Do you feel that your sales team can further maximize their potential? If you are a person of authority, it may be important for you to get the best from your workforce by motivating, coaching, rectifying and reporting in order to improve your sales.

However, did you know that research suggests over a trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000) is spent annually on sales? {Source: The Brevet Group}. It’s no wonder that companies are equally (if not more) focused on the processes as well.

Your sales process is a sure-fire way to get your prospects to become customers in a more efficient way. Let’s take a quick look at 5 things to get your sales process to further work in your favor:

1 – Make A Sales Playbook

A sales playbook is important for creating a track, which your sales force will abide by. This doesn’t mean that your sales people cannot be innovative – rather that they have certain parameters.

It can be a simple presentation that includes:

• Sales strategy reminder E.g. A product which is new to the market may require a more descriptive sales representative (SR) who can handle FAQ’s too.
• Contains important internal sales metrics E.g. Past data, keywords used and results from using them, etc
• Closing Sales E.g. SOP’s for closing sales, this function can even reduce the cost associated with training.

2 – Outsource And Hire A Lead Generation Company

A lead generation company may be the best thing that could happen for your sales team. Basically these kinds of companies provide you a clean list of contacts with the relevant info. This allows your sales team to focus on the right target market.

Certain companies will even handle your outbound emailing and get leads for you. This is what drives efficiency and helps improve your sales.

Did you know that according to a study by Marketo, revenue can increase by 130% by implementing this in your sales process. The crunch of the matter is that sales representatives should focus only on calling and approaching the customer, not searching for them.

Getting quality prospect lists is not so common because some overcharge and misuse the customer’s lack of knowledge. Therefore, it is important to know whom you are partnering with. It is also important to ensure that your database is up to date in order to ensure that your sales team is working effectively.

3 – Implement The “At Least Five Nos” Follow up Strategy

Let’s get a little statistical over here, 92% of SR’s stop at the fourth “No”. Furthermore, at least five follow-ups account for up to 80% of sales. There is also a science behind this.

The reason is that a modern SR is utilizing this part of the process to learn about the prospect more. As the SR understands the prospect better, so does their approach, hence better responses.

Sometimes a reply may create a new avenue for the fifth time and the recipient may have had some kind of misconception about your company.

4 – Add Interactive Mediums To Improve Your Sales

This may not come as unexpected but as the world shifts more towards digital, so must our tactics.

The feeling of making a personal connection with someone is still important and that essence will never go in sales – it just evolves.

Here are some examples of how you can interact with your prospect:

• E-Meetings: Invite prospects to attend a Free Podcast or Webinar, which tells them about a topic of interest.
• Live Skype product sessions: Why not invite your prospect to attend a live session where your product/service is explained, it could answer some important questions.
• Referral: If that prospect and you know someone mutually you can even interact through that person. This way you can give an indirect personal touch to your sales approach.

5 – Embed Referrals To Improve Your Sales

Don’t shy away from referrals. While asking your customers or prospects for referrals can sound annoying, if done right, it can be extremely fruitful.

An introduction or referral can be priceless – the ‘two for a price of one’ concept strongly applies here. There are two instances in which this can happen:

1) Your customer loved your product/service so you ask him for a referral (based on experience) and they do just that.

2) Your prospect doesn’t buy your offering but identifies it as a need so you can approach them to refer to someone who may be in need. To upgrade this process you can implement an offer like 15% off for both parties after a successful referral.

So, if you are in a sales director or senior position managing sales, it will be easy to make a targeted and refined sales process. However, it is important to remember that the process needs to work for you, not the other way around.

What’s also important is targeted data because getting a good list of prospects is like fuel for your sales team.