Sometimes even the most successful companies hit a plateau in revenue. As a business owner, you want your company to be constantly growing—cue sales acceleration.
Sales acceleration refers to the strategies used to move prospective buyers through the sales process more efficiently. There are numerous ways a company can do this.
Below are the top tips for promoting sales acceleration within a company.
Focus on Customer Needs
Does your product or service meet the needs of customers? Is there something you could improve to increase sales? These are some questions you should consider when trying to promote sales acceleration.
With a customer-needs sales approach, your sales team should be focused on customer satisfaction. Rather than convincing customers to buy something, your sales team will spend most of their time figuring out what needs they can address. This type of sales approach can boost sales by 15% to 20%.
Have a Solid Sales Team
Your sales team is everything when it comes to sale acceleration. If you don’t have the right sales team, you won’t be able to increase sales easily.
So if you cannot achieve sales acceleration, consider revamping your sales team. Assess your current sales associates to see if they have the traits you want in a salesperson.
You want your sales team to be:
- Coachable
- Confident
- Inquisitive
- Intelligent
- Goal-oriented
If some of your team doesn’t fit these characteristics, it may be best to part ways and hire new employees with stronger assets. With the right sales team, promoting sales acceleration will be a cinch.
Follow Up on Leads
Leads are potential sales and thus a pivotal part of your sales acceleration plan. Only 2% of sales occur within the initial interaction, so following up with leads is a must for sales acceleration.
Unfortunately, this is an area that salespeople tend to fall short on, with 44% giving up on a lead after one rejection. This statistic becomes starker when paired with the fact that 80% of leads require five follow-ups to make a purchase. Yet, only 8% of salespeople will follow up five times.
You should make it policy for your sales team to follow up five times before calling it quits on the sale. While five times may seem like overkill, if you find the right approach, it will be worth it in the end.
Research Competitors
Competitive analysis is a crucial part of any sales acceleration plan. Your competitors are the biggest obstacle to overcome when promoting sales acceleration. If your competitors are offering customers something your company isn’t, you will lose a significant amount of sales.
To perform a thorough analysis of your competitors, you should:
- Make a list of your competitors: This includes direct competitors (offering the same product/service), secondary competitors (offering different products but in the same market), and substitute competitors (in a different market but targeting the same customers).
- Gather information: Look at price, product, location, and promotional content.
- Analyze strengths and weaknesses: From the information gathered, how do competitors compare to your company? Make a list of everything that would make a customer choose (or not choose) competitors over you or vice versa.
- Determine your company’s advantages: Pinpoint your competitive advantage. Optimizing your strengths will give you the upper hand over competitors. At the same time, finding your competitive advantage will also help you identify your weaknesses and rectify them.
Collect Data
Collect data from all aspects of the sales process. For example, how are your leads engaging with emails or social media posts? What does customer feedback say about your company, sales team, and product or service?
Data will help you tweak your marketing to increase customer engagement, meaning more leads. Data will also help strengthen your sales techniques so that once you secure potential customers, moving them through the sales funnel can be done more effectively.
