Everyone is looking for the magic beans to increase and improve sales, understanding the history, sales cycle, and five easy steps will help you get there.
Sales is a high stakes career, and one that is becoming harder and harder to get exceptional talent. In order to adequately make progress in any endeavor, and address how you can improve sales, it is essential to look back to understand history.
History of Sales
The infographic gives the perfect summary of sales history. From here a quick review on the sales cycle and then five ways to how to improve sales.
The Sales Cycle
Every book, course, blog and about how to improve sales will provide you with the same 7 steps in the sales cycle:
- Prospect for Leads
- Set an Appointment
- Qualify the Prospect
- Make Your Presentation
- Address the Prospect’s Objections
- Close the Sale
- Ask for Referrals
Five Step Outline on How to Improve Sales
- Step 1: Differentiate Yourself in the Prospecting
- Step 2: Make it Easy to Set Appointments
- Step 3: Make Your Presentation
- Step 4: Create a Memorable Follow Up
- Step 5: Make Referrals Easy and Compelling
Differentiate Yourself
There are approximately 14.5 million people in sales in the United States. This means that getting yourself noticed during the prospecting phase is exceptionally important. It seems that almost everyone today has the same approach or process — rising to the top in a competitive, fast-paced, and time sensitive role is absolutely essential.
Differentiating yourself means you need to be creative and ahead of the curve.
Personalize your communication and know something about your prospects. Everyone wants to be remembered. Make sure that you are conveying your interest in your prospect. This may be with an understanding of their daily challenges. Know something that makes their needs palpable to you — making a personalized connection will make you stand out.
Make It Easy to Set Appointments
There are numbers of tools available to you that open your calendar to your busy prospects. By acknowledging their compressed schedule and opening yours up to them, you are making it easy for them to follow up with you. Here are a few top tools to make scheduling easy for your contacts.
Make Your Presentation Concise
Always make your presentation concise, compelling, and full of conviction. Face to face is always a first choice for delivery. However, with a litany of constraints today ranging from: scheduling, budgets, and sheer numbers of prospects to reach… you should take advantage of technology allowing you to “be in front” of your prospects for your presentation.
Video is an excellent medium. The quality of a video is now top notch. Pair this with your marketing brochures and a well-crafted PDF document and you will be well on your way to making your presentation memorable, accessible, and sharable.
Make Your Follow Up Memorable
Your presentation is the opening, but it’s your carefully planned follow-up that will keep you in the forefront of your prospect’s mental real estate. You need to create a solid follow-up, one that:
- Highlights and Summarizes Your Prospects Challenges
- Ties Their Needs to Your Product/Service
- Close with Your Key Points
- Outlines Next Steps--Include a Bid or Proposal
Make Referrals Easy
“In sales, a referral is the key to the door of resistance.” Author Bo Bennett
Word-of-mouth referrals stem naturally from an unparalleled customer experience that fosters clients’ identification with your brand. – Shawn P. O’Connor
Enough said, word of mouth and referrals are the key to your continuation on how to improve sales. Once you have successfully closed the first few, it’s all about referrals, testimonials, and customer stories. There are any number of tremendous examples of referrals, made easy. The legendary referral program — Dropbox’s refer-a-friend feature permanently increased signups by 60%, with users sending 2.8 million direct referral invites by April 2010. And everyone’s favorite go to cab company, has a great referral program. Uber’s referral program lets you give your friends the gift of discounted first rides
Ving: Five Easy Steps to Close-Won
Taking into account the five easy ways on how to improve sales, you are well on your way to ending the calendar year ahead of the curve. The challenge for you is to be able to find easy to use and accessible tools to help you implement the five tips.
Use Ving: the sharable digital packets — allowing you to combine video, audio, documents, spreadsheets, and short surveys into one place. With Ving, you will be able to:
- Differentiate Yourself - Personalized Video Introductions
- Set Appointments - Make it Easy with the Survey Feature
- Make Your Presentations Concise - Couple Presentations with Video, Audio, Etc!
- Follow Up - Be Memorable with Your Follow Up
- Referrals - Your Clients Can Share Your Ving Easy!
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