0A good salesperson is a lot like a superagent. Just think about it – they are resourceful, adaptable, quick-thinking, and masters at utilizing the best tools of their trade. They know how to examine and assess the situation for opportunities and possible hazards, and make moves accordingly.
How about having a team that exudes those attributes? In this week in sales, we’re talking all about the ways in which you can build a sales team which will understand your vision. Of course, we can’t expect to see the results immediately, but devoting your time on training will surely set your team up for success.
The “Invincible” Sales Team
One thing that you need to keep in mind if you’re ready to embark on a journey of building sales dream-team, whether you’re a team of 1 or 100, is that every sales team has its own unique strengths and weaknesses.
The Close.io is going in depth about building a strong sales team, and it’s starting with the importance of assessing your team. Particularly looking for the weaknesses and how you can diminish them. Asking questions like “Do we have a clear sales process in place?”, “How are we taking advantages of the changes on the market”, or “Do I have the right people?” will give you an overview how your team functions, and what are the necessary changes you need to make.
By doing that, you can choose the right format for your sales training – courses, in-person workshops, hiring outside consultant, internal team testing, conferences – the possibilities are endless. There really is a huge range of options, and no single one is right for every company or every team.
Of course, some things are universal, like being an effective listener, identifying the red flags of bad customers, cold emailing, cold calling, dealing with fear in cold sales, and using empathy.
Now that we’re talking about the importance of empathy, HubSpot is sharing 18 empathy statements that’ll help put prospects at ease. This is what will set you apart from the rest of today’s competitive sales landscapes.
Sales VS Marketing
It’s a no-brainer that sales development and marketing are truly intertwined business processes and should work closely together. Marketing wants to create content that sales can use, and sales wants content. Simple as that.
However, more often than not, sales and marketers work separately, causing misalignments in the whole process which should be effective and help secure meetings, pipeline and, eventually – revenue.
The most persistent tension arises from the daily go-to-market strategy, who’s a good target account, how good are the inbound leads, and how good or not the company data is. Sales Hacker shares 3 tips to help you identify root causes of tension between marketing and sales and eliminate them. And they are supported by AI.
For instance, bad data and the uncertainty around it is at the heart of misalignment. It breeds distrust, it makes it hard to set strategy, and it creates delays. To tackle bad data, many teams turn to sales and marketing solutions powered by artificial intelligence.
Having access to a comprehensive database of company profiles takes the burden off your team for tedious tasks like prospecting and company research.
A large portion of all B2B teams still struggle to identify and describe their ideal target, and it is too often that decisions are made because time has run out, and not because there has been an agreement between the teams. By relying on AI, we can eliminate the costly and tedious efforts of data sourcing and synthesis, create new audience models in minutes, and it will give us immediate access to all target accounts.
There will be times where inbound leads from a new industry or demographic unexpectedly showed interest in your product. When this happens, you need to rapidly take advantage of this moment with agility – and as with your main strategy, to remain agile, you need self-service access to clean, trustworthy, in-depth company profiles and almighty AI.
Something that is related to the topic of AI is Sales Automation, and we’d like to share the Reply’s Ultimate sales automation guide, but this time – for millennials. Sales automation is a wonderful thing, it allows people to spend more time on actually selling rather than being consumed by the tasks.
Predictable Revenue also gives us an example of how Catavolt sales development and marketing teams work in unison and are led by a sales manager and account-based sales leader.
Back To Basics
No matter the sphere of our work or the type of our job, staying humble and allowing ourselves to go back and relearn some of the basics of our craft will undoubtedly bring more benefits. This is why we can see this type of content resurface from time to time.
For instance, Wordstream is sharing 5 tips for using the proposals as sales tool which go as following: addressing the key objection, emphasizing urgency, closing as a favor, follow-up, not getting greedy. Your proposal is much more than just a document. If used properly, it can lead to more transactions and more clients.
How about impressing your prospects with a compelling demos? A good sales demo will bring you the deal even if you don’t meet all of your prospect’s requirements. Your product features become less important when the prospect believes they’re buying into a true partnership. This could very well make the difference in deals between you and your competitor.
As we already mentioned, we believe that going back to basics can clear the road and help you stay focused on things that are actually important. We tend to get buried in information, it gets overwhelming, and we lose the sight of what is important. HubSpot shares the 5 most important sales performance metrics that every sales rep and manager should track, and they are as follows: percentage of sales team hitting quota, average deal size, conversion/win rate, revenue, and sales funnel leakage.
And as our last information, we’d like to share an infographic showing 10 ways in which you can ruin an email by MarketingProfs. It’s good to look at colors and shapes after a long day of looking at the lines of text.
Week in Sales No 14 – Wrap up
These are some of the articles we found to be most interesting in sales during this week of sales knowledge sharing.
Did you read or write anything that could help us learn something new?
If so, feel free to contact us and send us interesting links, we’d be happy to share the article with the world
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