5 Customer-Oriented Tips to Improve Sales Performance

Sales is one of the most responsible and complex aspects of your business development process. Making sure that your sales processes are carried out in the best way is of crucial importance for the growth of your company. 

Here are a few points proving the huge impact of your sales on your business growth: 

• Lead Conversions: If your company has prospects interested in your product or service, it essentially depends on the work of your sales team whether or not the prospects will be turned into actual customers. 

• Business Development: Quality sales performance builds a solid bridge of loyalty and trust between your customers and your business. And if your customers are satisfied with your services, they’ll refer you to other people or just leave positive feedback. It’s no news that such feedback and reviews are a huge influence on your target audience so make sure your sales team works professionally. 

• Customer Retention: Business is not just about selling your product or service, it’s also about building long-term relationships with your customers that are based on mutual trust. Your sales team plays a major role in this process. There are many ways for your sales professionals to contribute to customer retention such as performing sales follow-ups, setting up after-sales calls or meetings and the like. This way you’ll get into closer contact with your customers and will let them express their opinion about your services or products. Simply remember that long-term customer relationships lead to loyal customers, referrals and high brand awareness and reputation!

As you can see, sales performance can highly affect your business growth, your bottom line and the number of your customers. Hence, it’s important to ensure that your sales team is made of qualified specialists who can collaborate well together and have a well-thought and detailed approach to your sales processes. 

To help you foster and improve your sales performance, we have made a list of 5 effective strategies you can freely implement and expect beneficial results in the nearest future:

1. Text Message Marketing

With an open rate of 98% (which means your messages are read or opened within 3 minutes of their delivery), text message marketing can be one of the best sources of lead generation. If you use it correctly, you will be able to highly improve your sales performance. 

Here are a few tips on how to make the most out of text marketing for your sales growth: 

• Let your customers know about your new products or services by sending them text messages.

• Ask and encourage your audience to fill out a review or a survey about your business (timing is important here - e.g., you can send such text messages when your customers have just received a successful order from your company).

• Develop and promote a high-standard loyalty program.

• Add links to your text messages and direct your potential customers to your website. For better results, you can use vanity URLs which will let you give a relevant name to the link and increase the click-through rate. 

• You can also use bulk text messaging for informative purposes. Send your customers interesting and valuable blog posts, appointment reminders, free coupons, promotions, “welcome” and “thank you” messages, also provide them with your operating hours and pricing. Just keep in mind to be relevant and not to flood your clients with too many messages. 

• Personalize your messages and don’t be afraid to be fun - send light and friendly texts to narrow the distance and lessen the official atmosphere. 

SMS marketing is not only effective but also highly affordable which makes it a great addition to your business’ marketing efforts. Besides, improving the techniques you apply to your general mass texting strategy, you’ll be able to achieve a much higher number of sales.

2. Smarter Cold Calls

Cold calling might not be the favourite part of your sales team, but it does have the potential of increasing your sales. Cold calls are, in fact, one of the most effective marketing strategies for building a successful business. 

Cold calling can always be improved and made more effective. Here are a few tips on how to get the best results out of your cold calls: 

• Be more client-oriented, make the call about them and not about your offer. Focus your questions on the customers and not yourself. 

• Write down all the questions you want to ask during your cold calls. Have a clear set plan in advance. 

• After getting a positive response from your clients, start asking them questions about their business. E.g., learn about the main problems that bother your customers in their business at the given time. 

• Be friendly and genuine, try to build a relationship and not to sell right off. 

• Let your customers understand the benefit of buying from you. 

• Timing is also important - choose the right time for calls so as not to bother your customers when they are most busy. Some studies say the best time for cold calls is between 8 to 10 in the morning or 4 to 5 in the evening.

   

3. Great Customer Service Implementation

Customers are the main fuels of your business and what can be more important other than giving them the highest quality service? It’s of crucial importance to have a customer relationship management (CRM) strategy in order to be able to successfully manage your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and prospects.

Here is how you can improve your CRM strategy: 

• Use your CRM system across all your departments - your marketing team will benefit from a good CRM strategy as much as your sales team. 

• Align your CRM system with your social media channels. Social media has an imperative influence on your customers’ purchase decisions. 

• Provide CRM training to all your employees to reach the utmost efficiency. 

Analyze, track customer behaviour and remember that there is always room for improvement. A good CRM strategy and great customer service will surely take your business to the next level.

4. Discounts and coupons

Customers love all kinds of discounts and coupons so don’t miss the chance to improve your sales this way and to boost your reputation. However, the discount policy should be done carefully otherwise you might end up damaging your bottom line. Set clear objectives and think of the different approaches you can implement to reach them. Above all, compute the right metrics in order to be sure that your goals are properly met. 

Well-thought discounts and coupons can help you acquire new customers, increase your sales and customer loyalty, and of course, get you rid of old inventory.

5. Results Analysis

And last but not least, it’s important to carry out a sales performance analysis in order to understand what results you have achieved, what goals are to be met in the next stage and how well your sales performed in general. 

To carry out a successful sales performance results analysis, you should be guided by the following points: 

• Have a look at the input of all stakeholders involved in selling

• Collaborate with them to achieve the strongest analysis plan

• Know where you are as compared to your competitors

And in the end, if your analysis has shown any drawbacks or mistakes, get to improving and solving them so as to have better sales performance. 

It might not be easy to improve sales performance but hard work always pays back. Following our effective tips, you’ll be able to learn how to increase sales and transform more and more leads into actual customers.