Sales Tactics for real selling - The Digital Sales Institute

Sales Tactics for real selling

Most sales tactics today are directed by the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) business world that we have to sell into. There are the new rules that will reshape many of the components of selling, from prospecting, to sales conversations, to closing and building relationships.

The future of sales tactics is to be insight driven and to be built on a platform of data, information, and knowledge. This will provide a better understanding of trends, relations, and processes to manage all stakeholder experiences, both the digitally-driven sales team and the digital-age buyer.

Interact with your customers like a friend. Your intention is to listen, understand, guide, and help them.

With the growth of the digital age, the art of selling has become a bit more complicated. Salespeople are now encouraged to use adaptive selling, meaning that they adapt their sales approach to that specific customer, a process that involves a personalized experience, asking meaningful questions, understanding the customer’s reactions, and adjusting the sales process accordingly for each customer.

Sales Tips

Here are some tips on sales tactics for your selling efforts.

• • Show you care to build credibility
  • Connect With Buyers on Their Terms
  • Segment Your Communication
  • Understand Pain Points and Challenges
  • Personalize Your Approach
  • Create More Than Just a Customer – Be a Partner
  • Maximize your ROSE

The top sales tactics you should try

Here is our list of sales tactics for your business to boost your sales effort. These are well founded tactics that should be baked into your sales DNA to give you lasting benefits.

Show you Care to Build Credibility

The modern buyer is looking to connect with companies or salespeople on a level that goes beyond a product or service. They want to do business with a company that provides more value than the price they pay for a product or service.

With a buyers desire to engage with a value driven company and people, comes the opportunity for you to tell your story. What you stand for, your value proposition, where you came from, what’s important to you, and the positive impact you can make.

Build a compelling value proposition, one that features how you help, bring value, make lives easier or make contributions to your customers or the approach you take in being a responsible professional in your industry.

Through the use of trustable sales messages, video, or genuine neutral insights, you’ll not only humanize your brand but give buyers a reason to listen about what you have to say. In turn, you can further that relationship by involving yourself in the challenges that are important to your customers.

Your sales story shows you as not just as another salesperson within your industry, but as a real expert for the customers you serve with the shared concerns and goals of any potential customer.

Connect With Buyers on Their Terms

This may sound like a tagline for a sales seminar, but it speaks to something that’s lost in the growing digitalization of selling.

Companies or salespeople often create Facebook and LinkedIn pages but never do anything beyond posting a few promotional messages. They simply use these channels because they believe they are there to be attractive to an audience. Similarly, why have a professional Twitter account only to post nothing more than special offers?

There’s more to social selling or social media than to use it as a promotional message channel. We must do something with it. Use social selling and the social platforms as real avenues for customer service and engagement. Harness the power of video, webcasts, customer interviews, insights and information which carry a personalized touch to your audience and help to create dynamic engagement.

Why not partner with influencers to tap into their network reach and turn them into trusted followers for your company. Build tighter communities of people interested in what you have to say through your social media presence. Plus, make sure every piece of content or communication you create is mobile friendly.

Ultimately, be more than a salesperson who’s just going through the motions.

Use the platforms your buyers use. Meet your future buyers where they want to be met and utilize touch points in a way that makes engagement more genuine.

Smart salespeople are beginning to realize that buyers want more than lame attempts at engagement. To cut through the noise of our world, salespeople will have to offer authentic communications in their sales tactics that help buyers connect and create meaningful relationships.”

Segment Your Communication

Every communication with your prospects and customers should build on your relationship. So, think about the product or service from which you generate revenue, is your value messaging a one-for-all approach or is it more segmented. If you value proposition is not the latter, it’s time to reconsider your sales tactics.

The appeal of a product or service is going to mean different things to different buyers. The modern buyer is looking for your bundles of value messaging to tap into that uniqueness.

Now, we know you can’t sell to everyone but learn who your audience is and tailor your sales messages (sales tactics and related content) that is explicitly personalized to them.

Ensure all your sales, marketing, and social media messaging is rooted in your business’ values, voice, tone, etc. This is a top-down sales tactic as well as bottom-up: bottom-up in terms of daily sales execution and top-down in terms of you defining what your business’ purpose is.

Understand Pain Points and Challenges

It goes without saying that you can build a better understanding of your customer needs and boost sales by thinking of your products as a solution to customer pain points. The sales mindset here is that while you are technically selling a product, your customers are buying a solution to an existing problem. Buyers don’t want to buy a 6 inch drill; they want to buy a 6 inch hole. That’s why it’s important to understand what pain points and challenges your product or service solves, is it efficiency, productivity, cost savings, compliance etc.

This sales mindset empowers you to connect emotionally and practically with your buyers or customers to drive more revenue.

Personalize Your Approach

A recent survey showed that nearly 73% of B2B C-level executives stated their expectation for more personalized experiences when interacting with salespeople is now higher.

This expectation reflects the need for a different, more personalized sales approach in your sales tactics. You must be able to get the buyer to listen, to establish a connection and get them to care about what you have to say. To build on this interaction implies the need to ask questions. This is here your research, insight into the company, market and trends will enable you to create a personalized experience with relevant questions. Deep questions builds credibility, credibility builds trust.

Much the same as appealing to your various segments that make up your customer base, develop personalized communication that speaks to your audience, not at or over them.

Your goal is to blend potential customers into your sales stories. Listing off technical specs or your companies jargon that only insiders would understand results in the opposite – alienating individuals who are looking for simplicity, to make buying easier.

That said, be proud of company and what it stands for, just don’t get overuse them.

Create More Than Just a Customer – Be a Partner

For your company and sales strategy efforts to have staying power, it requires more than customers. It requires partners, which means a partnership first sales tactics approach from you. There’s little doubt that buyers want to do business with those they trust and believe to be experts. Selling todays means you must be more accountable and transparent on how your company operates. Never abandon your customers after a sale. Constantly follow up, follow through and make yourself available even more so than during the sales process. Back up your credibility to yourself and the commitment to your company by taking a partnership approach to every customer.

To really transcend sales experiences and develop genuine, lasting relationships with your customers, remember the following:

Care about the space you and your customers operate in.

Meet your customers on their terms.

Craft unique sales messages personalized to each unique client.

Take a partner first approach with those seeking to do business with you.

Build loyalty by extending the relationship, creating partners and not just customers.

Above all else, allow your sales stories for your company and the solutions you provide to make an emotional connection with your customers.

Implement tactics to maximize your ROSE

The measure of your sales tactics and sales techniques is your rose. Return On Sales Effort. The tactics listed here should give you the opportunity to at least build your profile and professionalism. The best way to bring about the change you want in your own sales efforts and in your sales training, is to make them part of your daily sales habits and DNA.

 

 

Sales Tactics for real selling - The Digital Sales Institute: