Sales leaders and business owners alike are all looking for the holy grail formula to business growth.
And sure, I could promise you the world and tell you this is it. But there are too many variables within a business for a single set of guidelines to make everybody rich and successful.
That being said, if you get the right balance between the trio of people, process, and technology, then you’re onto a winner.
In this blog, we’ll dive into some best practices for the sales growth trio, which will lead you to automate, scale, and innovate to drive more sales within your business.
There’s a reason why your people come first on this list. It’s all well and good having great processes in place, and top-of-the-range tech, but without the talented people in your sales team to make it happen, none of it means squat.
If your company culture is focussed on motivating and empowering your team, then they will return the effort ten-fold. Motivation, productivity, and helpfulness aren’t something you can drum in completely though - they are skills that must come naturally.
These skills will play a huge part in personalising one-to-one connections with your prospects and customers. There are tons of stats that indicate the value of personalisation to attract and sell to customers - this is something that cannot be machine-learned with complete warmth and reliability (at least, not yet).
According to Entrepreneur, some of the most in-demand characteristics for salespeople include respectfulness, conscientiousness, persistence, positivity and resourcefulness. If you find these salespeople, hang onto them tightly. They will be essential for your sales growth for years to come.
Modern selling is no longer centred around how salespeople sell, it’s about how people buy. You’ll be wasting time if you’re just relying on your salespeople to jump on the phone without any prior plan.
Your process needs to be put through its paces, and moved from mere ideas mentioned in meetings into steps that your team know, understand, and can execute with consistency.
You will need to be clear on:
Modern buyers can now find most of the information needed about a product or service before even speaking to a salesperson, so you will need to refine your inbound sales process. A typical process looks much like the one below.
Our blog on what inbound sales is will help you understand further how this ‘always be helping approach’ can lead to more sales and more revenue.
It’s naive to think that, these days, a collection of spreadsheets will ‘do the job’ when it comes to selling to new customers.
Typically, this will result in leads being followed up too much (or not enough), and ‘hot’ prospects being completely ignored.
Luckily, sales automation systems and powerful CRMs can track, automate, and provide complete visibility over your prospects. It’s an essential tool in your sales technology stack and one that is growing more essential for the personalised sales experience that the modern buyer craves.
With a CRM and sales tools such as Hubspot sales, your team will be able to personalise and contextualise outreach using key insights to uncover more opportunities and accelerate sales growth. Not only that, but smart reporting tools will enable you to see where you’re going right and wrong.
So which part is lacking: your people, processes, or technology?
For sales growth and results, all three need to be synchronised. However, to empower your team, you need to have the right sales toolkit in place to reach your customers.
The key is working backwards - by understanding how your buyers buy, you can create the right strategy and invest in the right software to make it happen.