We might be steaming through Q1 already, but there is still plenty of time to get thinking about how you’re going to improve your sales this year.
Whether you’re new to sales or a seasoned pro, it’s important to keep refining your skills to ensure you’re performing at your best. In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, sales teams must adapt to new technologies, changing customer expectations, and emerging trends to stay ahead of the competition. With these top 5 tips, the sales experts at Trigg Digital will provide you with practical advice to help you improve your sales techniques, close more deals, and exceed your targets in 2023.
1. Rely On Account-Based Selling
One of the biggest tips for any sales team looking to increase their hit rate is to move away from cold calls and turn to an account-based selling model instead. With account-based selling, sales teams take a more targeted approach, with each salesperson or team dealing with a particular sector or audience. Sales teams target companies (otherwise known as accounts) rather than individual leads. By prioritising your sales efforts and resources towards companies or industries that you know will use your product or service, you can ensure you’re not wasting your time. Tools such as Salesforce Quip can assist with account planning and gaining the visibility you need to focus your team around the right accounts and right activities to reach your business goals.
The first step in account-based selling is identifying your target audience and creating a personalised strategy to sell to each one. CRM platforms like Salesforce can help you to gain more insight into your customers and potential customers. Tools like Marketing Cloud Account Engagement can help you to monitor campaigns and track how users are interacting and engaging with your website – helping you to identify new customers.
Our Advice:
- By interacting with companies that you know will be interested in your product, you can get more insight into their requirements, and what other companies in the sector need. This way, you can create strategies to win new accounts.
- Personalisation is key in account-based selling and can help you appeal to new customers. With Marketing Cloud you can deliver a seamless experience across multiple channels.
2. Get Your Customers Involved
One of the best and most effective ways for brands to attract new customers is through word of mouth. According to Nielsen, the most credible kind of advertising comes from the people we know. 83% of people surveyed said that they completely or somewhat trusted the recommendations of friends and family – far more than they trusted information from newspapers, websites, or emails. One tip for sales teams is to get their customers to help them get their message out there. By offering your existing customers incentives such as discounts or free samples if they get their friends and colleagues to sign up, you can get them to do your marketing for you, and increase their loyalty and customer lifetime value (CLV) at the same time.
Tools like Salesforce Genie help you to appeal to your customers more and make them more willing to recommend your product or service. By gathering data on your customers and displaying it in a unified profile, Salesforce Genie can help you to offer those same customers a more personalised experience. The real-time insights from this platform can also help your sales teams to work out which customers would be the most likely to recommend your business. That way, they can target those customers directly with emails, and not waste their time emailing others (and potentially pushing them away with unwanted emails).
Our advice:
- You can get new customers from your existing ones, by offering them incentives for spreading the word. These incentives could be part of a loyalty program, which we can help you to set up.
- You can also get your customers more engaged by asking them to leave reviews or testimonials, which you can feature on your website. User-generated content like this can help establish trust between you and your customers.
- Asking customers to leave Google or TrustPilot reviews of the business can be useful, too – as well as a way of collecting user feedback, reviews increase your search engine presence improving your online visibility to make it easier for new customers to find you
3. Improve Your Email Marketing
Since it’s so cost-effective, email marketing is one of the most powerful tools that a business could have in its arsenal. It allows for more targeted advertising, for a start. Customers don’t like receiving one-size-fits-all emails – they won’t feel as though they’re being heard. Emails can be personalised to a much greater degree than social media ads – and thanks to tools such as Salesforce Genie, and the detailed customer insights that they provide, emails can be personalised far more than they could just a few years ago.
There are always ways to improve your email marketing, though. Are your emails mobile-friendly? Is the subject line as compelling as it could be? Salesforce can help you do more than just personalise your emails. With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you can automate your email marketing campaigns, and get up-to-the-minute insights into how your campaign is doing at every step of the process. Automated AI capabilities, like those provided by Salesforce Einstein, mean that you can even set up automated processes to pause (and activate) emails to certain customers depending on how or when they engage. By leveraging insights from customer profiles, you can even send out emails about new products or services that customers might not even realise they needed.
Our Advice:
- Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you can optimise your email campaigns and track how they’re doing with real-time insights.
- With the ability to see a unified view of each one of your customers, you can segment your customer base to deliver targeted and highly-personalised emails, at the right time, which is more likely to build trust and increase the lifetime value of your customers.
4. Boost Your Efficiency With Automation Tools
Automation can help you and your sales team to boost their productivity, by removing the need for any repetitive, time-consuming tasks and streamlining their work. Tools like chatbots, for example, can be programmed to interact with customers, answer common questions, collect data – and ultimately, provide the sales team with a new lead. By automating tasks like these, your sales team will have more time to focus on what’s most important – researching and building relationships with customers that lead to greater sales. In a recent report, McKinsey found that businesses using sales automation software had reported highway customer satisfaction rates, a 10-15% increase in efficiency – and a 10% uptick in sales.
Earlier this year, Salesforce announced Einstein GPT. Powered by Salesforce’s AI and OpenAI’s generative AI capabilities, it’s the world’s first generative AI CRM technology. It’s able to deliver AI-created content for sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT teams. By using Einstein GPT, sales teams will be able to save time and create auto-generated personalised content. It can compose emails, schedule meetings, create AI-powered customer insights, and help sales teams to prepare for their next interaction with customers.
Our advice:
- Sales Cloud delivers workflow automation with everything from email alerts and approval processes to manual tasks like filling out orders.
- Einstein gives teams artificial intelligence-powered assistance – Sales Cloud Einstein, for example, automatically sorts your leads by the order of which is most likely to convert, helping sales teams to prioritise and convert leads into opportunities and closed won deals faster.
5. Work Closely With Marketing Teams
One of the best tips for any company is to ensure that their sales and marketing teams are working together – in tandem. Rather than working separately and doing their own thing, they should be sharing ideas and strategies, and working toward the same goal. This way, they can plan campaigns, and target the same audiences across channels.
After all, the goals of sales and marketing teams are ultimately the same – to increase sales and grow the business. By unifying these teams, you can find new leads and drive sales. By using the Salesforce Customer 360 platform, you can unify your sales and marketing teams. Tools like Salesforce Genie unify all customer data, from all sources, gathering it all in one place. Accessing these insights in real-time enables teams to be more efficient, strengthening their relationships with customers and finding new leads at the same time.
Our advice:
- Sales and marketing teams should be in constant communication to avoid any missed revenue opportunities.
- Slack, part of the Customer 360 platform, helps sales and marketing teams to collaborate quickly and efficiently, share information and update each other in real time with automated alerts and notifications.
- Thanks to Einstein GPT, Slack can now also deliver AI-powered customer insights, summarise sales opportunities, and update knowledge articles.
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If you want to find out more about any of the tips and/or tools mentioned in this blog, we can help.
To kick off 2023 with a bang, we’re offering free health checks for the first 5 organisations to reach out to us. As well as making sure you’re able to meet your sales and marketing goals, we’ll identify opportunities to improve your tech stack and look out for any processes that could be improved or even automated, to make your teams more productive and more efficient.
Want to be one of those 5 organisations? Get in touch to find out more, or sign yourselves up…
+44 203 239 8492
hello@triggdigital.com
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