6 Innovative Solutions for Improving Business Sales Performance

There are two ways in which your business sales can go – through famine or feast. For most businesses, the sales performance is worse than expected – even when they’ve set realistic goals. The reason for this is poor business sales performance. 

Around half of the businesses survive in the first five years. This means that half of them don’t survive on the market. The latter cannot keep up with the trends, are beaten by the competition, or use the wrong strategies for success. There can be plenty of reasons why a company doesn’t perform well in terms of sales. Interestingly, in most cases, it is the simplest changes that can solve the problem. 

For instance, you can improve your sales performance by improving your response time.

Up to 50% of sales go to the companies that respond first. If you were offering delayed responses to your leads, chances are they didn’t buy because someone else responded first. 

Or, you might not be using social media to promote your business. 

Today, 78% of businesses that use social media outsell their competition. The simple solution for your business would be a well-thought social marketing and sales strategy. 

Perhaps your issue is poor customer support. If the people you employed cannot understand the needs of the consumer, this is causing you a loss in sales. 

To help you boost your business sales performance, we’ve created a short recipe for success. Below you’ll find 6 innovative solutions that will improve your business sales performance. Here is a short overview of the steps you should take before we jump into the details:

1. Strengthen your email marketing strategy
2. Integrate sales force automation
3. Improve your sales communication strategy
4. Optimize your sales team
5. Use customer advocates 
6. Get Social

Strengthen your email marketing strategy

The email was and remains one of the top methods for attracting and converting leads. Most businesses have an email list and promote their brand online. However, very few have a well-planned, organized strategy that improves sales performance. 

When it comes to this, the answer to all your troubles is an email marketing platform. This is not as expensive as it might sound. Today, you can find feature-rich, highly customizable email marketing platforms that don’t cost as much as trending tools like Constant Contact. 

If you are looking for the best Constant Contact alternatives, your top choice would be Flodesk. This is the fastest-growing tool in this field so far, combined with excellent design and flat-rate pricing. If you invest in it, you will get access to a plethora of features to improve your email marketing, including:

• Grand choice of stunning email templates to cut down the design time
• Inexpensive plan with a flat rate per month
• Conversion and lead generation tools
• Complex automation workflows

 

By investing in an email marketing platform, you won’t have to spend forever crafting each newsletter or email. You can automate the entire process to keep up with the schedule and use conversion and lead generation tools to make more sales. 

Integrate sales force automation

The next move to take is to automate the sales for your business. By doing this, you can boost your team’s productivity, minimize the risk of mistakes, and maximize the amount of time you spend on making actual sales.

Sales force automation is using any software that automates your daily mundane, repetitive tasks. This includes your email marketing platform, but expands beyond that, too. By investing in the right sales force automation solutions, you can transform your operations entirely. You can automate customer retention, lead nurturing, and prospecting processes. You can automate your social media postings, customer support with AI, onboarding for your leads, and more. 

These days, over 30% of sales-related tasks can be automated at least partially. With this technology becoming more diverse and advanced every day, we can only expect this number to grow. 

The sales force automation market has been projected to grow to $18.65 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 10%.

Here are a few examples of what you can achieve if you integrate sales force automation:

• Schedule meetings and appointments
• Send more personalized, professional emails
• Prospect and qualify potential customers
• Generate reports in real-time
• Auto-dial phones and play a recorded message (or connect the person who picks up to a live agent)

Improve your sales communication strategy

Poor communication is one of the most common reasons why businesses are losing sales. Only 13% of customers think that the salesperson understands their needs when they communicate with a brand. To improve this, you need to find and train the right people, but also tweak your entire sales communication strategy. 

In the war to get more leads over the competition, businesses often overlook the value of the simplest piece of the puzzle – sales communication. Having a good strategy in place is most often what secures the sale or pushes the lead to take the final step. 

The best way to implement a great sales communication strategy is by using a well-defined sales cadence i.e. a series of sales activities that will help you secure a sale. These include:

• Profiling and research – identify your buyer persona
• Modes of communication – what you’ll use to make the sales
• Timing and frequency – when, where, and how often you’ll engage with leads
• Duration – when will you run a sales cadence (the ideal duration is between 2 and 4 weeks from the first point of contact)

Here’s an example of a sales cadence:

Optimize your sales team

Every sales team is made of different types of people. You have the group that performs best, which is usually the smallest of them all. This group consistently brings your business leads. They are your best sellers, but their number is too small to work solely with them.

The other group combines people who, for some reason, struggle to succeed in this. It doesn’t make them less qualified. These people can still have great potential, but they might be using the wrong way of selling, or be unfamiliar with how your company works. 

Lastly, you probably have some solid performers, the middle group of your business. They are better than the underperformers but worse than the top sellers. 

Ideally, your business would work only with top performers. However, this is not something easily achievable. You can’t just hire people and expect them all to sell the same way, use the same methods, or have the same results.

What you can do is come close to making them all solid or top performers by uplifting the group. Offer them sales training, listen to their input, and ask them to team up with people who work better. This should be as much your effort as it is theirs. 

Some ways to improve your sales team are:

• Create an incentive scheme for your team – or a smart rewards program
• Provide them with targeted data to help them better understand the customer
• Ask them to focus more on the existing customers 
• Don’t go for a bigger pipeline – go for a smaller, more focused pipeline
• Become their trusted advisor and make sure they can talk to you freely
• Use customers’ testimonials to learn what your team needs to improve

Use customer advocates

The person who your target audience will trust the most is not your employee. It is not you, either. People trust other customers above everything else. They’ll look for referrals and ratings before they buy from a business they haven’t used before. Interestingly, only 11% of salespeople ask their customers for referrals. Around 91% of customers would be willing to give one if asked. 

That being said, your best way to convert leads to sales is through customer advocacy.

Find creative ways to share the feedback of existing customers with potential ones. Some of these are:

• Use referrals and references
• Make incentives to prompt people to share your content
• Ask them to create content to promote your brand
• Use influencers in your niche

If you learn to put happy customers to work in favor of your brand, this can increase your sales tremendously. 

Get Social

The power of social media is incredible – and growing more with every passing day. This isn’t the time to skip social media marketing or sales, not when the majority of your targeted audience is probably using at least one platform regularly.

If you want to boost your sales, use social channels to engage the audience. Post frequently, use social ads, communicate with your customers, and offer them sales via the platforms. These are all cost-effective ways to attract and convert your audience, so what do you have to lose?

Where will you start?

This guide might seem small considering that we gave you 6 tips. However, it is the exact opposite. If you implement these 6 tips into your business sales strategy, you will undoubtedly notice a boost in sales. Good luck!