You don’t have to be part of the enterprise market to be profitable, especially if your sales cycle isn’t complex. The secret to consistent profitability is streamlined sales pipelines.
That means leveraging the proper enablement and tools for prospecting, outreach, and sales operations driven by customer-centric strategies. These strategies should align with your sales process, ensuring prospects come out of your pipelines as paying customers. Let's get into it.
Top 20 Sales Tips For Improving Revenue
The following tips are based on the fundamental pillars of every sales process: Lead generation and qualification, sales strategies and operations, product positioning and value proposition, and customer relationship and trust building.
Lead Generation and Qualification
Lead generation happens at the top of the sales funnel. To improve sales, your top funnels must attract high-interest leads through inbound marketing.
You could take a proactive approach and use outbound lead generation with lead finder tools. Here are the five tips for making the most of this stage of the sales process.
Define Your Ideal Customer Profile
Product-led growth heavily relies on content marketing to allow leads to make informed purchasing decisions about your product. But before pushing out content, tailor it to your ideal customer. That’s where your ICP (ideal customer profiles) come in.
You can base ICPs on demographics such as company size, roles, job descriptions, company updates, or tech stacks. Once you've clearly defined your ICP, lead generation, segmentation, and qualification are streamlined.
Find, Segment, and Qualify Leads
Inbound leads captured from content marketing or demand-generation campaigns can be highly interested in your products. However, you can’t rely solely on inbound leads to fill your sales pipelines—enter lead finder tools.
Instantly, B2B Finder lets you find leads that fit your ICP, segment them based on a defined demographic, and qualify them all in one app. All leads in the database are pre-verified. You don’t have to spend extra on verification tools.
Using B2B Finder’s advanced filters, you can also identify critical decision-makers within companies that benefit most from your products and services.
Identify Key Decision-Makers or Product Champions
Identifying key decision-makers shortens the sales cycle significantly. However, there’s still value in marketing to end users. They become champions for your product. Sometimes, they’ll promote your products or services internally, even before their company meets with your SDRs.
The key is to balance your sales approach and tailor it to specific stakeholders. End-users benefit most from a product-led approach. CEOs or business owners want to know more about your solution's long-term or big-picture benefits.
This hybrid approach to the sales process starts by creating a solid digital presence through content marketing.
Create a Strong Digital Presence Through Demand Generation
Demand generation carries a lot of the weight in product-led sales strategies. It lets your business attract high-value leads through brand-building and customer-centric content marketing.
When creating content, focus on providing value, not selling the product. Your target audience wants to see that value for themselves. This strategy pairs well with products or services that offer freemium alternatives, free demos, and trials.
Personalize and Tailor Engagement and Nurturing For Lead Segments
Thanks to lead intelligence and automation tools like Instantly, personalization at scale is possible. Gone are the days when your cold emails felt like spam. Instead, prospects are met with high-value emails personalized to the T.
This automated process eliminates the stress of figuring out how long an email should be, what the best sales subject lines are, and how to improve personalization. Try Instantly's new sequence generator and see the difference it can make to your product positioning and value proposition.
Product Positioning and Value Proposition
How you position your value proposition in a product-led market is crucial to generating consistent revenue. Here are five tips for product positioning that help meet prospects' demands and solve their most pressing needs.
Focus on Contextualizing Value
Even businesses with relatively simple products or services have unique needs. That’s why most of your competitors' content says, “If you want to get more in-depth on how to achieve XYZ goals, schedule a meeting with our team today!”
But what if you provide that in-depth knowledge without needing a sales team intervention? You can’t achieve that with surface-level content. Content marketing and prospecting should focus on contextualizing your product’s value based on specific segments.
Doing so lets you provide value that’s broad enough to apply to a wide range of your target audience and specific enough that it can help solve common pain points prevalent in your industry or niche.
Implement Affordable Pricing Strategies
Your product’s pricing has to be realistically affordable based on the market you’re in. Many smaller businesses are likely looking for affordable solutions to help them grow; enterprises are more than willing to spend hundreds of thousands for the right solutions.
To establish a competitive pricing strategy, you must offer flexible pricing options or subscription models, conduct competitor research, and understand the market.
For example, following a competitor’s pricing can lead to you having no differentiation. If the price is too low, your perceived value might go down.
Don’t Solve Too Many Problems
One of the most effective ways to sell is focusing on simplicity. Prospects have an issue; you provide your product as a solution.
Some of the most successful service providers offer products with two value propositions, enough to solve the issues of two key stakeholders: end users and decision-makers
Solving problems for these two stakeholders lets you position your product for the short and long term. Instantly, for example, offers intuitive email automation features that your sales and marketing team can learn in a few minutes.
Instantly also lets you add unlimited email accounts, allowing you to scale sustainably without additional costs. That’s long-term security for such an affordable product.
Don’t be Afraid of Churn
A lot of businesses see churn as the boogeyman of sales. But if you have a sustainable sales process, it’s not something to be deathly afraid of. Remember, sales is a numbers game.
Let’s say your business gets 10 million site visitors each month. Five percent of that traffic starts a free trial, and only one percent completes a sale.
There’s a pattern here that sales managers can use to forecast monthly revenue accurately. When you’re working at scale and continue to fill sales pipelines, your business will more than likely offset the impact of churn.
Reduce Friction to Access SaaS
Product-led growth in any market is about reducing the friction required to access products. Your products should be easy to find across all your channels, and prospects shouldn’t have to dance around paywalls or sales reps to try out your product.
Consider offering free trials, freemium models, or credit-based usage systems. Once customers sign up to use your products, you win them over by nurturing them on best practices for utilizing your tools to their full potential. This helps you build relationships and trust with customers.
Establish Customer Relationships and Trust
Trust is a crucial commodity when it comes to sales. For product-led growth, trust can be built through strategies like social selling. Aim to build relationships and gain your prospect’s trust by considering the following tips:
Understand Your Prospects’ Organizational Structure
If you have a company contact list, engagement can be tailored to meet the criteria for each stakeholder. That’s possible if you fully understand your prospects’ organizational structure.
SDRs can start with an initial discovery call and learn everything about the company and the key decision-makers in each department.
Once you’ve established trust and built a relationship with your prospects, account executives have more difficulty negotiating and closing a sale.
Building Trust, Then Sales
Even when pricing is low, investing in a new product or service can still be considered a considerable risk. Let’s say they want to invest in a new CRM. That means investing resources and time to learn the ins and outs of the new product.
That’s why SDRs and account executives must invest time in getting to know your prospects' needs. The best way to do so is by pivoting into an advisory role. Nurture prospects, provide value, and show them that you have their best interest in mind.
Instead of just another tool, your product can be seen as a partner in your customers’ business growth. Trust is also a two-way street, and you must listen to feedback from your customers to prove you have their interests and needs as a top priority.
Listen to Feedback and Implement
No product comes out perfect on release. It takes time to iterate and develop a product that offers a holistic solution to your prospect’s pain points.
Creating a healthy feedback loop based on your customer's behaviors, requests, and rising needs is essential. Listening to feedback accelerates iteration and experimentation, directly affecting your current user base and future customers.
Earlier, we discussed that you shouldn’t solve too many problems. However, implementing new features based on feedback is different. They’re directly tailored to serve customers. So it’s essential to iterate.
Offer Flexibility When Needed
Flexibility should align with your pricing strategy. Rapidly growing businesses need flexible options to help them address their company's operational and technical needs.
One of the simplest ways to implement flexibility is to offer custom pricing for tailor-made solutions. The offer should be horizontal, matching workflows, business processes, and growing needs.
Customer Support Sells
Studies have consistently shown that companies earn more revenue from existing customers than new ones. It comes as no surprise since customers already trust your brand and see the value in your products.
This is where customer support can help improve revenue. Excellent customer support can offer valuable insight and personalized recommendations for upselling or cross-selling.
Sales Strategies and Operations
The final sales process pillar is sales strategies and operations. This section highlights the execution of strategy and monitoring sales activity.
Decide on a Sales Model
There are two main sales models to consider: Self-serve and high-touch. If your product is low-cost, intuitive, and a perfect fit for small businesses and individuals, implement a low-touch sales model.
Smaller businesses often have shorter sales cycles. Decision-makers here know their needs and are likely to do independent research about the best products for them.
High-touch is more of a fit for medium to enterprise businesses with complex sales processes and specific needs.
Your sales team must engage with prospects and offer tailored solutions as they move down your pipelines. Choose this model if you have a premium product with a steep learning curve.
Choose the Right Sales Methodology
Sales methodology provides your company with a roadmap for its sales process. Everything is standardized here, from lead generation to negotiations.
The five most used sales methodologies include:
- Customer-centric selling: Aims to understand customer needs and curate a personalized experience throughout the customer journey.
- Challenger sales: Transitions SDRs into advisors trained to challenge prospects' preconceived notions about their unique needs.
- Consultative selling: Helps prospects identify needs and offers solutions they can do themselves, but at the same time, positions your product as the most efficient solution.
- Value selling: Focuses value propositions on tangible benefits, like ROI, cost-savings, or time saved handling daily tasks.
- Targeted account selling: Identifies high-priority prospects and establishes relationships with decision-makers.
Leverage the Proper Tools
Every company needs lead generation, prospecting, engagement, and nurturing tools for a holistic sales process. Instantly provides all these tools.
Instantly Dealflow CRM streamlines your sales lead management. B2B Lead Finder lets you access a database of 160 million verified leads. Then, you can seamlessly add these leads to your Instantly campaigns to a personalized and automated sales engagement campaign.
Invest in Sales Enablement
The tools you use are only as effective as those using them. That’s why you need to invest in proper sales enablement. Consider looking into industry-specific training.
Some core skills you need to develop include objection handling, overcoming common industry pitfalls, negotiation skills, persuasion, and closing skills.
Remember, sales development isn’t a one-and-done deal. It must be consistent so your team stays up-to-date with the latest best practices.
Track The Right Sales Metrics
Track metrics that align with your sales goals. Track performance-based metrics to get an overview of sales activity. These include pipeline coverage, win rates, quota attainment, or email marketing metrics.
From a macro perspective, you should also track big-picture metrics, like total revenue, net revenue retention, and the average customer lifetime value.
Key Takeaways
The highest-performing sales processes are systematic but flexible enough to adapt to market changes and new trends. Following the 20 tips listed above ensures that you stay competitive by leveraging a systemized process that aligns with the core fundamentals of sales. To recap, here are 20 sales tips to apply in your next campaigns:
- Prospecting: Define your ideal customer profile. Use lead finder tools to find, segment, and qualify leads. Identify key decision-makers, then personalize engagement.
- Product Positioning: Focus on contextualizing value. Keep pricing affordable. Don’t overcomplicate value propositions. Reduce friction to access your products.
- Build Trust: Understand your prospects’ organizational structure. Focus on developing a relationship before selling. Listen to feedback. Develop customer support.
- Sales Operations: Identify which sales model and methodology fits your business. Track key metrics. Leverage the proper tools to streamline the sales process.
If you’re looking for a tool for prospecting, engagement, and nurturing, look no further than Instantly. Try it today and start scaling!
