With an ominous start to 2020 – and no end in sight at least for now – many businesses are struggling to survive.
As such, even global companies have had to take drastic measures like letting go of staff to cut down costs and save on budget. This in turn has had a major impact on two factors: productivity and sales.
In other words, c-execs left with a smaller team now have to figure out how to increase sales for the next quarter, despite of circumstances like working from home, interrupted workflows, stress, etc.
Given the situation, we’ve compiled 4 steps that will not only help you increase sales and productivity, but also help you create a long term plan for a positive bottom line.
Let’s dive in.
Step 1 – Analyze Your Current Sales Campaigns And Outreach
It’s only natural that your regular campaigns are no longer working as they used to. For instance, the same content might not be giving you the open and reply rates that you used to get in your previous email campaigns.
But before you change anything, the very first step should be to analyze everything and extract data like:
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- The top three subject lines that used to work
- The top three drip campaigns that brought in the most results
- The titles that responded to your campaigns the most
- The time and days your campaigns were the most successful
- The CTAs that worked the best
- The level of personalization that your target market responds to
- The mediums that yield the best results (Email, LinkedIn or some other social media, etc.)
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Armed with this information, you can re-design your outreach strategy to focus on what works best.
Read: The Scoop On Email Personalization For Sales And Marketing
Step 2 – Include Sales Triggers In Your Messaging
In the first step, you’ve collected information on how to reach out to your target market effectively – and what they respond to.
For the second step, the idea is to compile all the successful messaging and re-work it according to the current situation. In simple terms, this means that you take content that has worked for you in the past and add the following:
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- New challenges based on personas: regardless of the industry you’re in or are targeting, you need to address what your prospects are going through at this moment. For instance, what challenges are they facing currently and how your product and service can help. Of course, it’s best to segment your messaging since this could be different for every persona that you’re targeting.
- Include new sales triggers: this one is fairly straightforward. In addition to including the challenges your prospects are facing (this is more at the macro level), you should also include sales triggers (this is based on an individual level). Simply put, these are ‘clues’ that your prospect is interested in buying or has entered the research phase. Remember, this could be something as simple as commenting on a particular post on LinkedIn.
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Another idea centers contact re-engagement – in other words, use relationships and connections for your outreach.
This way, your sales team can reach out to quality connections such as past customers or lost leads. Ask them their concerns post Coronavirus, the challenges they are facing and even if you can’t help directly, chances are that they will remember you in the future.
Step 3 – Outsource And Automate Lead Generation
With a smaller team – or a team that is unable to provide the same level of productivity given the current situation as before – you need to implement two things: outsourcing and automation.
In fact, these two can be combined for increased efficiency. In addition, when you outsource the many manual tasks that SDRs normally need to do, you automatically take the burden off them and allow them to do what they actually should – close deals.
Here’s how it works.
As SDRs need to deal with an ever increasing number of prospects and leads, it’s best to streamline their work through automation. This includes automating contact imports to your CRM through email or LinkedIn, moving contacts into different email sequences based on their response, etc.
However, this could potentially upset the balance between automation and personalization – but the perfect solution is outsourcing.
For instance, if you hire a virtual assistant for your sales team, they could be in charge of activities like:
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- Updating contact data lists with sales triggers
- Setting up new email sequences
- Uploading new content for emails
- Moving leads into different sequences (e.g. follow up in 3 months)
- Enrolling new contacts into email drip campaigns
- Monitor sales campaigns
- Set up appointments for your SDRs
- Manual outreach on LinkedIn with personalized messaging based on sales triggers, segmentation, etc.
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Remember, while there is a lot that you can automate, there are still tasks that need to be carried out manually. This is where a sales VA can help you save time and ease some of the workload off your small or overworked team.
Step 4 – Test New Platforms For Outreach
This is literally the best time to explore new platforms for lead generation – and we don’t just mean virtual platforms.
For instance, the lockdown has left us without much of human interaction. In this situation, it’s entirely possible that your prospects or leads will respond to an increasingly popular method of outreach – direct mail.
Similarly, you could start exploring less popular platforms (for lead generation) like Reddit or Quora. Yes, you will have to create an entirely new messaging that is more suitable for the medium you’re working on – but it’s still worth a try.
And that’s it for now – these are some of the ways that sales managers can support their team and increase sales despite the ‘new normal’ that we’re all experiencing. Remember, this is the right time to re-evaluate your campaigns and gear up for an uncertain future.
Cloudlead specializes in sales prospecting and B2B lead generation. We mine top of the funnel leads based on your ideal customer profile with sales triggers that help you close more deals than ever.
Want to learn more? Book a demo with us today.
