0We find out what happens when you go the extra mile in your attempts to connect with new contacts and how automating the personalization of every email can help you boost sales.
It’s also a team building season, which is why SalesHacker offers best ideas for team building activities. After the obligatory training and skill improvement, everybody needs to have a little fun time. Scavenger hunts, karting or mini golf competitions, escape rooms and pampering nights are always a good idea.
Sales Statistics
Every year brings something new, and every year is uniquely different from the previous one, and from the following as well. By analyzing the strategies and results from our past decisions we can gain knowledge about what works and what we need to implement in our sales strategies.
HubSpot has conveniently compiled a list of 75 sales statistics that are sure to help everyone sell smarter by the end of this year and years to come.
For instance, did you know that there’s a relationship between the number of opportunities in your pipeline each month and quota attainment? HubSpot Research found 72% of companies with less than 50 new opportunities per month didn’t achieve their revenue goals, compared to 15% with 51 to 100 new opportunities and just 4% for companies with 101 to 200 new opportunities.
According to Gong’s analysis of 519,000 discovery calls, there’s a clear relationship between the number of questions a rep asks and their chances of success. In other words, if you want your discovery call to go well, make sure you’re periodically posing questions to the buyer.
Fun facts about sales professionals, those with three to four years of selling experience spend 50% more time on training than those with two years or less and 110% than those with five years or more – probably because rookies aren’t sure if they’re going to stay in sales and veterans don’t believe they need to develop further.
Reply.io shares over 180 marketing and sales email automation stats. According to Ascend2 research, for example, the most difficult email tactics to implement are list data segmentation, meaningful CTA and personalization.
The Extra Mile
Sales success has always required reaching your prospects where they are. Often times at their office via a phone call or at their computer via email. But phone and email don’t even come close to covering all the touchpoints used by the modern buyer.
Whether it’s sending an old-fashioned letter, reaching out over social media, or other unique methods that give your sales process that special something – it needs to stand out.
Maggie Barlow, SalesLoft SDR, discusses some of her experiences in creatively engaging prospects. She talks about three unique steps that have allowed her to stand out from the crowd.
The first tip is to research your prospects. By adding the research step, you can get that personal touch that will finally get you a response.
The second tip is to use good old-fashioned snail mail. Regardless of what it is, direct mail will deliver something tangible to prospects.
And the third tip involves using social media to connect. Adding another type of touch point increases your chances to connect
Similarly, Jeff Bullas talks about how your “thank you” note can improve conversions. Basically your Thank You pages are your playground. You can use them to promote your other downloadable content or webinar, brag with recommendations from your clients or simply ask them to connect with you on social media.
The extra mile, in this case, would be sending a Thank You email to your former or current customers just to show your appreciation for the opportunity that they gave you.
Personalisation And Automation
We always talk about the importance of personalization and human touch, making that additional effort in order to reach the prospects, but there will always exist the administrative chores and tedious manual tasks that suck the life out of us, that still need to be taken care of.
If you were looking into solutions for this problem – bots are your golden ticket.
You may wonder why. And that is because time is your most precious resource. The more time you spend on manual tasks, like researching prospects or creating personal sales reports, the less time you have for selling activities, like prospecting or following up with buyers.
Bots can handle these administrative chores for you. It’s like having an army of personal assistants living inside your favorite chat platforms, ready to help you out at any time.
That is why HubSpot is sharing their list 15 bots that could potentially help your sales game gain the upper hand.
The bots are not needed in the email outreach section, but automation is. SalesHacker explains how to send personalized emails at scale. It is not enough to just put your prospect’s name at the beginning of an email, but tailor each message to each recipient. Start as early in the email as you can – the subject and opening lines personalization will surely spark your contact’s interest. Lucky, all of this can be achieved with automation by leaving words like job title, subordinate’s name and service name open to change.
Week in Sales No 13 – 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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