0Every salesperson has a unique sales personality that differentiates them from others.
And this uniqueness is your biggest strength if you stay authentic and consistent. That means you are acting in a way that feels natural and genuine and it will naturally make it easier to keep up.
As a salesperson, you likely have created your own style that works for you. But have you ever wondered how you would stack up against some of the most famous salespeople from pop culture?
The infographic shared by Hubspot shows you which fictional salesperson is similar to you. Although it does not have the scientific answers, it could potentially be useful or at least fun. Do you recognize any of these characteristics in yourself?
And while we’re still talking about fun things – which is not at all typical for Monday morning at least for most people, have a look at these hilarious and too accurate sales memes that Hubspot has compiled.
Recognizing the real prospects
In some situations, buyers can seem too enthusiastic when responding to your presentation – and that is not a good thing, that means that they are actually less likely to buy. The phenomenon is called “The Happy Ears” and it occurs when salespeople hear what they want to hear.
The buyer seems positive and eager to get started with the proposal (without raising concerns or objections), and the salesperson is letting emotions cloud their judgment and forecasting the deal as a “sure thing.” Unfortunately, as experienced sales professionals indicate, when prospects respond to your demo in a way that seems too good to be true, it often is. Entrepreneur debunks these overenthusiastic prospects and gives us some insight into why the buyers that are hanging onto our every word are probably not going to buy.
Free trials or freemium pricing plans can be tremendously beneficial and effective, they are an amazing marketing tactic, who doesn’t love free? Now of course, how many free trial users end up as paying customers will depend on your conversion model.
On average, a SaaS is going to see a much lower free-to-paid conversion rate, most likely under 25%, and in all probability, less than 10% for the majority. Sales Hacker shares what you can do to convert free trial users into paying customers.
Starting off with nurturing and providing value to your prospects; it’s important to offer help, engage and build relationships with them. Be there, and be there on time – users who are active for 3 days are 4 times more likely to convert. Also, make sure to be clear about everything from signing up for trial and also the cost if they convert. Personalization has always held its importance and it’s vital in email communication. Creating urgency and setting goals for users can get you far – the fear of loss and the thrill of competition can be used to your advantage. Making the transition from free to paid service as smooth as possible and it will more likely result in a conversion. And last but not least – use triggered emails over timed ones.
People love confident and professional people, that is a fact. But more than that, they seem to always gear towards a person who is warm – someone who is empathetic, humble, kind. By being that way, often times we can receive the same response.
And this is exactly what Get Response has shared with us this cold, autumn week – how can we warm up our cold leads. And not just in any way, but by using marketing automation.
The goal is not to look for new prospects, it is to take existing prospects who are no longer engaged with your brand and turn them into warm leads. Once a prospect becomes a warm lead, it becomes much easier to turn them into an actual customer. Some techniques you can use to do that are as follows: apology campaigns, hyper-personalization campaigns, special promotions, and even disengaging – which might prompt them to action.
Time Management in Sales
We’re always talking about efficiency and time saving, and at the end of the day, time is money, right? And sometimes time slips away without us noticing. For instance, checking our email may seem like a quick, harmless couple of seconds of our time. We feel compelled to check it out and don’t want to miss anything – especially a message from a very important prospect. Jill Konrath talks about how harmful it is to check emails too often.
According to sociologist Judy Wajcman, 70 percent of emails received are checked within six seconds of arrival in our inbox. You may wonder why is that such a big deal? However, by adding the statistic from Jonathan Spira, the author of Overload, that a person’s recovery time from any interruption is 10-20 times the length of the interruption we lose a big chunk of our time just by trying to recover from the interruption.
If you check email every ten minutes, six times per hour, and it takes you only 30 seconds to do a quick read before you get back to work means that 30 seconds of reading equates to 5 minutes of recovery, which means you need 30 minutes of recovery for every hour of your workday.
Sales Relationships
We can now clearly understand the bad effect that it has on us. We should try to schedule our time specifically for reading and answering our emails. And giving 100% of our devotion to our relationships.
For some reason, it seems that the notion of putting more importance on economic value prevails and that we shouldn’t rely too much on our relationships. Anthony Iannarino talks about how relationships create “unfair” advantage in sales and the importance of focusing on relationship selling instead of economic value.
HubSpot is yet again teaching us a valuable lesson about connecting with prospects – stop pitching and start building relationships!
They have sent a personalized outreach email to 27 CMOs they barely knew, and in less than 48 hours, almost half of those booked a meeting with them, and they are willing to share their secrets with the world.
Increasing Sales and Scaling Process
Using a customer journey map could lead to increase in sales. What customer journey map is, is an illustration of the steps a customer takes when engaging with a company.
Although these steps align with the stages of the typical buyer’s journey (awareness, consideration, decision), customer journey maps get much more specific than that.
Customer journey map improves customer experience and internal process, and fieldboom has shared an elaborate blog post on how using customer journey can lead to increased sales.
SalesHacker shares everything you need to know about scaling your sales process. A sales process serves as a bulletproof model that other members of your sales department can follow and obtain successful results in finding new prospects, closing deals, and keeping a good relationship with the client. And if your sales process has a good foundation, it means that the whole selling experience will go smoothly.
Week In Sales No 16 – Wrap Up
And we’d like to wrap this Week in Sales No 16 up with the sales trends for the following year that are sure to change the sales game in 2018.
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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