Creating Priorities in Your Sales Cycle

A salesforce reaches new levels of success by making incremental improvements to their sales strategies in an effort to close more lucrative deals.

But how do you identify the right tools and behaviors to ensure your sales team achieves their goals? Let's dive into how you can prioritize activities throughout the sales cycle to land more of your best-fit deals with less reliance on brute force.

How to Prioritize Sales Activities

The sales team has various responsibilities in the business. Sales leaders can take the first step to prioritizing these tasks by auditing every activity they carry out daily, weekly, and monthly.

Try to find out the activities that directly impact won deals to enable you to focus on them. From there, you can delegate other non-sales activities tasks to other business areas to reduce the pressure on the sales team. For example, keeping your database healthy is an important sales-related task, but your top performing SDRs should be making calls and running meetings -- not spending hours of their day performing data entry.

Work to understand what these activities are, what stage of the sales cycle they have impact on, and who else within your organization has the know-how and capacity to handle them. This requires you to understand the various components of your sales cycle before touching on its activities.

Areas to look at include remuneration and proper sales training. A happy sales team tries to always work smart and intends to stick around for the longest time. It is a significant asset to the company to increase sales and retain the right talent.

The company should never underestimate the activities of the sales team. They offer more than just taking phone calls, recording details, and passing information to other departments to complete sales. They are the ones who advocate for the customers' needs and reassure them on how your company is uniquely positioned to solve for those needs. Therefore, their level of service, response times, efficiency, and trust should be higher than any other employee in the business.

Here are some tried and true steps to help your salesforce be successful:

1.      Start Auditing Your Current List

Before you stock up any more data from other channels, determine the health of your database. If you've been serving your customers well, you have great opportunities for up and cross-sell offerings. If you have a wealth of knowledge to share with early stage prospects, do so tactfully via curated podcasts, webinars, blog posts, industry-relevant articles, or any piece of educational content that demonstrates your understanding of their problem and your ability to help solve them. 

2.      Learn From Your Existing Online Traffic

Your existing online traffic is a measure of how your current marketing strategies (and even sales efforts) are working. First and foremost, is the right traffic finding you online? Once you can confirm this, you need to turn your attention to how your prospects are interacting with your website and social channels. Identify the information they're looking for and make incremental changes to your marketing and sales efforts based on these insights.

3.      Boost Your Customer Experience

Once sales steps into the conversation, creating a stellar experience with your prospect is the key to developing a quality relationship that leads to life-long advocates of your company. It does not matter the service the clients need. Whether it's consulting or a direct purchase, the experience should make them feel like the most important person to your business. Make them feel like VIPs from the very start of their buying journey and you'll have a roster of delighted clients that choose you as their sole provider in the years that follow.

4.      Make Your Selling Processes Seamless

Along the buying journey, the purchase process is the most critical but often overlooked. You want to make it smooth so that nothing interrupts the decisions of the buyer to choose your services. You want to ensure there is no distraction along the way and direct them towards your competitors.

You can do this by putting yourself in your customer's shoes. Identify exactly what they need at each stage of your sales cycle, then provide them with the right information at the right stage in their buying journey. Eliminate any barriers standing in the way of the premier buying experience you would expect for yourself.

If you're reading this post, you're already on the right path. Maybe you want to learn more about how to overcome those barriers inhibiting you from closing more sales, but you're not sure where to even start. If that's the case, check out our free sales barrier analysis worksheet. We'd be happy to review it with you and share some insights on what to try next.