Written by Kira Grieve
Kira is a Senior Campaign Manager at The Selling Factory. Over the last year and a half, she has used her education (Double Gator from UF) and experiences from traveling to coach and encourage over 100 college/UF students on sales outreach, sales tactics and personal goals.
Have you ever thought about the success rate of sales professionals and realized that 74% of them fail? With only 26% of people succeeding at sales, finding the top sales tactics that actually complement your industry and focus has never been more important. Sales strategies aren’t universal.
If you aren’t working within the right culture for the strategy you’re trying to implement, the chances it will fail are high. If you don’t have the right resources to support the strategy you want to launch, the rate of failure is also high. The key is learning how to identify the best sales tactics for the results you want, the resources you have, and the message you are trying to deliver.
Keep reading to learn how to elevate your approach to the sales game and how to succeed with each pitch.
Your sales strategy isn’t only your avenue to a successful or failed attempt at lead generation; it’s also your opening for continuous revenue. Sales strategies are also great ways to elevate the skills of your team or yourself if you’re a one-man team because you can find watch strategies that match your skills best.
Of course, you have to match your strategy to your resources and your business model, but you want to make sure you can be consistent with it. When it comes to lead nurturing, the right approach will help you spot risks and find the most effective selling styles that match your audience and ways to improve your performance whether in the field or working remotely.
Learning some of the top sales tactics for your specific industry will make any type of selling simpler to close deals and plan around your future goals…you just have to know what the winning strategies are.
This form of selling is a winning strategy because you’re identifying the needs of those you’re pitching to. Not only are you showcasing what they need the most, but you’re also pitching the solution to their actual problem.
With this strategy, you are showing how your products or services will solve your audience’s pain points. Knowing the formula to succeed at solution selling can also help. The formula will look like this:
“Pain x Power x Vision x Value x Control = Sale”
Solution selling is often said to be one of the most complex types of selling, but if you know your audience, your product, and do your market research, it won’t be hard to master.
Challenge selling is very closely related to solution selling. However, with this method, you’re going to be focusing on actually ‘finding’ opportunities for your target audience. Consumers want to hear and see results rather than generic pitches.
Challenger selling is the way to do that and is a simple way to elevate your sales tactics while heightening the chance of securing more business. It might sound daunting at first, but this is a way to get the gears of your audience working because if you can prove you have a better option for them, they’ll often bite the bait.
Use your sales skills to ‘challenge’ what they are already doing and show them how your products or services will make them more efficient. To succeed at this, show them how you can save them money, how much time you can save them in their workflows, or how much closer your products will bring their teams together. Whatever your product does, pitch it and show why it’s better than their current methods.
We’ve all heard of cold calling and not many sales professionals like this part of the sales game. However, warm calling is a lot more approachable and successful. You might be asking, “How can I ‘warm call’ a prospect if I haven’t, cold-called them first?”
Well, while warm calling typically means that you are contacting someone you’ve had contact with before, you can generate those leads without calling them beforehand. Use organic or paid targeted marketing to do this. This is where market research comes in and you don’t want to skip it.
You can draw their attention without picking up a phone through email ads, general ad campaigns, and social media efforts. All of your ads should be designed to increase engagement, and when they engage, you can follow up ‘warmly’ because now, they’re expecting it.
Regardless of the selling styles you decide to use, never be afraid to mention your competitors when pitching yourself, products, or services. This doesn’t mean you need to pitch what your competitors can bring to the table. Instead, you want to find ways to make what you’re selling stand out from what both your direct and indirect competitors are doing.
This means customizing your sales pitch in a way that mentions something your competition is trying but that you do better. This could sound something like, “A lot of local businesses have been working with ‘company 2’ and have been seeing 10% ROI with their tactics. However, with my services, some of those same local businesses have seen a 25% ROI at a faster rate.”
The point is to center yourself as an industry leader and not be shy about it. This shows your confidence and that you’re knowledgeable about what you’re selling.
When you do this, ensure you have some form of visual proof. You can do this with a pitch deck or a snapshot of the actual back-end analytics of one of your clients. If you haven’t worked with anyone yet, rely on case studies and projections to sell and validate your claims.
Sales is hard, but it doesn’t have to be with the right sales tactics. If you know your audience and know what you’re selling, you’re already a step ahead. Sales isn’t complex, when you overthink it; that’s when the complexity comes in.
When you have the right tools to support your strategy and the right attitude, you’re likely to close deals without breaking a sweat. To take your selling approach to the next level, learn more with The Selling Factory.
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