Are you thinking of changing up your sales strategies? Or maybe looking for more ways to help improve your sales? Technology and digital marketing practices help bring about many opportunities for salespeople, if only they are properly leveraged.

In this blog post, I’m going to share 4 useful sales strategies to help you improve your company sales.

Try value-based selling instead

What do you focus on when selling products or services? The features they bring, what benefits they have?

One other way to sell is to focus on the value your product/service brings to a specific client. Basically, you need to learn everything about their business, how it runs, what their needs are, and what their issues are so that you can then put together a tailor-made proposal that will show them how you can help them achieve their business objectives.

The big difference between focusing on value rather than benefits is that you’re effectively personalizing your sales pitch to specific needs – something that is happening more and more throughout marketing strategies too (like content marketing, email marketing and automation, website content, and so on).

Don’t forget about sales enablement

In order to grow sales, you need to invest in your salespeople. And that’s what sales enablement is: helping your sales team become more efficient and successful by giving them the tools and knowledge they need to improve their productivity. This can mean both the tools salespeople need for themselves to use internally, and also the resources they need for their conversations with prospects and the content they need for potential buyers.

But, while sales enablement sounds simple enough – providing your salespeople with the right information and tools – implementing it is not that straightforward as it can be different for everyone.

To help, you can use a sales enablement platform; for example, tools like MindTickle can help through every stage of the process, from onboarding and training to progress updating and measuring success. You can pretty much automate onboarding and coaching specifically for each salesperson’s role and measure results as you go along – and, also worth mentioning, all of this can be done on the go with mobile apps too, so your salespeople will be just as efficient while on the field too.

Another useful platform is Repsly, which is a sales CRM tool built with sales enablement in mind. Like MindTickle, there is a sales enablement mobile app as well where salespeople can get access to all the tools and information they need to sell (such as their full customer history). And, among other features, you can also track your sales team’s performance so you can further optimize your sales strategy.

Improve sales with social selling

Social media can be an incredibly powerful sales tool if leveraged. It’s not only a great way to connect with your audience and customers directly, but it also helps you generate more leads for your business, shortens the time it takes to nurture your leads and prospects, and overall, helps improve your ROI.

However, social media is usually the (digital) marketing team’s playfield. And, in many cases, there is little collaboration between marketing and sales teams.

There are several ways that you can leverage social media for selling and it all starts with an established social media presence: i.e. posting new content regularly, on a daily basis, and engaging with other users.

Beyond that, follow these tips to help you get started with smart social selling:

  • Post a mix of different types of content that is targeted to your different audience personas. This way, you can generate leads and nurture them by providing them with content that they want to read/hear/see or better yet, content that helps them solve a problem. Use tools like Buzzsumo to search for content and Feedly to keep track of different publications, relevant news, and other useful content from your niche/industry

  • Use social media monitoring: monitor relevant keywords related to your business and your products or services to discover conversations and potential leads which you can then follow and engage with.
  • Monitor leads and prospects so that you can engage with them and nurture them into becoming customers
  • Use LinkedIn (or get a LinkedIn Pro account for more options) to search for companies, prospects, learn about them, and connect with them. As an alternative to Pro accounts, there’s also a LinkedIn tool dedicated to salespeople, the LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which lets you create more in-depth lead and company searches:

Use content marketing to create content for every stage of the buyer journey

Another marketing practice that can help you improve your sales is content marketing. Content is particularly great at generating leads and nurturing them, but can be used in a variety of ways to help improve your overall sales.

Create content for each stage of the buyer journey in order to move leads faster along the funnel:

  • The awareness stage (top of the funnel): at this stage, leads are only just learning about you. Use educational content to offer them value and help solve one of their needs: e-books, how to guides, cheat sheets, research papers, and so on
  • The evaluation stage (middle of the funnel): in this second stage, the lead is already familiar with your brand and now, you need to show them how you can help them. Use content such as webinars, product demo videos, and case studies to help them “evaluate” your products and business
  • The purchase stage (the bottom of the funnel): content so far has helped you generate leads and nurture them. Now, how can you use content to give them that final push to convince them you’re the right choice? This is the perfect stage to send your prospects free trials of your products, as well as give them a consultation to discuss their needs, or a live demo to not only show them how your product can help them, but also so you can personalize your pitch to their particular needs.

Conclusion

To sum up, we’ve discussed several different sales strategies and tactics in this article:

  • Using value-based selling to deliver personalized sales pitches
  • Using sales enablement to improve your sales teams’ productivity and overall results
  • Leveraging social media to improve sales and return on investment
  • Leveraging content marketing to improve sales and nurture leads

What are your preferred sales strategies and tactics? Which strategies have proven most successful in your personal experience?