Sales Optimization is crucial to every Sales Department looking to increase win rates.

Check out 9 key factors that will bring you and your team closer to acquiring new sales and hitting yearly targets;

1- The Base of Sales Optimization: Your CRM

Having a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool makes the lives of your sales reps much more manageable. Integrating a CRM into your sales process is the first step you need to make for sales optimization. Place all of a deal’s details at your reps’ fingertips, including any activity that’s been done relating to the deal.

Having all this data consolidated & available allows sales reps to continue their work, follow up with prospects easily, and even learn from each other. It gives them a new channel to see how high-performers are closing deals and the opportunity to share information and tips with each other easily.

2- Ideal Customer Profile

Identify your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Whether you are a B2B or a B2C company, you must know who your target market is and what their challenges and needs are, who takes & makes the decision of purchasing, and what they base their decision on. 

Your ICP will help inform you of the questions you must ask yourself before jumping on and trying to sell your product/service.

3- Sales Optimization & Automation

Time is Money, especially in sales.

You will find sales reps wasting time on tasks that could be automated. Sending follow-up or nurturing emails, generating contracts and proposals. They’re time-consuming tasks salespeople can avoid. While they are doing all the previous with all of their prospects, they might lose the interest of a hot lead in an advanced stage of the buyer journey, and in no time, you will find them signing with your competitors.

Automate time-consuming tasks and allow your sales reps to focus on their strengths. Focus them on building long-term relationships with your prospects and booking demos and meetings. In addition, it will help prevent your team from burning out.

Moreover, having all your tools integrated in-house or through a third-party provider is essential to less wasted time.

4- Alignment Between Sales and Marketing

Align your Sales and Marketing. These two teams should always be working together to grow and scale. This is key to proper Sales Optimization.

Sales should know what Marketing is doing and vice versa. Have each department run lead audits on one other. It’ll allow you to identify what isn’t working and uncover the challenges and bottlenecks to be omitted from the processes.

5- Focus on Hot Leads

Allow your sales team to focus on hot leads. But how do you know who these leads are?

These leads are those who submit a form, message your chatbot, book a demo, or reply to one of your emails with interest and are actively looking for a solution like yours.

6- Nurturing Campaigns for Leads in the Sales Pipeline

Use your nurturing campaigns for more than just lead generation. Nurture leads within the sales pipeline as well.

Remind prospects of your services on every channel you use and automate your outreach so you can be more effective with your outreach.

Stay top of mind by reminding prospects about you and your solution. Moreover, offer even more value by providing them with more information through blogs, podcasts, and other pieces of content published by your team.

7- Optimizing Sales With Proper Solution Knowledge

Every employee should and must have proper knowledge of the product/service provided by the company they are part of.

However, Sales reps must have in-depth knowledge about what they are selling and not only working knowledge.

Why?

Sales reps are the company’s first point of contact with prospects; hence, whether the latter moves forward with the deal or not lies on the sales rep. This is, of course, after ensuring that the lead is qualified.

8- Sales Optimization = Sales Coaching

Coaching is crucial for Sales Optimization. Your sales team is not some software that can be upgraded. They must be coached, trained, and pushed to stay up-to-date with the best methods, trends, and research into Sales. Our world is constantly changing, and sales reps must be proactive to stay on track and get ahead.

Coaching can be done in weekly meetings with sales reps to go through chosen, connected calls and see the gaps and the strengths of your team.

It can also be through having specific sales content, courses, or blogs written by thought leaders which can help your team to improve their pitches, emails, or videos.

Nevertheless, we should not forget that there should be constant updates to scripts and playbooks of your department internally so that new team members are quickly on-boarded and flatten the learning curve to reach your team’s knowledge, effectiveness, and efficiency level.

9- Short Sales Lifecycle

It is known that the longer your sales lifecycle takes, the higher the probability it is to lose your potential client.

So, how do you shorten it? Sales optimization.

Keep the time between follow-ups and demos short. Moreover, provide high-value touch points.

Following these two rules organically accelerates your sales lifecycle alongside the above factors.

In addition, you’ll find your prospects more willing to meet.

If you’re looking to implement Sales Optimization and enhance your processes, reach out to Hovi’s SMarketing experts today to get a complete picture of how you can optimize & automate your sales process, level up your team’s skills, and accelerate your growth today.