Smart Sales Team: It’s not as Difficult as You Think

While acquiring new clients can seem like a tough job to do nowadays, there is hope in new technologies. With the help of automated marketing and sales solutions, you can improve your team’s results.

Managing a sales team is challenging for many reasons. Even if you have passionate professionals on board, they can be overloaded with information. Moreover, people experience so-called marketing clutter, which means that they receive too many commercial messages and, therefore, become resistant to ads.

Find out how to boost your Sales Team productivity!

SMART goals for a Smart Sales Team

First of all, you need to set up goals and KPI’s. You can follow a great method that will help you establish manageable goals for your team. Set up goals that are: 

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Timely

The better you know what you want to achieve, the more accurate the strategy you can design for your sales reps to proceed.

Cold calling redefined

Conventional cold calling is a well-known sales technique used for decades all over the world. It is a form of outbound marketing, which means that the company initiates contact with a lead. 

Usually, consumers are reluctant to pick up the phone when it rings from a call center. An intrusive call is nothing pleasant for people, especially if they receive a lot of them. 

Some marketers and salespeople say that sales over the phone do not happen in reality anymore, but the numbers prove them wrong!

• 92% of all customer interactions happen over the phone.
• 82% of buyers accept meetings when salespeople reach out to them.

BUT: only 1% of cold calls ultimately convert into appointments.

Smart calling to save the day

The trick here is that nowadays, you should replace cold calling with smart calling. Instead of contacting everyone who randomly made it into your spreadsheet, instead, call prospects that are potentially interested in your products or services. Cold calling in this form is not a separate activity but a part of the whole strategy. 

That is why you need a new approach to cold calling. By providing your sales team with essential information you increase the possibility of closing a deal. With the use of powerful tools, you can gather data about your prospects and reach out to the right people at the right time. Therefore, neither the reps nor potential customers will be frustrated and confused about making or receiving such calls.

Do not let your leads freeze

It’s most likely your reps will not close a deal at the first attempt, but nothing is wrong with their selling skills just because of that. Actually, 80% of sales require five follow-up phone calls after the meeting to be finalised.

Your sales strategy should be designed based on stages of the sales funnel. Create a customer journey through stages in which a given person goes from being unaware of the brand to becoming a lead, a prospect, a customer and ultimately a fan. Ideally, at the end of the process, you will have an evangelist who will recommend your products or services. 

Warming up leads requires going step by step through the aforementioned stages. Do not rush this process, otherwise you can freeze a lead and lose a chance at selling. 

Also take care of people who can come back and be interested in your offer again. Acquiring new customers is 6 to 7 times more expensive than retaining current ones.

Automate the selling process

Smart Sales Teams would not exist if it were not for automation solutions. Digitisation allows for gathering many types of data to facilitate many tasks. One of them is acquiring customers.

The golden mean

Personalisation plays a crucial role in any business relationship. The more personalised your call is, the more chances you have to close a deal. It might seem time-consuming to have a more individual approach, but it does not have to be that way. Thanks to Big Data, your reps can have access to essential information about a given prospect at their fingertips in order to personalise their calls. 

As we have entered the Digital Transformation Era you should benefit from automation in order to improve personalisation and increase sales. You might think that using automation seems like a solution that drives the individual experience away, but then you couldn’t be more wrong. Automation actually enables personalisation by providing all of the necessary information to salespeople.

Save precious time

The average salesperson spends 35% of their time selling (face-to-face or on the phone). The rest goes on research, generating leads, meetings, post-sales tasks and other activities (like training or transportation). Time management should not be a part of reps responsibility. Instead of making your salespeople use time-tracking tools to control their work, implement software which will strategically help your sales team. 

As you can see it is essential to focus on the right tasks and find a way to eliminate ones that can be automated. It takes an average of 8 cold call attempts to reach a prospect. Therefore, it can be extremely helpful to have sales dialing software that suggests who to call and when.

Join forces

Do not reach out to everyone. Instead of spending time (and money) on calling more people, focus on identifying prospects and gather helpful data. What for? Let the stats speak for themselves:

• 42% of sales reps feel they do not have enough information before making a call. 
• 70% of exec-level buyers say that salespeople are not prepared for the questions they ask.

When using many sales tools, it will certainly be more resourceful to integrate them with each other. That way you can unveil their full potential. For example, once you integrate your call centre software with a CRM (customer-relationship management) system your reps will get all the handy data that can help with better personalization while calling. 

Additionally, cooperate with the marketing team so that they can spend an accurate amount of money on the right target group and, thus, deliver more valuable leads. 

Thanks to social selling, cold e-mails and tracking behavior on your website, you can enter into a pre-existing buying process. What if a given person is already a lead? What if someone visited your site and has already seen your offer? Do not waste such opportunities!

Take a closer look at performance

Very often, even if a company reaches a given person who engaged with the brand, it does not end well. 85% of prospects and customers are dissatisfied with their on-the-phone experience. By analyzing reports and calls you can evaluate every rep and find out why some conversations close the deal and others do not. Identify sales techniques that work best for your target group and implement them in your next campaigns.

Smart Sales Team with CloudTalk

CloudTalk is a powerful call center software that can boost your sales team performance starting from now. The idea behind it is to automate all the possible processes so that reps do not have to take care of them anymore. Such tasks include, for example, manual dialing or post-sales tasks.

CloudTalk has many useful features:

• Your team can access this tool across different devices and be sure it is going to be updated with recent information. 
• Recording calls allows for listening to them anytime and anywhere. 
• Advance voice analytics enables understanding of salespeople’s effectiveness. 
• You can keep an eye on your reps and live coach them.
• Click to call option which enables dialling directly by clicking from internet browser, CRM or Helpdesk tool. 
• Understanding customers by identifying key metrics.

The most significant advantage when it comes to the usage of call center tools such as CloudTalk is an increase of productivity and performance. Integration with CRM systems like Pipedrive (https://www.cloudtalk.io/pipedrive-call-center-integration) and Salesforce (https://www.cloudtalk.io/salesforce) can work wonders for your sales team. The process of integration is seamless and does not require programming. Once you are ready and set to go all the information will update in real-time.

Thanks to such solutions you can make smart data-driven decisions and increase your company’s revenue.

Conclusions

A genuine recipe for success is to combine both aspects: technological solutions and human interaction skills. With talented reps supported by smart software (ideally integrated with CRM system), you can skyrocket your results. To maximize your sales team’s effectiveness, focus on process improvement. Use advanced online tools and optimize them. With access to data and as much information about prospects as possible, your sales reps can spend more time on actual calls and, therefore, closing deals. Do not waste your time anymore – contact us and start generating more revenue for your company.

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