There’s not a single sales organization that doesn’t want to improve sales. Even if you’re consistently hitting quotas and have a healthy monthly revenue, you can always do more with more sales.
If improving sales is your goal, your first inclination might be to find more people who are willing to buy your product. It’s a logical first step, as more customers equals more money. But simply getting more leads isn’t always ideal, as this also means spending more money and even needing more salespeople to handle the volume.
Before you start trying to generate more leads, you first need to figure out if you’re maximising your existing sales process.
This means finding leaks in the funnel and figuring out ways to plug them. It’s seeing how leads are handled and whether you’re doing everything you can to move them through the funnel.
Try these three hacks for maximising your sales process and how they can improve sales organically:
1. Focus on Lead Management
There’s a lot that happens from the time you get a lead until the time you close a deal (or they exit your funnel). If you’re not aware of how leads are ending up in your sales funnel and how they’re being handled, you could be missing out on important opportunities.
Tools like lead qualification, lead scoring, and lead distribution can help you better manage leads to give each one the best chance of making it through your funnel.
Lead qualification looks at a variety of factors, including lead source and activities taken by the lead, to determine whether or not the lead makes it to a sales rep. This allows sales teams to best maximise their own time by talking only to leads that have a good chance of closing.
Lead scoring ranks qualified leads based on their level of readiness to buy. The hotter the lead, the higher the score. This gives sales team a chance to prioritize hot leads before they have a chance to cool and close in on “easy” sales that will add to your revenue.
Lead distribution uses a system that ensures leads go to the appropriate salesperson. For example, you might have three people in your sales organisation, with each one suited to sell a different product. Leads interested in Product A will go to Sales Rep A, and so on. This allows each sales rep to leverage their best talents and expertise to give leads a better sales experience.
Your leads are the end of marketing and the beginning of your sales process. If you’re not focusing on this initial transition (i.e. the way you manage leads as they arrive), the rest of your sales process is ultimately set up to fail.
2. Automate Sales Activities
Sales reps spend less than 36% of their time selling, but why?
Admin tasks and time spent in sales technology like CRM account for most of this downtime. Emailing accounts for a major chunk of the day, along with dead-end activities like Facebook or catching up with co-workers.
But let’s skip that last one for a moment: the fact remains that most salespeople are not spending the majority of their time on revenue-generating activities, and that’s a problem.
Automating sales tasks can help to reduce this gap, giving salespeople more time to focus on what they do best. Things like sending follow up emails, scheduling appointments, and tracking lead activities can eliminate much of the manual process that’s bogging down sales departments.
3. Take Your CRM Mobile
Speaking of gaps in the amount of time spent selling, adding the mobile element can cut down on lag times between sales and leads. When leads make their move, sales team members can respond immediately, regardless of where they are.
At the very least, they can know at a glance where their leads are the funnel, what sales tasks they have assigned, and any recent updates to their lead’s status so they can better utilize their time.
And, as an added benefit for sales leaders, you can use mobile CRM to monitor your field sales team’s activities. Mobile connections give you a streamlined way to communicate with a scattered team, no matter where they are. They can get up-to-the-minute assignments and motivation with no loss of productivity or functionality, giving them more time to sell and less time trying to figure out their next move.
The Fastest Way to Improve Sales with LeadSquared
Are you ready to tighten your sales process? LeadSquared teaches you how to improve sales without sacrifice!
Our suite of lead management and sales tools is designed to help you do more with your time and make every minute impactful. Sales organisations that use our intuitive features are able to fill the gaps in their sales process, streamline activities, and cut out much of the guesswork and manual labor that’s stifling your sales performance.
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LeadSquared free for 15 days and see first-hand how we can help you
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