Just like a prized fighter who prepares for the next match, an athlete who prepares for years to compete in the international Olympics, or a war-fighter who is continually trained for various geographic missions throughout the globe, your sales team must continue to improve and refocus on the markets and customer base. This requires that the team conducts opportunity identification, develop needs and solutions, establish the value, proof and control of sales cycles, selection and negotiation, and close – after all, this is a team sport and it’s all about winning! As a market leader and expert, Qvidian offers proactive sales proposal software that wins you more business.

Lead generation effectiveness – in spite of all the promises of social media, most new sales leads are not effective at generating quality sales leads. Social media platforms such as Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Vine, MeetMe, and Facebook to name a few.  

There are highly effective strategies which may be used to generate many more qualified leads and business that include direct mail, effective advertising, referral systems, hosting beneficiary relationships, word-of-mouth marketing, telemarketing, networking, circle of leverage, qualified list, Internet, becoming a recognized authority, public relations, special events and promotions, and much more.

Strategic benefit and value proof – as technology and social media have been catalysts in the global market place regardless of the size of business, the buyer behavior is one in which people love to buy including corporate buyers but hate being sold. Establishing value involves having emotional decisions that are justified in value and logic, essentially the value justification versus cost justification is a common theme.

Some examples of value measurement include avoiding eliciting emotion, establishing baselines with diagnostic questions and value validation includes correlating the value of the company’s’ capabilities to current situation.

Increase customer loyalty – there are tools today to help an organization in terms of quantifying customer loyalty and in predictive analysis of customer sentiment. One such tool, the Net Promoter Score (NPS), is useful as a leading indicator of growth and regardless if the focus is on increasing growth or profits. The NPS serves as a foundation of a measurement framework that correlates the customer journey. The scoring is based on a 0-10 scale and a single question such as asking the customer how likely they are to recommend your product.

Sales processes – typically, many refer to the sales pipeline as a means to explain the overall sales process including lead generation, lead qualification, needs assessment, proposal, and closing the sale. As an extension of this concept, the sales pipeline may be referred to as the amount of business that is closed, both attempted and closed, within a given period of time.

Some calculations can be leveraged from tracking the sales pipeline include the lead-to-customer conversion ratio, the average sales cycle in terms of days, the number of opportunities progression, and key metrics including average monetary value of an opportunity and the total number of potential opportunities.

Sales rep coaching – newly hired sales people are should be acclimated to the language, processes, and tools of the sales organization as soon as possible. The large organizations including those with global sales teams benefit from enrolling sales managers and learning and developing personnel in a sales training program and should be paired with a mentor. Sales training, in general, is not a single event but a continuum and one which must be nurtured by senior staff as a means to grooming them for success.  

Reduce uncertainty – getting beyond a stalled prospect and motivating them includes calling to follow up, asking to schedule a refocus meeting, documenting prospect’s goals and identify if they have changed, apply EQPA (event, question, player, action), begin follow up of suspected goals, determine a sense of urgency, and determine missed criteria. Once a buyer has shared a goal, it is recommended to start with framing logical, safe questions that are virtually guaranteed to get buyers to describe their current process.

Competitive loss efficiencies – the cost-benefit is not proof but it is speculation as to what might happen. For example, proof may include the inexpensive such as success stories, testimonials, reference calls, white papers, case studies, web site, online and demos. Conversely, examples of expensive proof includes reference and/or site visits, proof of concept, on-site demos, meetings with decision makers, and free training.

Sales enablement – at the very heart of the customer life-cycle, sales enablement is an iterative and evolving process by which a systematic approach exists to increase sales. This includes the strategic selling in an organization where it is one of the toughest and most difficult but where the sales team must expound and hone their go-to market skills. There are a lot of great strategic sales teams out there, but there’s an equal amount of selling teams that could use some advice. 

Forecast accuracy – looking into a crystal ball and guessing what the future may hold is something that no sales professional considers or attempts but predicting the probable behavior of customers and getting into their psyche is more an art than science. Some sales team managers may just pull a number out of thin air and then commit the team to upward management goals. There are countless decisions and other numbers including goals and forecast that cumulatively shape the final forecast based on such input as hiring decisions, investment decisions, production, etc.  

Key performance indicators – it seems that these days there is always someone who has falls in love with a new measurement tool, a new report, a new app or widget that makes promises of finding gold at the end of the big data rainbow. All of this effort only amounts to taking a shot in the dark in hopes of finding a small promising nugget of truth – there are basically only a few truths with which to be concerned: the conversion rate, the monthly new leads flowing into the sales office, quantifying the total number of new qualified opportunities each month along with the dollar value, and the booked revenue numbers.