It used to be that in order to make a sale you could simply cold call a prospect and deliver them a script about the universal merits of your product. But those days are long behind – in the internet age, your prospect likely already knows a good deal about your business in advance, having researched your product online (as well as your competitor’s).
Therefore, in order to engage a prospect effectively you need to be prompt, prepared and perceptive. As a Sales Director, your sales development reps need to be thorough, optimizing the sales engagement process to warm up prospects or leads for closing.
In this article, let’s look at 3 tips a B2B sales team should use to ensure success.
Know Who You’re Selling to.
As mentioned, the prospective customer probably knows your business well. They might have perused your blog, combed your website copy or reacted to your social media presence – in any case, they’ve done their research. It now becomes incumbent on sales to return the gesture. Understanding your prospect’s situation, problems and needs is a key step in turning them into an eventual customer, as it allows you to be relevant to their experience.
Chances are sales reps won’t be able to research a prospect as thoroughly as they would like, prior to the discovery call – that’s fine. As long as they listen to the prospect’s needs, suss out their pain points and ask intelligent questions, they’re on the right track.
Automate the Sales Process.
Relying on list-based CRM systems alone, as a means of guiding the sales process, is problematic. Reps have to manually sniff out the leads they think best fit their time, manually click on them, manually call or email, and then manually enter what has just happened. All that keyboard activity seriously eats into productive time, not to mention the fact that relying on reps to filter through a list of leads is a sub-optimal method of prioritization.
Automate the sales process by using queue-based sales engagement software from a company like VanillaSoft – it reorders and reprioritizes leads into a queue that helps to optimize workflow, ensuring that reps are always working on the best possible leads. It also cuts out that dead time, by auto-dialing (or auto-populating an email) for them. And when the call is done, it auto-schedules the next one. Sales engagement software is an easy way to increase rep productivity – and therefore your ROIs.
Stop Selling Your Product, Start Selling Solutions.
Fundamentally, this is about understanding the relationship from the prospect’s point of view. Stop viewing what you’re selling as a product, and start viewing it as a potential solution to a prospect’s problem. As discussed above, this begins with understanding a prospect’s pain points and listening to their particular problems. Once you’ve done this, you can start restating your product’s value proposition so that it directly addresses those problems. It’s helpful, perhaps, to remember that a prospect only cares about your product insofar as it benefits them.
Conclusion
Obviously, this post is only scratching the surface, and you could fill an encyclopedia with tips on how best to succeed in B2B sales. But following these three tips – fundamental though they may be – will help you improve your sales team’s performance.