Sales teams are the front line of your company’s revenue. Whether leads are flooding in from your marketing campaigns or you’re in “prospect mode” making cold calls to potential clients, you need to convert more leads by continuously nurturing and coaching your sales staff. Even seasoned pros need support and can benefit from the newest technology for automating follow-up, situational role-playing and ongoing communications training (best practices for email, voicemail and live calls).
Sales, marketing and customer service are all part of a winning sales unit. There has to be an alignment of goals, policies and processes you use to close a sale and continue to provide the support and service the customer needs and wants. It costs far less to sell to a repeat (and satisfied) customer than to find and convert new prospects.
You want to prepare your sales staff with the proper training and tips to dominate good leads as they come in via your marketing campaigns.
How to Develop Successful Sales Reps
Some of these tips are part of a tried-and-true traditional sales training and others are new uses for technology and software applications. Call tracking, call recording, social engagement, email open-rates and easy to use analytics are all part of today’s sales strategies.
Below are some tips for developing high-converting sales reps:
- Assess Abilities and Areas for Improvement: No one is great at everything. We all have things we do well and others that are less comfortable for us. To figure out how to utilize your team’s strengths when creating your process of how to convert leads, you may consider using personality test such as Meyers-Briggs, DISC or a specific sales aptitude test.
- Assign Seasoned Sales Reps to Mentor Junior Reps: Really productive reps can observe and coach newer reps. Monitoring recorded or live phone calls, suggesting scripts, sharing best practices…. all can accelerate the development of your team. That mentorship can continue for some time, with both parties contributing to each other’s success instead of just being a short-lived orientation activity.
Provide OnGoing Sales Training: Provide opportunities for your reps to come back and train even after they’ve been on the job a while. New skills and course-corrections enhance job satisfaction and improved production as you bring on new products, technologies or face challenges in the economy or in your industry. - Role-Play: Start recording your sales calls with call tracking software and use them for coaching opportunities. Role play different scenarios and test new scripts to be executed based on who the buyer is and what he/she says. Listen to the entire series of calls that leads to a sale or identify what could have been done better for a different outcome.
- Update Communications Training: Today’s communications revolve around email, voicemail and live calls long before there are any face-to-face meetings. Customize your messages and make sure your staff knows what to say, when to say it and how say it. Create a guide for proven communication practices. Communication style impacts your customer experience and affects your lead conversion rate.
- Measure What Leads to Sales: Create a dashboard of your most important metrics and use them to refine your sales process. For example: track your call response times, number of calls it takes to convert, number of social touches, where your best leads originate, design custom reports for your industry, etc.
- Share Best Practices: Sales people may not want to give up their best “tricks of the trade” or take the time to share what works. Create a regularly scheduled time to foster a peer review of ideas that may lead to more sales for everyone.
- Share Your Company Vision: Helping your staff embrace your company’s vision can help them understand the big picture of what solutions you provide and how they benefit your customers.. That opens the door for more creative problem-solving and insights into customer challenges.
Automation and Call Tracking
You can vastly improve your marketing and sales success with data that tells you what’s working and what’s not. You need information to qualify leads that are most likely to convert and warrant the time and effort it takes. When you automate your data collection to create actionable “intel,” your chances of winning the sale skyrocket.
Automated call tracking is one way to gather that data, and is more affordable and easier to install than ever before. You can effectively measure which marketing channels lead to call conversions, giving your sales staff a head’s up about your prospect’s buying behavior. You’ll see where your visitor has been and which sites he/she visited before they ultimately called you for more information. That means your staff is better prepared for the call and has a better chance of overcoming objections and closing the sale.
Sales Email Applications
Using an automated email software, you can quickly send out sales content with a unique link that alerts you when the email is opened. You can then follow up in a timely fashion to answer questions and tailor your next conversation. You will be aware of whether your content has been forwarded to someone else who may be involved in the buying decision.
You’ll also know which areas of your content attracted the most attention, apprising you of what is most relevant to your contact and how to guide the conversation in a meaningful direction. These tools give your sales team the upper hand in today’s virtual interactions and increases your customer engagement.
No matter how your sales team interacts with your prospective customers, converting leads to sales is your bottom line. Streamlining that process for your sales, marketing and customer service unit saves you time and money. Training, ongoing coaching, developing best practices, utilizing automation and call tracking data all lead to increased efficiency and dominating conversions.
Learn more about to setting up your automated call data collection and give your sales staff the information they need to effectively convert leads.
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