4 Ways to Sell Smarter Without Working Harder

When you’re running a small business time is a precious commodity, and it can be difficult to decide what to prioritize when there are so many urgent tasks necessary to keep your operations going. One vital task that it’s easy to get bogged down in is sales. One survey found that 83 percent of small business owners are responsible for their company’s sales activities. And while 52 percent of businesses with five or more employees have workers who handle sales, in 69 percent of these cases the owner still does sales themselves as well.

One problem with this is that you can’t spend all day driving sales while still running the other parts of your business and growing your company. To grow your business beyond a certain point, you will need to adopt strategies for selling smarter instead of just selling harder.

Here are four strategies you can use to increase your sales efficiency so that you sell more while spending less time on sales.

1. Map Your Sales Process

A fundamental step towards improving your sales efficiency is mapping the steps in your sales process. Mapping your sales process allows you to identify each step in your procedure so that you can analyze, adjust, and optimize it.

According to marketing legend Brian Tracy, the sales process breaks down into seven key steps: prospecting, building rapport, identifying needs, delivering presentations, overcoming objections, closing sales, and generating repeat sales and referrals. You can use these seven generic steps as a framework for analyzing your own company’s customized sales process, which may have specific sub-stages within some of these steps. For instance, your prospecting process may involve capturing prospect information online and following up with email marketing prior to setting a sales appointment.

Once you know the exact steps in your sales process, you can evaluate how each stage might be done more efficiently. For example, you might improve the need identification stage of your sales process by writing scripts with probing questions to help identify prospect needs more quickly.

2. Hire Sales Staff

In order to manage your sales process more efficiently, you may find it expedient to hire dedicated sales staff to perform one or more of the steps in your sales process. For instance, outsourcing some of your prospecting activity to outbound marketing specialists can increase the number of prospects you reach while saving you time. Hiring sales representatives with strong closing skills can improve your closing rate and boost your sales return on investment.

When hiring sales staff, it’s important to look for the right qualities in representatives. Effective sales representatives are highly motivated, goal-oriented, and hard-working, in addition to having a good grasp of the sales process. You will attract the best candidates with a strong compensation package which includes rewards for exceptional performance.

3. Leverage Sales Technology

You can increase the efficiency of your sales processes and personnel by leveraging sales technology. Sales technology allows you to automate routine parts of your sales process so that you can handle more prospects in less time and with greater closing efficiency.

The most important piece of sales technology you can adopt is customer relationship management (CRM) software. CRM software provides a digital interface that allows your sales team to access prospect account information from any mobile device. This can provide valuable data that makes it easier to close sales and extend appealing upsell and cross-sell offers. CRM software can also make it easier for your sales manager to coordinate scheduling of your team’s activity. To get the most out of your customer relationship management tool, schedule Infor CRM consulting services training to train your sales team in advanced CRM applications.

4. Prioritize Qualified Leads

One useful application of CRM software is allowing you to use analytics to identify your hottest prospects. By comparing your ideal buyer profile with data for individual prospects, your CRM tool can determine which prospects are most likely to buy. You can then delegate your best sales representatives to focus on closing your hottest prospects.

This application of CRM is one example of how prioritizing qualified leads can help make your sales process more efficient. Another way to focus on qualified leads is by building a profile of your ideal customer based on your current customer base. This can help you attract social media prospects who are already pre-qualified into your buying funnel, increasing the efficiency of your marketing and sales efforts.

Mapping your sales process, hiring sales staff, leveraging sales technology, and prioritizing qualified leads are four fundamental strategies for improving your sales efficiency. Implementing these strategies can empower your business by allowing you to make more sales with less personal effort so that you have more time to spend on running and growing your business.