The goal and objective of every small business is to make profit. However, that is possible only by improving the efficiency of the sales cycle. For that, the small business should provide have a dedicated sales team and also provide them with right tools that would help them to keep the sales funnel/pipeline healthy.
A study conducted by MarketingSherpa, revealed a startling statistics that 68% of the organizations have not yet identified their sales pipeline. Only a few organizations have invested in creating a structured sales process to fit into their business model.
Whether your business is small, medium or big you need to build an efficient sales team and also have a process in place to ensure that there are consistent results. Putting a sales pipeline in place is the need of the hour.
For the optimizing your sales your need to create a simple sales process, integrate it with your present system and optimize it on the go. The following are the three simple steps involved in creating a sales funnel/pipeline. This can transform your sales forever.
- Get to know your potential prospects- Selling your products/services will be a tad bit difficult if you don’t take time to build buyer personas. You need to understand the mindset of your buyers. It’s a competitive market and consumers have multiple choices and if you cannot get across to them, you simply lose the business to your rival.
- Keep your e-letters short and simple as possible.
- The demos conducted should be foolproof and should be done by someone who can handle the questions put forward by the customers
- While speaking to a buyer over the telephone, break the process into clear logical steps so they understand what you are trying to convey
- Create a simple and clear-cut sales cycle- Buyers prefer a simple and less complicated sales process. Simpler the better. Therefore, if your current sales process has many steps that a customer has to go through before buying your product, then its wise to break them into stages that they can easily understand and also make it as flexible as possible. It will be helpful to both the customer as well as to the sales rep.
- Create sales strategies- Here the sales team has to work in tandem with the marketing team to create strategies to find the right leads, converting the leads into warm leads, moving them into the sales cycle and finally closing the deal. This process involves the following steps.
- Lead Qualification- Leads are prospects who have relevant and sufficient information about your products/services. However, the experts opine that 28% of the leads that are pushed over to the sales team are unqualified lead, as they have only basic or minimum information about the product/service.
- Lead Scoring- This is the critical element in lead management. It’s a procedure that is used to rank the prospect against a scale to understand how valuable the lead is for the business. It depends on the factors such as social media followers of the leads, the job profile and more. However, you need to examine whether your type of business would actually require a lead scoring system. The reason is though it’s a crucial element, it’s not a must-have element for every business and in some cases it can be waste of time
- Lead Nurturing- It’s a process of taking the customer relationship forward at every stage of the sales pipeline. Here the sales team along with the marketing team have to focus on making efforts to reach out to the lead via newsletters, discounts, listening to the need of the leads using social media platforms, clarifying the queries and providing information. The lead nurturing will result in loyalty customers. They are the businesses life time customers.
- Sales Opportunity Management- Opportunity management is nothing but sales pipeline management where the sales team is provided with a sales road map. The road map gives an insight into the sales funnel by providing a sales rep with a real-time overview of a particular lead. The process of managing a sales funnel is known as sales opportunity management
To get the attention of the target audience avoid using complex language. You need to keep things simple and speak the buyer’s language.
The above mentioned steps give an overview of how to transform your sales. It’s a fact that to increase the revenue, you need to reach out to a larger target audience and for that you need to have a strong sales process in place. Above all, the sales team have to be trained the processes that are implemented and they have to monitored to see if they are on track.
For all this to happen, a small business should not only consider having a sales department with an effective sales manager but also give them the right tool such as CRM software on cloud. This software will make the task easier and allow real time visibility to the sales representatives who are on the field.
