Sales strategy #1: Get your sales and marketing people to work as a team

The #1 action plan for a sales team to break into newer audiences and get a stream of quality leads is to work in tandem with the marketing team. When your sales and marketing teams align their sales goals and are properly led, they will result in better leads and sales. At MAVEN, we suggest to all our clients that they get their sales and marketing teams to collaborate on these three key areas:

#1: Social Media – While social media might look like a part of the marketing process, it can be a very effective tool for sales teams to find and engage with fresh prospects.

In fact, social selling is already common practice with sales teams and benefits from the rise of social media. About 84% of senior executives who make the buying decisions use social media to support their choices, and 75% of them are significantly influenced by social media.

So you can either get your social media team to work with your sales team to identify the ideal prospects and build engagement, or you can recruit a social seller whose key responsibility could be solely to drive sales using social media.

#2: SEO – Using SEO tactics that target your ideal buyers — more specifically the decision-makers of your target companies — is a great method to generate consistent SEO leads to fill your sales pipeline.

For example, the social media software SocialPilot ranks for the keyword “buffer alternative”. It provides a comprehensive comparison on its landing page that should convince people searching for an alternative solution to Buffer.

Besides natural language and creative abilities, some SEO technicalities are almost mandatory for success. Writing SEO-friendly content can be difficult and time-consuming.

Sure, this needs collaboration between your sales and marketing (or SEO team), but it has big payoffs in the form of a consistent stream of high-quality organic leads.

SEO also makes your website more visible online, which gets more of your target audiences to discover you for your most profitable keywords.

#3: Content Marketing – Did you know that about 95% of buyers choose a solution provider that can give some content to navigate through each stage of the buying process?

And according to research, 82% of buyers read at least five or more content pieces from a vendor before making a purchase decision.

So if your sales team doesn’t have the right content to assist your leads in making the purchase or help them reach the more advanced sales funnel stages, the prospective customer will leave.

It’s important, therefore, to get your content and salespeople to work together to create content that doesn’t just generate leads but will also help sell more.

For example, Zapier created a successful post around productivity apps. The benefits are clear: Now, it attracts a lot of productivity lovers on an ongoing basis:

If you’ve got the budget, you might also try generating leads via PPC – although it tends to work better for local or online B2C service-based businesses than software B2B businesses.

While it’s true that helping a company break into fresh audiences falls more into the portfolio of a marketing team, it’s clear that a sales team must also get involved.

A simple way to boost the sales-marketing team collaboration is to create a few Slack channels. With these channels, you can connect the marketing and sales resources, and both can align their goals.

Sales strategy #2: Generate your own leads

Although it’s agreed that the responsibility of generating leads falls under the marketing team’s portfolio, you must also encourage your salespeople to generate their own leads. It never hurts to have a pool of personally-vetted contacts to sell to.

There are many ways to go about this, and by maintaining a great LinkedIn profile, a salesperson can connect with many quality leads. They can also simply reach out to their contacts from time to time with valuable information. For example, you could just use the latest content produced by your marketing team (e.g., eBooks or blog articles) to share it with suitable prospects in your network.

Seeking referrals (which we’ll look at independently as well) is another way for a salesperson to generate their own leads, as is staying engaged with existing customers. This way, they’re warmed up for upsell or cross-sell offers.

When practicing this sales strategy, make sure that you don’t put the focus of your salespeople on lead gen. Just encourage it.

Sales strategy #3: Be prepared for objections

Before you invite a client for a presentation or a demo or call them, try to learn about their possible objections. And with a little preparation, you can anticipate your leads’ most common rebuttals and queries.

Once you know what to expect, you can learn ways to overcome possible objections (we’ll learn more about this in the next section).

Sales strategy #4: If you can, gather your prospects’ most desired product features before reaching out

If possible, use the time leading up to the presentation to discover and understand the exact features or services that a lead is looking for when considering a solution.

You can evaluate your prospect’s social media profiles and check their activity behavior data in your business analytics software (if available). If you’re selling software, you could even check their reviews on platforms such as G2 Crowd (by simply searching for “[prospect name] + G2 Crowd” to get a better understanding of their current needs.

Once you have this, you can spend a considerable part of your presentation time focussing on just that.

This hack alone can dramatically increase your chances of closing a deal.

Sales strategy #5: Take feedback from the leads you couldn’t convert

Every deal you cannot close is an opportunity for improvement, but many salespeople don’t follow up with the leads that don’t convert. As a result, they miss the opportunity to identify gaps in their sales processes.

Sure, there are times when it’s just not a good fit – but very often, there are good reasons why leads don’t convert.

Ideally, once a lead turns you down, follow up. Send them a survey to ask which service provider they went with, why, and what about your sales process can be improved.

This way, you’ll learn how to get a successful sales strategy.

They may have opted for a solution provider offering more competitive pricing or weren’t convinced about a certain objection they’d raised.

You can also add surveys to your website and ask questions like, “What is stopping you from contacting our sales team today?” or “What other options are you considering?“. These open-ended questions can unlock a wealth of data for your sales team to work on.

All the insights you gather via such surveys can help you optimize your conversion rate for your future leads.

Sales strategy #6: Know what your competitors offer

The most common objections raised by prospects involve competitors. It may be that they’re already working with one of your competitors or that they’re considering a competing solution. In this case, you need to present a better case for buying your solution over your competitor’s to sway them.

But to handle such objections and close more deals, you must understand your solution’s USP.

To work on this, look at your successful deals and all your deals in general and identify the top competitors that kept resurfacing throughout the discussions.

Once you have them, create a comparison chart that you can keep handy during your presentations or other client interactions. In this way alone, you can win the contract over from your competitor(s).

You can use a template like the following one by Smartsheet to create powerful competitive analyses:

Sales strategy #7: Create a follow-up plan

This might sound like another basic sales strategy, but half of all salespeople don’t follow up with the lead after the first contact.

Imagine the amount of business lost in this way: About 80% of sales need a salesperson to make about 5 follow-ups. Not just that, many salespeople maintain that it takes about 8 follow-ups to reach a prospect.

Following up with a lead after the first contact is generally a good idea because being persistent shows the lead that they’re viewed as a valuable client. Besides, because decision-makers are such busy people, a simple and short follow-up email is a good way to get their attention.

The best part is that any good CRM lets you automate your follow up-emails so you can easily set them up to deliver at set intervals. Do this until the prospect reverts or after you’ve followed up about 8 times.

Here’s an excellent follow-up email sequence you can use. And these are four email follow-up mistakes you certainly don’t want to make.

Prospect.io recommends the following sequence:

Sales strategy #8: Check in on your current customers from time to time

Although a company’s existing customers are responsible for a lot of its business, many companies and entrepreneurs take them for granted. Instead of continuing to build upon and nurture the company-client relationship with current customers, many salespeople chase newer, more difficult sales leads.

To boost sales from existing customers, it’s important to cultivate and earn their loyalty.

A good way to do this for salespeople is to keep checking in with them to find out if they need help with anything. In many companies, this responsibility lies mainly with the customer success team. But because a salesperson is often one of the first contacts a client has with a company, they always feel good to hear “non-sales” stuff from them.

By staying in touch unselfishly, like sharing a good article or sending a simple personalized message, salespeople can keep them warmed up for additional offers or plans.

HubSpot recommends against using “Just checking in…” emails. Instead, you should use alternatives like this one:

Sales strategy #9: Ask for referrals

If one sales strategy is the most obvious and the most overlooked, then it’s seeking referrals.

(Image Source: Really Good Emails & Tictail)

You’d be surprised to know that, according to research, about 91% of customers are open to giving referrals to salespeople, but just 11% of salespeople actively seek referrals.

In addition, 84% of B2B executives start their buying journey based on a referral, meaning that not seeking referrals is a huge sales opportunity gone to waste.

Converting referrals is also much easier because you’re already connected to the decision-maker, and someone they trust has already written a good word for you.

Ask your salespeople to send a referral-seeking follow-up email to all their onboard clients to seek referrals.

Sales strategy #10: Go social

Did you know that 82% of prospects are okay with being reached out to via social networks?

And according to research, about 73% of prospects engage with a vendor on social media.

Not just that, salespeople who use social media consistently outperform the ones who don’t.

The only caveat when it comes to social selling is that your messages need to be sincere and personalized — otherwise, you might risk looking creepy. So, do use social selling but with caution.

Sales strategy #11: Develop a lead-nurturing plan

It’s said that leads who are not ready to buy just yet, represent about 80% of your future sales.

This means that unless you’ve got an action plan to nurture these leads and help them decide to buy, you risk losing a lot of your future business.

Here’s where a lead-nurturing plan helps.

Having one in place helps you sell these leads by warming them up to buying from you.

So how do you run a lead-nurturing program?

All you need is to set up email autoresponders that reach out to these leads from time to time with information they might find valuable.

Here’s an excellent 3-month nurturing track plan you can download and build upon.

(Image Source: Marketo)

Sales strategy #12: Sell with precision

The quality of your prospects or leads determines how successful you’ll be at selling.

A common mistake is to think of every industry as a target market. And so, instead of having segments of leads from the different industries you serve, you end up with a homogeneous database with leads from every industry you cater to.

The problem with this approach is that you can’t do honest and personalized selling at scale.

You need to identify the select few industries you serve and then fine-tune your sales strategy just for that industry.

For instance, if you’re an accounting software provider for the SaaS business industry, your target audiences are actually all the SaaS service providers.

Yet, these services could be in different industries. For example, SaaS service providers offer a particular tech, say, a hiring solution. And then, there are SaaS service providers who offer CRM services. The same sales messaging, call scripts, or cold emails can never work for such diverse leads. So to get sales, you must build a more organized leads database.

You can use a solution like UpLead that lets you search for leads by specific industries and, in this way, create different lists of leads based on the industry before defining your customized sales approaches.

There’s no such thing as mass-selling.

Sales strategy #13: Work on the sales experience

Did you know that your prospects — and most people in general — hate getting sold to?

This means that unless you really offer value and match your sales experience to meet their expectations and preferences, you probably won’t do very well.

While creating a winning sales experience might sound like a vague idea, implementing it is actually quite straightforward. To start with, find out your prospects:

• Preferred communication channels. Do they prefer sales calls or emails?

• Communication preferences. When is the best time to contact them? Use your historical sales data to find when you made your most successful outreach efforts.

• Key challenges, pain points, motivations, and fears. What drives their decisions?

• Information needs. What content do they need to see to decide?

Only when you know your leads so intimately will you be able to deliver sales experiences that add value and don’t come across as “salesy.”

In addition to these tactics, you should encourage healthy competition in your sales resources, give them the best tools (such as a leads platform like UpLead, a CRM, and other productivity tools), and generous incentives.

Now that we’ve seen some of the best-performing sales strategies let’s look at how you can construct an effective sales strategy that allows you to pick and implement the most relevant sales strategy in the most meaningful ways.

Wrapping it up

Understanding your industry and the most common problems of your target buyers is the key to choosing the best sales strategy for your business.

Picking ad hoc sales strategies from a list of roundups doesn’t work. You absolutely have to know your customers’ most pressing problems.

In addition to understanding your customers’ pain points, you must also understand how they approach their solutions. For example, if most of your target buyers trust only referrals, you might want to work more on your referral approach. Likewise, if they’re tech-savvy and are comfortable searching online for the solution, you might want to work on your inbound sales strategy so your product gets more visibility online and consistent, fresh leads fill up your pipeline.

Also, even when you’re sure of picking the right sales strategy, you still need to fine-tune them so they get more leads constantly. If you use your sales data, you’ll always be able to identify opportunities for maximizing them.