sales

By Shanea Patterson

If your sales team has been struggling to close deals lately and you just seem to be stuck in a never-ending cycle of stale leads and low conversion rates, you might need to adjust a few things: your sales strategy, sales processes, and how you handle customer relationship management. If you want to start seeing results from your marketing efforts, consider the following.

1. Sales Strategy and Sales Processes

Perfecting your sales strategy requires consistently assessing mistakes and making adjustments where necessary. The same goes for your sales processes. If you want to increase sales, you’ve got to have consistent and reliable sales processes that help you warm up leads and nurture them into customers. Your sales team should have a process for each step of the buyer’s journey, which includes:

  1. Awareness – potential customers become aware of your brand
  2. Interest – prospects know what they need and they’re interested in a solution
  3. Consideration – they’re now considering their available options
  4. Intent – they have the intention of buying, but they need more info
  5. Purchase – they’ve finally made a purchase
  6. Loyalty – they come back to make repeat purchases and become loyal to your brand

These stages can vary from company to company, and you can alter your buyer’s journey as you see fit. Think about the kind of content you could create that might help move your potential customers closer to the sale.

2. Know Your Audience

If you don’t know who you’re marketing to, chances are you won’t be marketing as effectively as you could be to draw in your target audience. You can start by creating several buyer personas that represent your ideal customers. The more specific you get about knowing your target audience, the better you can tailor your content and marketing efforts to them. That means higher response rates and increased conversions.

Just a few things to know about your target audience include:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Location
  • Occupation
  • Marital Status
  • Income
  • Education
  • Goals & Challenges
  • Interests

3. CRM System

A customer relationship management (CRM) system can help you keep track of all of your customer relationships by giving you a big picture of where they are in the buyer’s journey, what their challenges or pain points are, and what they need to move to the next step in the buyer’s journey, whether it’s a data sheet, a user guide, or a product demonstration. If you don’t have a CRM system, you’re seriously missing out on features that can help with sales planning.

A CRM system is designed to help you nurture your relationships with potential clients. According to TechTarget, it’s a combination of strategies, practices, and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze customer communications and data throughout the buyer’s journey. The goal is to improve customer service relationships, increase customer retention and drive sales.

Benefits of a Good Sales CRM System

A good CRM system allows you to offer a personalized, customer-centric experience to both your leads and your agents, while helping improve sales performance management, revenue management, and response time to customer issues and inquiries. A good CRM should have a clean, modern interface focused on usability and increasing the overall efficiency and effectiveness of your business.

Finding and implementing a new CRM benefits sales, management, and marketing departments. It benefits sales by allowing agents to spend more time interacting with customers and prospects on activities that lead to more sales and income. It helps management by giving them complete and accurate insight into their team’s performance, including new ways to increase sales revenue. The marketing department benefits by being able to see the results of their efforts on prospects and by discovering new ways to maximize their impact on potential clients.

Case Study #1: McDonald’s

When McDonald’s wanted to change their marketing to target their ideal customers, they implemented a CRM system to help make the most of each potential and existing customer. Along with that, they launched an app that helps the company collect information on how often each customer visits a restaurant as well as insight into their buying patterns.

Case Study #2: Unilever

Unilever uses a CRM system to boost agent productivity and improve their call center abilities. The company also uses it to manage customer relationships and interactions to speed up response times to customer inquiries and issues.

If you’re having trouble converting leads into sales, you might have a problem with your sales strategy and how you’re handling your customers. A CRM system can help you organize all of your business relationships with ease and give you an added layer of support for your sales and marketing departments.

Shanea Patterson is a certified content marketing specialist with a knack for writing SEO content about business, finance, and marketing.

Boost revenue stock photo by Jirsak/Shutterstock