As a business owner, you’re always looking for ways to increase sales and grow your company. You’ve tried a few different things, but nothing seems to be working as well as you’d like. What’s the next step? One option is to try out some effective sales growth strategies.
These sales growth strategies can help take your business to the next level by increasing sales and bringing in new customers. Here are a few of our favorites:
What is a growth strategy?
A growth plan is an outline that details the actions that a business will take to expand its operations and increase its revenue.
This plan helps a business evaluate its financial position, market position, and industry trends in order to set specific growth goals that the organization can work towards.
A growth strategy requires various departments and team members to work in tandem to further the company’s goals.
5 Sales Growth Strategies Every Business should be using
The following sales strategies will help you increase revenue and grow your business:
1. Businesses should define their ideal customer profile
Unproductive leads are the most time-consuming and inefficient thing your sales team can do. These leads will not purchase anything from your company no matter how well you nurture them.
Your sales rep must have a profile of the type of customer who is most likely to interact with your company. This is the ideal buyer profile.
This is only true for B2B. B2C should immediately develop their buyer persona or outline the people that they want to work with.
Think about the qualities that make your clients a good match for you when creating your ideal buyer profile.
What patterns do your observations reveal? You should consider factors such as location, demographics and industry.
However, this does not mean that you will never have a customer who doesn’t fit these high quality standards.
This simply means that your sales team can spend more time focusing on customers who are most likely.
Three key steps are required to create a strong buyer profile.
- First, you must agree on the purpose of your company and what you want to sell. Do you have a core service or product that you want to highlight?
- Second, create a list of customers who have used this product or service before. What patterns do you see about the types of companies and people with whom you work? What was the sales cycle like?
- Third, make a list of the characteristics that will make this buyer profile a good fit. Each category may have multiple options. You might find that 100-500 employees are your best fit. However, 1000 or more might be your second best fit. They don’t necessarily have to be a bad fit, but it does not mean they aren’t. We just want to prioritize them.
It is not easy to start your sales and marketing strategy with a solid foundation. Although marketing strategies to increase sales are important, they will not bear fruit if there isn’t the right amount of energy and planning.
2. Learn when a prospect is engaging with your business
Another example of a sales strategy is to recognize when a prospect “raises his or her hand”, or simply fills out a form or visits a few pages out of curiosity.
For example, if someone opens one email message or fills out one form, it is not a sign of “high engagement.”
However, if someone fills out multiple forms, clicks through multiple emails, and/or visits important pages on your website (such as pricing and features pages), it is likely that they are a highly engaged marketing qualified leader (MQL).
These parameters will vary for every company.
These MQLs will allow you to make the most of your sales team’s time and not just send every lead (no mater how qualified) to them.
You can make your sales force less productive by sending too many unqualified leads.
Sales agents will have to talk with more people to make a sale. This can also affect morale.
A well qualified lead strategy starts with defining the threshold at which a lead becomes a MQL (marketing qualified lead).
This will also be different for each company.
It could be five visits to your website’s most important pages, requesting a free trial or multiple premium content pieces, or any combination thereof.
3. Use marketing automation to nurture your MQL
Another common challenge in marketing is moving someone from the awareness stage into the consideration stage of the sales funnel.
You can keep customers interested and moving towards becoming satisfied customers by sending them targeted content about specific solutions. This will help you push your customers’ pain points while also sending the lead to you sales team.
It doesn’t have be difficult or time-consuming to improve your marketing strategies. It all starts with a solid foundation.
These business strategies are effective and increase conversion rates. They also help align your sales plan and marketing plan.
4. Drafting and executing the online sales strategy
One of the best places to begin a sales strategy plan is to understand the best way to get the right people in touch with your sales team. This is what web canopy Studio does by creating a lead score.
A lead score is a threshold that determines when a contact in our CRM has become a MQL (or marketing qualified lead). This system will help you identify people who are most engaged with your company than someone who is just starting their buyer’s journey.
First, you need to determine your ideal buyer profile. If you assign a score to all the traits that make up your ideal customer, you can determine when someone is ready to be sent to sale.
Next, I would set up a system to track leads that are being passed from sales to marketing. This will ensure that your sales team is calling the right people (use our free call scripts for help!) Instead of bombarding your MQLs in noxious sales pitches, you can email the right people. We don’t want someone to enter the sales funnel and then be turned off.
A great sales strategy is to send an email to someone who becomes a MQL. You don’t need to send a detailed message. You can even send a short email introduction to ensure that your MQLs connect with actual people and not just the marketing team.
Next, have your sales team connect with them via LinkedIn. Finally, try to arrange a phone conversation. You can space them out however you like. We love to test many models with different clients.
Our current competitive strategy is to immediately email someone followed by a call the following day. This sales process is a template that we have created and you can use it for your product or services.
5. Focusing on the customers
Focusing on the customer is the most important component of a competitive sales strategy. It is important to build a relationship with your client and find out how you can help solve their problem. You and your client will grow together if you are sincere in your interactions.
You can offer small products and services to get potential clients in the door, and you can begin to build trusting customer relationships. This means that your client’s success will hopefully lead you to more business opportunities in the future.
The more personal outreach you can make, the better. LinkedIn is a powerful tool. However, there are smarter ways than just spamming people’s inboxes. Instead, LinkedIn can be used to connect with prospects and gain insight into their interests and personalities. This information can be extremely helpful in a sales call and gives you an advantage over going in blind.
The Ultimate B2B Sales Strategy
The best B2B strategy starts with identifying the type customer that will fit your company’s ideal buyer profile. Ask yourself: “Who are the people we want to work alongside?”
This will be done using the same exercises as Lead Scoring. You want to identify the right target market for your business. This is one of the most important things you can do.
You might know that your clients have an average revenue of 5 to 10 million dollars, employ 10 to 15, and are located in San Francisco, New York, or Miami. These are great identifiers your clients share so you can target new clients with these traits.
If someone meets these demographics, they are likely to be a good fit for your company. You can narrow down your criteria further. Consider “industry”. If you are only interested in the automotive industry, then you will want to target people who fit that criteria. You can do this by lead scoring by adding points on to your existing contacts in the industry.
Give value to those who meet the criteria and then remove points for those who don’t.
Conclusion
If you’re looking for ways to increase sales and grow your business, then check out these effective sales growth strategies. By implementing these techniques, you can take your company to the next level and see significant revenue growth.
Need Help Automating Your Sales Prospecting Process?
LeadFuze gives you all the data you need to find ideal leads, including full contact information.
Go through a variety of filters to zero in on the leads you want to reach. This is crazy specific, but you could find all the people that match the following:
- A company in the Financial Services or Banking industry
- Who have more than 10 employees
- That spend money on Adwords
- Who use Hubspot
- Who currently have job openings for marketing help
- With the role of HR Manager
- That has only been in this role for less than 1 year
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