Win more deals in 2017 by avoiding these 3 common sales mistakes
Every sales associate works toward a similar goal – winning new business for a company as efficiently as possible. That can be a tremendous challenge when one wrong turn anywhere in the process of selling can mean a lost deal. Although it’s probably impossible to reach a point where you never lose another deal, most sales associates have significant room to improve their sales performance. Today we discuss three woefully common sales mistakes that sales associates can avoid to do just that.
Problem 1: Being unaware of your ideal customer
For a sales associate to win a deal, the first step is to target the right prospect. If you own a shop that sells baby clothes, trying to sell to every person that walks by on the street is going to result in a lot of rejections and wasted time. Moreover, when you try pushing your products on people that don’t need them, they can get annoyed and tend to exclude you from being a contender in the case they need a product like yours in the future. So, before you pick up your phone to make a sales call or hit send on a promotional email, it’s crucial for you to evaluate if the prospect has all the necessary qualities of your ideal customer.
Creating an ideal customer profile focuses your sales and marketing efforts on prospects who are more likely to buy from you. You use it to build sales and marketing strategies and content that often results in success.
One way to create an accurate ideal customer profile is by studying your current customers. You can scour customer data stored in Vtiger like their role, industry, and the size of their team. Things like meeting notes can tell you about challenges they face and goals they want to reach, their budget for a solution, and other information. Patterns in this data, like a few industries being overrepresented, can tell you who to look for next. The more such patterns you find across a range of characteristics, the stronger your ideal customer profile becomes.
A good practice is to create 6 to 10 different ideal customer profiles and focus your sales and marketing strategies around targeting specific profiles. This lets you both test and improve your profile selection by exploring how each group respond to your messaging. Additionally, it prevents you from targeting too broadly and spending time on prospects that aren’t interested in what you have to offer.
Quick Tip : Send a questionnaire or have a quick chat with your existing customers to learn what made them choose you over your competitors. You could ask questions to find out how they learned about your business, why did they first buy from you and continue to buy from you, what features/services that you provide makes you a better fit for them than your competitors, were there any hesitations before making the purchase, and more.
Problem 2: Not using CRM data during the decision-making process
It is said that data, when used effectively in improving the outcomes of decisions, is equivalent to value. Sales associates feed your database of customer information every day, and while they use that information to help them sell on an individual level, both they and managers often fail to fully leverage that data to alter their overall strategies, leaving a ton of value on the table
Vtiger’s sales insight, dashboard, reports, sales forecast, lists, and filters are all designed to help sales associates and managers leverage their CRM data to predict trends and patterns to make better business decisions. For instance, when you know the total value of opportunities won in a quarter, you can understand to what extent the drivers will hold in the future, and set realistic revenue goals for your sales team for the rest of the year. Or, when you gain insight into how your product is selling in a particular region vis a vis competitors, you can establish more economically favorable pricing and plan inventory levels.
Quick tip: Don’t trust your CRM data because it’s full of old or unusable data? Vtiger can help clean and keep your data up to date
Problem 3: Not collaborating with marketing teams
Oftentimes, marketing and sales teams operate in silos that work to achieve independent goals. While marketing teams focus on creating a strong brand image, and generating and nurturing qualified leads, sales teams focus can range from having as many meetings as possible, to closing as many large deals as possible. Unless marketing is trying to bring sales the leads that they’re comfortable selling to, however, then the entire organization, and revenue, suffers. According to a study by Aberdeen there’s a 24% difference in revenue between when sales and marketings’ goals are aligned, and when they are not.
Building a cohesive team from two independent ones calls for both passive and active collaboration. Passive collaboration happens when teams can see into the work that each other do. Because Vtiger records aggregate all engagements had with customers – that’s easy. Vtiger makes active collaboration easier to, too, with tools like on-record @mention messages, real time notifications, and chat. This ensures that everyone in the team is on the same page and working together toward the same goals. For instance, the sales team can provide suggestions to the marketing team on what content is of interest to, and converting leads – helping the marketing team create better-targeted content and emails. And the marketing team can provide resources like ebooks and customer case studies to the sales teams to share them with the leads and build trust. Vtiger’s Internal chat feature additionally lets your team create groups to share ideas and exchange information in real time. And because all the conversations and shared documents are always available to all Vtiger users, your sales and marketing teams don’t have to waste time searching for information in siloed systems.
With Vtiger your sales teams are empowered to sell faster and confidently. Signup for a free trial today and explore powerful sales and automation features in Vtiger. If you have any queries, feel free to drop in a comment or email us at support@vtiger.com
