A Sales Strategy is comprehensive and uses a methodological approach to make sure you get your products and services in front of the people who need them. It becomes your operating plan for your sales organization. These posts can aid you.
You know you’re better than the competition.
So what’s the most effective way to help prospects and customers see that, too?
A solid value proposition.
Your value proposition is often the first thing prospects see or hear that differentiates you from the competition. It should also be the one consistent message throughout the buying journey that propels prospects to loyal customers.
I’ve got your back! That makes for great relationships.
And the sooner you can establish the I-got-your-back kind of trust with prospects, the more likely you’ll close the deal.
So how can you prove to prospects you truly have their back when all the other providers who claim the same?
Smart sales professionals are in prime position to offer personalized pricing. But how do you know when personalized pricing is the smart move?
With personalized pricing, you can take a detailed look at their customers – everything you know about needs, revenue, demands, behaviors and influencers. Then use that information to offer at a price you think will close the deal, benefiting customers and you.
Effective pricing gives loyal customers better deals than customers with no history or relation to the salesperson or company. Plus, you can change terms when needs, demands and the industry shifts.
Companies agree there’s value in personalized pricing: Nearly one-third say there are maximizing opportunities in personalized pricing, a study in Retail Systems Research found.
Cold calling is useless. Social selling is the only way. The more leads, the better. Buyers know everything.
Hogwash!
Chalk those claims up to some of worst myths in sales.
They may seem true at times – especially when no one answers your cold calls or buyers say they’ve already researched you.
But research and experience prove the biggest and most believable sales myths wrong.
Here are 12 myths and the research that debunks them:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has changed nearly everything – and Sales is no exception.
It affects how customers buy – and how salespeople need to sell.
AI fuels buying choices we make every day – from the shows we watch and the routes our driver takes to the next item we order online.
Recommendation, location and association algorithms are our behind-the-scene buying influencers – and they make AI creepy and cool: Creepy that our devices know and connect so much about us. Cool that what it does is actually helpful.
“The power of selling is moving away from the individual and toward the machine – machines that can now prospect, follow up, present, and propose without human intervention,” says Victor Antonio, author of Sales Ex Machina: How Artificial Intelligence is Changing the World of Selling. “In some cases, the machine will obliterate sales functions, while in others it will dramatically shift the locus of the focus further into the sales cycle.”
As with any industry evolution, some changes are good. Some will have a negative impact.
Here are 16 ways AI is changing sales – and how you can adapt with it.
You can – and probably do – grab new leads every day.
But do those leads really want what you have?
Without a demand generation plan, they may never realize they do. With an effective demand gen plan, they’ll pay attention, engage with you and – if you get it all right – become a customer.
A demand generation plan should be the perfect marriage (or as perfect as any marriage can be) between the marketing and sales funnels. Ideally, it’s a long marriage – bridging everything from the first interaction with prospects to the point a qualified lead becomes a customer.
Here are four components of a demand generation plan and in-depth tips and tools on making them effective.
Your competitors aren’t waiting for you to screw up. They’re ready (and likely trying) to steal your customers right now.
Competition can be ugly, especially if you’re on the losing end. But it’s part of sales. The best way to win is to stay ahead of the competition’s attempts to poach your customers.
Knowing how they’ll try to steal your customers is your best defense.
Here’s what they’re doing when you aren’t looking:
In sales, numbers speak volumes.
Revenue is clearly a biggie. But that’s not all that makes a great sales manager. There are plenty of intangibles, too.
Here’s what researchers say are the qualities and traits of the greatest sales managers.
Working with my clients’ sales forces, I started to see repeating and quite frankly alarming patterns. Because for the most part, we were working with good salespeople from good organizations marketing good products, yet far too often the results suggested otherwise.
It was obvious that something was wrong, something needed fixing.
Now, I have always believed in the value of talking to actual customers, so I introduced a singular, and at the time somewhat radical element to our methodology. I insisted that we research our clients’ customers as comprehensively as we did our clients’ sales teams.
From talking to ever more customers about how they buy and why they don’t, we came to regard this process as a journey, the Customer Buying Journey.
We developed a model that enabled us to effectively decode and map the elements, the “DNA” as it were, of each buying journey. The DNA concept of an actual identifiable code meant that the Customer Buying Journey could now be mapped.
Here’s what we found.
If sales drop, put yourselves under a microscope to see if sales and marketing are aligned.
A slight misalignment is often a root of the issues.
When sales and marketing aren’t aligned, organizations miss growth opportunities. Yet when the two areas think, do and react as one unit they can drive growth up as much as 35%, according to research from SiriusDecisions.
Problem is, many organizations don’t recognize when sales and marketing aren’t aligned – and that relationships are ineffective and opportunities are missed.
Here are seven signs that sales and marketing aren’t aligned and how to get them in sync.
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