 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
When I discovered these two facts, I was shocked. 44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up. 80% of sales require five follow-ups. In other words, 44% of salespeople aren't putting in 1/5 of the effort needed to close the deal. Too often we give up after one follow-up email, despite data proving that multiple follow-ups are required. Yet persistence is only one lesson that can be learned from the following 107 sales statistics. There are countless others to be revealed. Check out this SlideShare to sell smarter, stop wasting time on useless tasks, and start closing more deals in less time:...
According to a 2016 study from HubSpot Research, “Buyers Speak Out: How Sales Needs to Evolve,” prospects want to work with salespeople who can offer advice and expertise beyond just a description of product features. Sixty-one percent of buyers say reps can provide a positive experience by providing relevant information. Roughly half of buyers appreciate when salespeople recommend multiple strategies beyond their business offering, and 45% want salespeople to be invested in their goals.In other words, prospects want to work with reps who understand their unique priorities, challenges, and industry landscape. You can learn some of this information through traditional methods, such as asking your prospects directly and reading their company websites and blogs. But these sources won’t lead to all the answers you need. In addition, you can earn trust by beginning the sales conversation with an intimate understanding of the buyer’s business -- rather than relying on your meeting to get the facts. These five unexpected places you can research prospects will clue you in....
How often do you get a call from a prospect you’ve never spoken to before who says, “I love your service and it’s the perfect fit for my business. Where do I sign?”
Probably not that often.
That’s where persuasion comes in. Some deals are easier to close than others, but all sales conversations will involve some degree of persuasion -- even if both salesperson and buyer know your offering is the best choice.
It’s not easy -- if persuasion were simple, far more than one-third of all salespeople would make quota. But adopting the techniques below can make you more convincing, and influence prospects to buy....
I’ve been selling for 30 years, and it’s been a blast. I’ve seen some incredible changes, and I can say without a doubt that right now is the best time to invest in a sales career. Sales is fun, critically important to scaling businesses, financially lucrative, and intellectually stimulating. But being a salesperson in 2016 is very different than being a salesperson in 1986. Buyers have changed, and so top salespeople have to change with them. Things that worked 30 years ago don’t fly anymore, but it’s for the best. Although it’s arguably more difficult to sell effectively in 2016, it’s easier for top performers to differentiate themselves. And the first thing you need to do is drop the eight tactics below. These are all things that worked when I started out in sales, but smart salespeople should never try these tactics today....
By now, every business knows it has to be smart in its online strategy. Gone are the vanity metrics of yesteryear, with numbers of downloads, visitors, and the like. Now it’s all about user engagement, customer loyalty, and business results.
This startup based in Singapore and India is using AI to automate a lot of what goes into generating sales leads and acting on them fast.
More and more sophisticated tools are coming into the market to help with tracking what’s actionable that really matters to the business. Conversion rate optimization, funnel analysis, real time heat maps, abandoned cart recovery, sales lead generation – there are tech tools for all that and more. The trouble is many businesses are just not equipped to derive insights from these tools or act on them. Small and medium businesses (SMBs) especially can’t afford to hire high caliber data scientists to make the best use of the tools for customer retention or sales closure.
That’s where Lucep comes in. This startup based in Singapore and India is using artificial intelligence (AI) to automate a lot of what goes into generating leads and then acting on them fast. Sales Gorilla is the name of its AI engine behind the Lucep app....
One of the most important tools in any salesperson’s tool kit consist of success stories that demonstrate capabilities, build credibility, and move the prospect closer to signing on the bottom line. Here’s a template used to describe the three parts of the commonly told success story:
When I first started selling physical product in my shopify story, I made a ton of mistakes that I could have avoided.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t done my research into the best practices and the best apps to use for my shopify store. My early failures had more to do with the fact that I was trying to work without having anything good to model my work off of.
Considering all the training that I had taken on how to sell physical products online, I was making decent sales of my personalized yoga balls after only a few months. The issue was that I hit a ceiling on my sales pretty quickly....
If you can improve your pricing page, you can make more sales. It’s that simple.In other places, I’ve explained some powerful tips that will make your pricing page absolutely irresistible. Here, I want to compile some of the industry’s best tips for optimizing your pricing page.Most of my experience with pricing pages is in the SaaS industry. Although most of the tips below deal with SaaS products, you can apply the information to other ecommerce sites as well....
You know what tips buyers off that the email they're reading is a sales pitch?
"Hi, My name is John Smith, and I'm a sales rep at Company."
Yup. That'll do it.
While you should never actively hide the fact that you're a salesperson from buyers, there are far more creative and engaging ways of opening sales emails than the standard name-and-company introduction. "Hi, I'm a salesperson" encourages readers to hit "delete" immediately, which is a shame because you probably have something valuable to offer. Changing up your opening lines to position yourself as a consultant, business expert, or interested party will do you justice and keep the prospect reading.
If you're struggling to think of alternatives to the standard opening line, take one of these for a spin and see how they perform for you. ...
Some might choose to tackle the Gen-Y demographic and wait on learning more about Gen Z, and others might just group these audiences together and figure they’re killing two marketing birds with one stone. But Deep Focus’ latest Cassandra Report, Gen Y and Gen Z want very different things from brands, and now that people who are a part of Gen Z are making independent purchasing decisions, that distinction is very important....
Many people have found headlines that work wonders, consistently, time after time. And they go well beyond the saturated listicle or clickbait. Why not take so…
What will the future bring for sales professionals? Sales expert Tom Searcy looks into his crystal ball to share his predictions for what trends will dominate the market in 2018.
One of the responsibilities of leaders is to help their teams not only plan for the future, but anticipate it. I spend a great deal of my time helping business leaders see that future in the larger market context beyond just their own industry. Here's a small glimpse into what I believe the next five years will look like in the world of selling....
CTAs are critical for achieving any results online, because traffic, subscribers, and followers don’t do you any good until they become leads and eventually customers. That’s why calls-to-action can be used in more places than just your website. They should also be employed in your: blog social media email blasts pay-per-click campaigns guest articles anywhere else you publish or market online It takes practice to craft the perfect CTA for a given offer and page, but there are a few guidelines to keep in mind that can help you....
|
The Harvard Business Review reported cold calling is ineffective 90% of the time, and more recent research shows that less than 2% of cold calls actually result in a meeting. Assuming a 0.3% appointment-booking rate and a 20% win rate, it would take 6,264 cold calls to make just four sales. 15 Lead Generation Alternatives to Cold Calling What can the modern business do to protect its future and get new leads without cold calling? The good news is that it doesn’t involve a circus act or shameless begging of any sort. The bad news is that it requires a completely different way of thinking and some serious energy and hard work. Here are 15 alternatives to cold calling salespeople can use to generate leads....
Inbound marketing — it’s definitely grown in popularity as a marketing buzz word in the last 5 years. But inbound, content marketing is more than just a buzz word. It’s more than blog posts, checklists, eBooks, and landing pages. Maybe it should be called Inbound Smarketing. Because when “add value first” is your strategy from marketing to sales, you can take the principles of a traditional content marketing strategy and apply it to a 1-on-1 situation between a member of your sales team and a prospect. When both marketing AND sales go “value first” the results can be hard to argue with. Prospects Don’t Want To Hear About What Your Product Does If you’re selling an SaaS product, or are in charge of SaaS marketing, your prospects actually, probably don’t care about your product. They probably don’t care about your company. (Read Ben Horowitz’s blog, or The Hard Thing About Hard Things for a better explanation on why nobody cares about your company). Prospects and would-be customers are all busy trying to solve various problems of their own. Your focus should be on providing a solution to their problem. More specifically, a set of solutions for the problems specific to your unique customer personas. Prospects are only interested in your product because they perceive it can solve one of their problems. This is why starting a conversation with a prospect about your product will have you fighting an uphill battle, too often, too early in the sales process. Your prospect did not wake up hoping to hear about your scheduling and payment product feature. But they probably woke up thinking about how to reduce client cancellations and get paid up front when clients book a spot in their Saturday morning boot camp....
“The right thing at the wrong time is the wrong thing.” - Joshua Harris Have you ever called a lead on a Tuesday morning and heard nothing, but tried that same lead two days later and they responded back almost immediately? That’s not luck -- there’s some science behind why this happened. According to research from James Oldroyd and InsideSales.com, effectively reaching out to prospects comes down to one thing: timing. For example, did you know 4-5 p.m. had a 164% better connection rate than 1-2 p.m.? Or that connection rates drop by 400% if you respond in 10 minutes instead of five? The following infographic reveals the best times and days to connect with respond to prospects. Science and data are starting to dominate sales. Are you keeping up?...
Most prospects have tens (or even hundreds) of pending LinkedIn invites to respond to -- which means that when they finally get to yours, it’s only getting mere seconds of attention. And in such a short span of time, a single bad line can condemn your invite to the “ignore” pile. If you want your invites to get accepted, check out nine clunkers to never use again...
Deftly diffusing a potentially conversation-ending roadblock is one of the hardest parts of a salesperson's job. While specific sales objections vary significantly based on the specific product or service that's being offered, most can be grouped into larger categories: price, timing, disagreement among the stakeholders, etc. Wouldn't it be nice to have a strategy guide that could help you rebut these common doubts? The wise people at RAIN Group have heard your pleas. The infographic below lists 18 oft-invoked objections, along with suggestions on how a salesperson could overcome them. Forward this to your sales team, and fear the dreaded "but" no more....
In a previous article, I shared the 5 Core Steps to Consultative Selling. The steps were: - building rapport,
- conducting a needs analysis,
- crafting a solution,
- proposing / selling the solution,
- and then servicing the account.
Today, let's look at each of those steps from a social selling perspective.
According to Forrester research, 74% of your sales process happens before a buyer calls you. These invisible sales stages, in which buyers initiate the selling process without calling on sales, gives them tremendous freedom to browse, learn, and compare without your influence. This customer-controlled, pre-selling environment has given rise to "social selling."
So how do we apply social selling to each of the 5 core steps?...
Every decision your customer makes consists of many conscious and subconscious emotions. The key to success in any business is an understanding of psychology and human behaviour.
We all have the same basic mental triggers and needs that drive action. If we understand these psychological triggers, we can craft more effective marketing messages and increase sales.
Below is an introduction to 7 important psychological and emotional triggers that can increase your sales, backed up with examples and further reading....
It’s a pretty common lament online amongst brand marketers that the market is so spoilt by those offering everything free to the consumers, that there’s hardly anybody wanting to purchase anything at all.
Now we all know that isn’t true, because research every year points to fast growing volumes of internet selling and buying, and the trend seems only more increased with mobile now becoming the medium of choice for even more buying and selling than before. Could it be that it’s not really the customers online who are window shopping for freebies, and it’s the marketers who are assuming that customers want things free and will not pay?...
It’s incredibly rare that a prospect responds to a salesperson’s first outreach attempt. This necessitates following up … and following up on your follow ups.
But how many prospecting touchpoints should salespeople make before they call it quits? When should they send these messages? And should they email, call, or reach out in another way? The “how,” “when,” and “what” of following up is important to get right if a rep hopes to snag the buyer’s attention and make a sale.
Here’s a guide that can help you optimize your prospecting process and significantly improve your response and connect rates, even with no changes to the content of your messaging.
Just like anything shiny and new, social selling suffers from a fair amount of hype. And with hype comes misunderstanding.
Sales reps and leaders eager to embrace the next generation of selling tactics often jump in with both feet. While this enthusiasm is great, sometimes they dive in before they understand what social selling really is, or what they’re trying to achieve. This is a recipe for disaster.
So instead of another piece listing the benefits of social selling and the results that can be reaped through social selling tactics, I thought I’d combat some of the hype by writing on what social selling isn’t. Then business leaders can go in with a clear understanding of what they’re getting into -- and what they’re not....
These particular posts didn’t have many social shares and yet the analytics demonstrated someone had been looking at them. The traffic was noticeable.
Generally I’ve found – both on personal professional sites – that for every social share, there are three visitors. So why were there so many page views on these particular posts?
With just a little more thought, the catalyst became obvious. The sales team had found these posts and were emailing them to customers and prospects as a touch point....
...Calling somebody cold.Out of the blue. No referral. No information. No relationship. No trust. No credibility. No rapport. No introduction. No qualification. Just cold.
Why would anybody with half a brain and bills to pay ever do that?
Then I read more of his article and found he made some pretty good points and I cooled down a bit....
|
![107 Mind-Blowing Sales Statistics That Will Help You Sell Smarter [SlideShare] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/q6eUjzK0qq7w93EtyWDhgzl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
![The Best Time to Call Prospects, Based on Data From 100,000 Calls [Data] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/yhuIPF32t5WqfnU8bJrF1jl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
These selling statistics will permanently change the way you prospect, qualify, and close.