Sales is a harsh industry where professionals can win or lose fast! The pace of sales can be intimidating, and unfortunately, there is no surefire to succeed in sales. Industries, services and products all require a unique sales approach. Understanding how you can best prepare and analyse your performance will help you on the path to sales success.
How to Succeed in Sales
Although there is no set way to succeed in sales, there are some behaviours we can replicate across all products, services and industries. These include setting goals, knowing your customer persona, listening, answering questions and uncovering the needs of your potential customer or client.
Here are five ways to succeed in sales:
- Setting Goals
- Knowing Your Customer Persona
- Listening
- Ask Questions
- Uncovering the Needs of your Potential Customer or Client
Setting Goals: to understand whether you are succeeding in sales, you need to set measurable goals. Setting goals help to focus your efforts and provide motivation. Goals also help to evaluate your performance.
Knowing Your Customer Persona: Customer personas describe what your typical customer may look like, including what they value and what motivates them. Understanding the DISC profile of your customer is an effective way to help understand your customer's persona.
Listening: Leave your agenda at the door and be prepared to actively listen to the customer to overcome objections and answer any questions. Actively listening to your customer will help you identify their needs and pain points, allowing you to form the perfect pitch.
Ask Questions: Asking questions will further help you understand your customers' needs, diagnose their situations, and determine the best fit between their needs and your product or service.
Uncovering the Needs of Your Potential Customer: All the above points help you truly uncover your customer's needs. Successful selling is all about how you can best serve the needs of your customers.
How to Measure Sales Success
Sales metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are statistics that measure an individual's, team's or company's sales success. To measure sales success, you first need to define the Sales KPIs important to your business. KPIs will be different for each company. For some, deals won vs deals lost are essential, whereas revenue from existing customers or the average lifetime value of a customer is more important.
Here are some key metrics to measure sales success:
- Activity ratios - how many calls are made vs how many turn into qualified leads and schedule meetings.
- The number of qualified leads in your sales pipeline.
- Length of the sales cycle.
- Conversion rates over a set period.
- Deals won vs deals lost.
- Revenue from new business vs revenue from existing customers.
- The average lifetime value of a customer.
Once you've identified your key metrics, you'll need to find a way to track them. A sales dashboard or CRM is a great way to keep track of how you perform against your KPIs for large businesses. For smaller companies, keeping written records in the form of an excel sheet is a great way to track sales metrics.
Tips to Sales Success
While you may have all the skills required to succeed in sales, your success will be determined by how effectively you put these into practice. Here are our top five tips for sales success.
- Have an extensive understanding of your product or service offering
- Have a persistent follow-up
- Know when to walk away
- Become comfortable with rejection
- Engage in a sales assessment
Have an extensive understanding of your product or service offering. Salespeople need to believe in the product or service they are selling. Otherwise, how can they convince others of its value? A critical factor in belief in your product is your product knowledge. The more you know and understand the product, the easier it becomes to answer questions and overcome objections.
Have a persistent follow-up. Most of your prospective buyers will not make an immediate purchase decision. You cannot introduce your product or service and expect the prospective customer to decide to purchase without your assistance. Numerous salespeople fail to implement an effective strategy to follow up with prospects after sending a proposal. You can waste a lot of potential sales by not having a persistent follow-up.
Know when to walk away. Another one of our tips for sales success
is to know when to walk away. Sometimes we can spend too much time on non-qualified leads that are highly unlikely to convert. Knowing when to walk away from an unqualified prospect can help you spend more time on leads with more potential to become customers.
Become comfortable with rejection. You can't win them all, and you certainly won't land every deal. Learning to become comfortable with rejection is part of being in the sales industry. It's crucial to not dwell on lost prospects and learn how to improve and move on from denial quickly. Moving forward positively will help you land more significant and better deals.
Engage in a sales assessment. Supplement your development with an assessment such as the sales competence assessment. A sales assessment will enhance your success by introducing behavioural science into your performance. Ultimately this self-assessment will help you understand your most robust sales competencies and identify any underlying mindsets that create a roadblock to your success in sales.
Sales Success Profile
A sales success profile is a valuable development resource to help you understand your natural sales style and your customers' style. A sales success DISC profile will identify your natural strengths and development areas to help you focus on areas that can contribute to your success in sales. A DISC sales success profile also enables you to understand your customer's profile and how best to tailor your approach to ensure the most favourable outcome.
Success in sales is often determined by how well sales professionals interact with their prospective and existing customers. Top salespeople are confidently self-aware and able to communicate their sales pitches with little stress or pressure. These successful professionals understand their own DISC style and understand the DISC profile types of others. Their ability to effectively relate, communicate and influence is crucially important when selling and creating relationships with clients and prospects. They understand how they need to behave and interact to be successful.
Sales Managers can use a sales success profile to take proactive steps to help an employee understand their strengths and weaknesses. As well as how they need to adjust their style to effectively interact with others. Ultimately a sales success assessment can help a sales professional to succeed and thrive.
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