Improving efficiency in your sales process over time and trying out new tools is essential for increasing your sales. It may even mean the difference between business success and failure. Here are some ways to increase sales efficiency.

Creating a Sales Process

• Consider these points as you establish your sales process:
• What will your methods for prospecting be? Will you use phone calls, texting, email, social media, or a combination of these methods?
• Define each of your niches clearly, including factors such as industry, company size, location, titles and departments of people to contact.
• How many meetings will you need to close a prospect? For example, your first meeting may be short and may just be used to qualify the prospect and find out about their goals. In the next meeting, you can present a solution, and in the final meeting you can go through a customized plan of action for helping the customer.
• How will you evaluate prospects at each stage of the process to make sure they would be a good fit?
• Do you have a process for handing objections?
• Do you have necessary documents ready such as pricing information, case studies, and contracts? You can integrate these documents with your CRM.
• Do you have an easy process for tracking what stage of the sales pipeline each prospect is in? Many CRMs now provide a drag and drop interface for moving prospects through the sales process.
• Do you have processes for onboarding new clients, managing their accounts, and upselling them?
• How will you document each stage of the sales process?

Researching Leads

Before having your first meeting with a prospect, take a look at their website and social media channels to learn about them and look for indicators of how you may be able to help them. For inbound leads, look at the content that got them interested in your company. Maybe you can help them with something related to that content.

Creating Messages for Prospects

Here are some tips for creating phone and email messages for leads:

• For making calls, prepare scripts for cold calling and for leaving voicemail messages.
• For sending email messages, have some templates prepared that you can customize based on your knowledge of the prospect. You can also create message sequences to save time.

Calling Prospects

Calling prospects can be a time-consuming activity, but you can now make it less so by using technology that allows you to queue calls automatically and skip calls that are not answered. Schedule time in your calendar for making calls so that you will be able to use that time effectively without interruptions. Also, you can make calls through your CRM so that the call information will be automatically recorded and organized under each prospect’s CRM details.

Following Up

Make sure that you establish systems in your CRM for following up with prospects who have not responded to you and with those prospects that you are in the process of having conversations with.

A coach can help you to make the most of your sales efforts. Get in touch today!