Are we doing something wrong?
When we first set-up business, we created what we believed to be an amazing sales strategy. With our (supposed) fool-proof strategy, what we thought would be a smooth sales funnel, turned out to be a bumpy ride.
Our strategy of directly pitching our services to businesses to generate leads was a bust. And since this focused sales approach was our primary source for lead generation, our sales goals took a massive hit.
On analyzing our sales strategy, we realized that instead of generating leads, our efforts were:
- generating fewer responses from our target audience;
- being viewed as spam by our prospective clients;
- adversely affecting our monthly, quarterly and annual sales targets;
- holding us back from reaching the right people at the right time;
- causing us to miss out on potential customers.
Our sales team realized that things needed to change.
It was imperative to understand the problems in the existing sales strategy and create an improved strategy to overcome the shortfalls.
How to overcome the problem?
Having come face-to-face with the failure of the initial sales approach our sales team, through research and discussions, devised a 4-point system for a more comprehensive sales strategy:
1. Change approach:
The very first step to building a better sales strategy is to accept the need for change in the existing approach. Realizing that our direct approach strategy was not ideal to push sales in a market with multiple competitors was the eye-opener needed to start creating a new sales strategy.
We realized that instead of bombarding people with our sales pitches, we needed to trust the intellect of our prospective clients. We switched from a direct to a passive approach with our sales efforts by focusing on holding conversation rather than pitching our services.
2. Build trust:
In a market full of competitors, it is necessary to stand out among the crowd to be recognized. We realized we needed to have a competitive edge over our peers and discovered that one of the best ways to achieve that was by building authority and gaining trust of our potential customers.
We identified that our unique selling proposition (USP) was our thorough processes, transparency and consistency in quality of services. We therefore, leveraged these to give insight and build trust in our business which in turn helped us achieve better sales.
3. Get personal:
Understanding the actual problems and requirements of the customers helps in providing better products and services to customers and this results in creating a loyal customer chain.
By engaging in genuine conversations with our prospective clients and understanding their business model, we were able to identify their business challenges and explain to them how our expertise could help them in their digital transformation journey.
Receiving a positive response from this technique helped us to incline our email and messaging campaigns towards understanding customer concerns and providing the best solutions.
4. Show don’t tell:
Focus on creating a good customer experience rather than a great sales pitch as customers tend to respond better to personal experiences rather than wordy promises made in sales pitches.
Comprehending the importance of experience in sales we focused on visualizing the needs of our prospective clients and started working on providing quality content and showcasing our efficient processes to prove our expertise rather than sending long sales-y pitches to their inboxes.
Conclusion:
Many tech companies continue to rely upon cold messaging and email campaigns on different social and professional networking platforms to achieve sales. To meet a satisfactory sales target, it is important for businesses to shift from approach of the past and step into new-age sales campaigns that focus on building customer trust and solving the challenges arising in the customers’ business.
Any insights you’d like to share?
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