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Influencers Invited Sales Blog

2 of 5 Sales Tips

Tip #1 – Know your customer!

You can never know too much about your prospects, customers, or clients. It’s important that you do your research regularly when it comes to your prospect or customer:

1. Research all public information about the company, industry, client base and/or individual.

2. Research your competition and how you counter their weaknesses. Be prepared to communicate the value and how your product or service could benefit them.

3. Be prepared to walk-away if its not a win for both sides.

Identify trends and changes in the market. We live in a world where sales trends are changing all the time. The lack of information about the trends of your prospects and customers can be a serious disadvantage to your success. Today’s technology makes it easy to instantly identify changes in both your overall market and in the desires and buying preferences of your prospects. This knowledge will support your overall confidence when communicating with your prospects or customers.

It’s important that you reach out to your prospects and customers to know how they are responding to your marketing, services, products, promotions, etc. If you don’t know how your strategy or execution are working in the real world, then it makes it impossible for you to leverage your success or move away from unproductive sales strategies.

Tip #2 – Know your statistics/ Track your activities — ROI.

You don’t have to be a math or data wizard to monitor your sales efforts or investments. Tracking will uncover your weaknesses, which you can then overcome and turn into strengths. If you don’t track your activities, you won’t know where in the sales process your weakness lies. Furthermore, when asking for help, your mentor won’t know where to begin helping you. For example, you set 14 appointments, but have zero presentations, the problem is not that you did zero presentations; the problem is that zero out of the 14 appointments resulted in no presentations. The weakness uncovered is clearly that you need to work on how to turn appointments into presentations. Examples of what you can track:
* Direct Mail/Email Campaigns
* Dials
* Voicemails
* Connects
* Appointments Set
* Presentations
* Sales

A lot of companies utilize a type of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system to track sales efforts to results. If you or your company don’t have one in place, there are a multitude of CRM resources you can utilize online (i.e. ACT, Salesforce.com). By monitoring and tracking your investment of time and money to your desired results, you’ll know faster where you need to make changes to your sales plan or strategy

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