10 Tips for Closing More Deals & Moving Prospects through Your Sales Pipeline
A successful sales pipeline involves a combination of technology and social skills. It was once true that social skills were the primary way to drive sales, but technology has taken on more importance as the Internet and artificial intelligence offer more ways to connect and maintain relationships. Below are 10 tips that have helped our customers close more deals and keep prospects moving through their pipeline.
Your Voice Is Key to Connecting to Customers
As Michael Hegeloh pointed out last year, the human voice is central to connecting with others on a personal level and communicates as much information about attitude and emotions as facial expressions. For sales agents who spend most of their time connecting to customers over the phone, this means they can have as much emotional impact as they do at in-person events.
Don’t Underestimate the Power of Social Media
The first step for any sales pipeline is attracting and engaging prospects. Internet technologies like social media platforms make it possible for start-ups and small businesses to connect with potential customers fast anywhere they happen to be. Building a modern marketing plan is key to creating a steady churn of sales leads.
Grow Your Leads with Constant Nurturing
When prospects engage with your business, it’s an important opportunity to create a first impression. Nurturing leads helps them decide to take the next step with your products or services, and it creates a good public perception of your business. For example, a social media page that doesn’t respond to questions gives the same impression as an “Out to Lunch” sign in the window at a brick-and-mortar store. Your leads will move on to a competitor.
Building Personal Relationships Will Help You Close Deals
Depending on the nature of your business, you may interact with hundreds of customers each week or only a handful. In either case, though, it’s important to view your relationship with them on a more personal level than a sales deal. That’s because customers choose businesses when they feel a personal connection, and they remain loyal when you keep that personal touch alive.
Sales and Marketing Tools Need to Be Integrated
Sales and marketing are usually divided into separate teams, but the two roles need to work together to create an efficient pipeline that generates leads and converts them to customers. Your marketing and sales tools will be most effective when they integrate seamlessly. This will make the hand-off of leads to sales agents smoother and performance easier to track. Automation tools also make it possible to reach a wider audience with a smaller team.
Prioritize Leads with an Effective Scoring System
Over time, your salespeople may notice patterns that indicate whether leads are likely to become repeat customers. Depending on how specialized your products and customer base are, there may be some common criteria or specialized ways to score leads as they arrive and prioritize the ones that score high. Some criteria to consider are browsing behavior on websites, demographics, and engagement history.
Create Lead Categories That Work
Another way to tailor your marketing and sales engagement to each lead is to establish categories and market segments that you’ve found respond to one strategy or another. It might revolve around which products or services leads are interested in, the size of purchases they are likely to consider, or their geographic location.
Engage Every Lead at Least Once
It’s also important to treat every lead that arrives as a potential customer. That means designing your pipeline so that none of them will fall through hidden cracks. If you ensure that leads are assigned to sales agents and receive attention in a timely way, it’ll help you capture as many sales as possible and avoid missing unforeseen opportunities.
Leverage Cloud Communications
The flexibility of today’s nimble business is partly achieved by switching to cloud technologies early. The cloud also enables advanced automation technologies that can help your marketing and sales teams to make better use of their time. An internet phone can integrate with a sales CRM like Salesforce, ensuring that leads are properly managed. It also doesn’t hurt that cloud services can often save you money which you can use for more important business expenses.
Quality and Performance with Timely Indicators
As time passes, a business will see managers and employees come and go, and the market it serves will change as well. This means that the processes that work today may not in the future, or the talent that made it work may be lost. It’s a good idea to establish a set of key indicators for sales and marketing performance and monitor them. They can let you know when changes are needed, and they can confirm whether process improvements are working after they are implemented.
