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With more than 10 years sales and marketing experience, I am going to share with you 4 of my best sales strategies that I’ve used in the past to sell tech products, health and fitness courses, consulting and marketing services. However, these hacks can be used in any industry to drive sales results.
Let’s dive in.
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Let Go Of The Sale
This can be difficult, especially if you’ve just lost a big client, you’re behind on your sales targets or your business just really needs this sale to happen.
I get it.
But whatever is going on in your life, good or not so good, it’s essential that you detach any emotion to getting the sale.
Entering into any sales interaction with desperation dripping from every pore is not going to help you. Prospects will sense it and will instantly start to back away.
Bruce Lee was famous for his deep-thinking on combat.
One of his key ideas was to forget about who was going to win or lose, he would just let the fight happen, let it evolve and the outcome would take care of itself.
The same is true in sales.
Instead of focusing on getting the sale, focus on the sales process which is providing an accurate diagnosis of the prospect’s problems and desired outcomes and then presenting your solution to help them get the outcome they want.
If you can show them how to get what they want they will give you what you want in return.
This is especially important after presenting your solution and pricing where objections are likely to arise.
If they know that you can help them, they will be open to your reasoning when it comes to countering their objections.
This has helped me win a lot of business.
The moment you come in too hungry, the barriers go up and they will fight you every step. You may as well conclude that meeting, it’s over and the sale is gone.
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Develop A Sales Script
Before you skip this strategy, hear me out.
Most people who are responsible for selling have heard of sales scripting but have thrown it out the window because they think that following a script will make them sound like a robot or feel weird.
Let me ask you something:
When you first learned to drive a car did it feel clunky, awkward and weird?
Of course it did, because you had to consciously think through every step.
But now when you drive how does it feel?
I bet it feels like the car is actually a part of you. If you want to get to any destination you unconsciously make all of the adjustments (reversing, corning, switching lanes, parking etc.) and it just happens naturally.
Sales scripting is exactly the same.
Once you’ve made a few dozen calls it will click into place and it will feel normal and you will find that your sales calls move along smoothly and end with a predictable result.
Think of a sales script as a GPS system or a map that guides you towards the right destination.
This is important because clients will often at times want to pull you in different directions, which is a problem because you can get lost and the sales process loses its effectiveness. A sales script helps you quickly get back to where you left the road and the journey continues as normal.
But the real power in sales scripting is that it allows you to constantly improve it.
We call this script optimisation, making incremental improvements. By taking your script from version 1.0 to version 50.0+ you’ve made 50 optimisations, believe me, you’ve got a killer sales process on your hands.
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Optimisation Data
In every single sales interaction only two things happen:
- You get the sale
- You learn and optimise
We call this “optimisation data” it’s like website conversion rate optimisation (CRO) for selling.
Every sales process can be improved, in order to do that you need to first note down the sales process you’re using, hopefully you’re not winging it otherwise this won’t work for you.
Each part of your sales process can be broken down into stages let’s use this one for example:
- Current Situation
- Identify big problem/s
- Find desired outcome
- Present Solution
- Handle Objections/Questions
- Close
At each stage you can either lose the sale or advance it.
For example, if you’re getting stuck at step 2 it could be that you’re not asking the right probing questions which means that you probably didn’t get a clear understanding of their situation at stage 1. So formulate better questioning and make sure you have a clear understanding of their situation so you can probe in the right places in stage 2.
Each step needs to be scripted out so that you stay on course if you haven’t scripted your opening, questions, objection handling, presentation etc. then you can’t optimise.
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Use Tools To Automate Your Processes
When I was selling I wanted to spend as much time as I could in appointments bringing on new clients while spending the least amount of time doing mindless paperwork.
Tools are now essential for every day sales activities because they help you streamline and automate allowing you to spend the bulk of your time closing deals.
Here are my 3 top areas of automation:
Email Automation
Following up with prospects, sending out proposals is incredibly tedious so finding ways to automate this process is a godsend especially if you’re managing a large portfolio of clients.
These tools essentially manage your emailing tasks, you can send out personalised bulk emails, automatic follow up for those who didn’t respond, you can build templates, schedule emails to go out etc.
These tools are specifically built for sales teams as well.
Recommended Email Software: Yesware and AutoKlose
Reminders
Whenever I set an appointment I always wanted to make sure that my client is ready and to pre-empt any possible cancellations. The best tool for this is SMS we use a local texting company, after I’ve created the appointment I’ll schedule in a text to go to that client 1-2 hours before our meeting or web conference.
Recommended SMS service: 160 SMS
Automating Appointments
If you’re generating leads from your website, then you want to give your prospect multiple ways to set up a meeting, allowing visitors on your site to schedule in their own appointments was a nice little lead generator for me in addition to setting up my own appointments.
Recommended Scheduling Software: Bookify
The Close
There are plenty of little tactics you can do to bump your sales results but by improving how you approach the sale (mindset), developing a proven sales blueprint (sales script), continual improvement of that blueprint (using optimisation data) and reducing the time spent on repetitive tasks (automation) so you can spend more time involved in revenue generating activities will give you quantum leaps in sales performance.
