Making a few tweaks to your sales behavior can make a huge difference in your sales revenue.
Doubling sales means spending twice as much time and money selling, right? Wrong. You can double sales by making relatively small incremental improvements to your sales process, according to Donal Daly, CEO of The TAS Group.
Here’s how it works:
1. Pre-qualify your sales leads just 20% more accurately.
The higher the quality of your sales leads, the less likely you are to be calling the wrong people. To make your sales leads just 20% better, take a look at where you’ve been selling successfully and where you haven’t been doing so well.
Create a quick profile of your ideal customer and, using that as a point of contrast, define your most-likely-to-not-buy customer. Now go through your list of sales leads and cross out the ones that, based on these profiles, probably won’t buy.
2. Disqualify your sales leads just 20% faster.
Even after you’ve winnowed your list, there will still be prospects on it who don’t really need for your offering or have no money to buy it. Wasting time on these false opportunities means less time working on real ones.
Early in your first conversation, ask “what’s the priority of this problem?” “How will you handle it if you don’t buy a solution?” Then listen carefully. Politely end the conversation if your offering isn’t all that important to them.
3. Close just 20% more of your opportunities.
Obviously, the more opportunities that you close, the more customers you win and the more sales revenue you produce. While doubling or tripling your close rate is probably impossible, anybody can achieve a 20% improvement.
The easiest way to increase your close rate is to stop trying to sell and instead listen carefully for “go ahead signals” during conversations with potential customers. Put aside your fear of failure and ask for the business. It’s that simple.
4. Increase the average value of each deal by just 20%.
There is a fixed amount of time and resources connected to every sales effort. Making two deals for $10,000 each take far more time and effort as making single deal with one customer for $20,000.
Therefore, when you’re involved in an opportunity, constantly be aware of additional ways that your firm might be help that customer. This is not upselling; it’s providing better service to the customer.
These four changes act cumulatively on your sales revenue like so:
- How much you’re selling now: $100k
- After eliminating 20% of your bad leads: $120k (better time usage)
- After disqualifying 20% more non-opportunities: $144k (better time usage)
- After a 20% increase in your conversion rate: $173k
- After a 20% increase your average total per sale: $207k
Geoffrey James writes the Sales Source column on Inc.com, the world’s most visited sales-oriented blog. His newly published book is Business to Business Selling: Power Words and Strategies From the World’s Top Sales Experts. @Sales_Source
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