product recommendations based on past behaviour (think Amazon and their product recommendation emails)
So basically, personalized marketing means:
- Collecting data about your users and website visitors to understand their behaviour, their preferences, and their interests
- Using that data to deliver personalized content, automatically, for example on your website or through email communication
Amazon has used this strategy (very) successfully for years; in fact, it’s helped them generate an estimated 10% to 30% increase in revenue, which is very impressive considering they generate billions in revenue.
How exactly does personalized marketing help you make more sales?
First of all, it helps make sure that your website visitors and your prospects see products that they’re genuinely interested in. They don’t have to look for them, they just need to open up that recommendations email you sent them or visit your website.
But an even bigger benefit to using personalized marketing is that it is the perfect tool for upselling. For example, if someone bought a product from you, you can send them personalized emails with related products that they would benefit from. Likewise, if they visit your website – you’ll now have more information about what types of products they like/need, so you can show them related products. Or, for every product you sell, you can show a list of products that are usually bought together with that product – yes, exactly like Amazon does so successfully.
Work with social influencers
Another marketing tactic that can help you boost your sales is working with social influencers.
You can leverage influencer marketing for all kinds of business objectives, such as improving brand awareness, improving your traffic or your social media engagement, and so on.
And while most of these objectives can have an impact on your sales, however indirectly, you can also leverage social influencers specifically for improving your sales:
- Find relevant social influencers to write reviews of your products on their blog, or to create “product review” social media posts. If the influencer targets the same audience as you and actually has an influence over their audience (meaning, they have engaged followers who trust them), these product reviews will not only serve as social proof for your business, but they will also be a ringing endorsement for your product, making their readers and their followers want to buy it
- Promote your product directly through exclusive offers; for example, you can create a special discount that the influencer offers their followers
- Promote your business/product with a giveaway and get influencers to help promote it. This helps raise brand awareness, generate leads, and helps you make more sales by getting people excited to try your products
Use data and analytics to boost sales and sales performance
With almost any business, marketing, or sales strategy, data can help you improve your results.
That’s because data helps you understand the past so that you can predict (and improve) the future; whether it’s learning from your mistakes or from your wins, it’s all about experimenting, analysing, and improving – it’s the best way to evolve.
So, what kind of data can you use to help you boost your sales and sales performance?
- Start by establishing your KPIs: how exactly are you going to measure your results?
- Monitor your team’s performance: who are the best sales reps and why? Who is underperforming? Try to find out what habits and tactics led to these results and how you can coach all of your salespeople to achieve better results
- Measure your different sales tactics’ success: which sales tactics work best?
Conclusion
Marketing and sales are becoming increasingly intertwined. Now, it’s more important than ever to ensure there’s a close relationship between your marketing and sales departments and more importantly, that there is real collaboration between the two.
It’s also important to leverage new technology – otherwise, you’re going to be left behind while your competitors are trying out new sales strategies and new technology that helps them stand out.
What are your top performing sales strategies?
About the Author: Limor