Want to Build Sales Fast? Answer These 4 Questions

Whether you’re a sales wiz or brand-spankin’ new to the job, you know that building sales is all about reaching the right people at the right time with the right message. After all, what’s the point of pitching a product or service to someone who has no need or want for it in the first place? You can’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and if you’re going to kick your sales into high-gear, you’ll need to create a high-quality prospect list filled with your ideal customers. Answer the following questions about how to build prospecting lists, and get ready to build sales and rock your prospecting process.

1. Do You Even Know Who You’re Selling To?

Before you create a prospecting list, it’s paramount to know exactly what you’re going to offer your prized prospects. After all, how are you supposed to figure out needs your product if you don’t have a solid understanding of what you’re selling? This is where product training comes in handy.

If you’re a sales representative, you’ve probably experienced a lengthy onboarding process to join your company where you would have learned all about the product or service you offer. This is good, but not quite good enough. You need to go above and beyond in order to become a true expert of what you’re selling. You can do this with a little bit of additional training and learning. According to the Association for Talent Development (ATD), “Companies that offer comprehensive training programs have 218% higher income per employee.”

We know sales reps are strapped for time, so how can you maximize your training to gain extensive product knowledge without spending hours learning? We recommend you carve out some time to simply read your company’s use cases and success stories. If you can, listen to as many recorded calls with both sales and customer service as possible, because real-world use cases are the best way to improve your product knowledge and understanding of the customer experience. Deeper product knowledge will help you feel more comfortable when talking to prospects; this will help you land you close more deals. Additionally, product knowledge will help you better understand who your ideal prospects are.

Here is a list of some more product knowledge training strategies you can provide yourself or your team:

Tip: Microlearning- Chop up training into bite-sized pieces so that you can better retain the information. Make sure the training is always relevant and use short videos or slides to present the information in a way that is memorable and easy to retain for you or your salespeople. E.g.: set up a bi-monthly zoom with your team to go over one product feature.

Remember: product knowledge training is not a ‘set it and forget it’ thing; it’s on-going. As your product or service and company evolve, so should your knowledge and training. Make sure to stay clued in on all the latest news, features, and offers of your company, and don’t forget to go back and refresh your memory too once in a while!

2. Who’s your ideal customer?

“If you’re talking to everyone, you’re talking to no one.”

Now that we’ve got the ‘what?’ out of the way let’s dive into the ‘who?’. You might have the most excellent product and killer sales pitch out there, but if it’s pitched to everyone or the wrong person, you’re wasting valuable time. Would you sell a dating ebook to your great aunt who’s a 70-year-old cat-lady? Probably not. If you want to build sales, don’t just sell to anyone, be smarter than that. We recommend developing buyer personas to dream up and pinpoint your ideal customer.

Buyer personas help companies understand who their customers are so that they can design a more relevant and tailored experience. With buyer personas, you can better target your sales messaging and pitches to solve your customers’ pain points. This means you will spend less time pitching to the wrong people, and more time converting qualified leads who are more likely to turn into sales opportunities.

Hubspot defines a buyer persona as “A semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” Learning about your ideal prospect and their company, who the decision-makers are, their challenges, goals, and demographic traits, will help you create a sales strategy aimed at attracting and converting the most valuable prospects and decision-makers.

4 more essential questions to ask when developing your buyer personas:

1. What’s their industry or vertical?
2. How big is their company?
3. What are the key issues they’re facing?
4. What are their business objectives?

We recommend organizing your buyer persona information into a to help you better visualize and understand your ideal persona. Be sure to share these templates across your team and company so that everyone can develop an in-depth understanding of the personas you’re targeting. Here’s an example of what your template might look like:

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Originally published at https://www.lusha.com on September 30, 2020.