8 Habits of a Successful Sales Representative

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Sep 06 2017

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Sales is indeed a tough art to master and there are numerous pitfalls along the way. The belief is popular among 63% of the marketers that generating leads remains their top challenge. But if it is done right, the sky is the limit. The reason is simple for a successful sales guy. Sales are one of the few activities in a company that brings in immediate revenue.

Hence, it is crucial for a salesperson to do everything in his/her power in order to have a positive impact on the books.

Here are some habits that will help any sales guy take off with panache:

1) Know the Company Universe

Your company’s universe consists of the various prospects that meet your sales screening criteria. In other words, they are the ones that are worthy enough to reach out to.

A successful sales guy always tries to convert those prospects that fall under the purview of these criteria. Once you are well aware of what you are looking for, resources are utilized more effectively and the cost of converting a client goes down significantly.

And how do they know which prospect to pursue? By asking relevant and high-value questions to thoroughly understand the client’s buying needs. Here are some data heads that they generally pursue:

  • Country and City in which they operate in
  • Industry and size of the company
  • Products/services that they offer
  • Budget, revenue, and funding
  • Contacts of relevant decision makers

An experienced successful sales guy uses all these details to gauge the value of the company as a client.

2) Tracking: How to Track Prospects?

Once you finalize your targets, your job only begins here. An ideal salesperson keeps a consistent track of the companies to figure out the best time to reach out to them.

Some proven ways to track your prospects are:

  • Identifying and tracking the sales cycle stage the prospect is in, namely awareness, consideration or decision stage.
  • Scoring the leads on the basis of the various details the salesperson knows about them.
  • Understanding the pain points of the prospects
  • Creating customized pitches for each of them
  • Activities of the decision makers
  • Any reported shift or change in the decision makers

Hence, not only does a good salesperson know the basics about their prospects, but they also know what to look out for in them specifically.

3) Take Measurable Efforts

Measurable efforts can easily be repeated since the process can be broken down into specific actions. Hence, the salesperson can understand the various steps involved in lead generation and even identify the weak points that can be improved to optimize the processes even further.

Such a system is effective mainly in cases when the salesperson is not able to convert the leads into viable customers.

For example, he/she might find that the sales pitch being used is not effective enough to land every type of client. Hence, the solution can lie in customized sales pitches for every client identified in the buyer’s persona.

4) Personalized Emails: How do They Help?

An ideal salesman should be well aware of the pros that personalized emails have to offer. While bulk emails address the email list as a whole, personalized emails aim to bridge a connection with the prospects by utilizing the background information that they have about them.

Thus, such emails have a much better open and click-through rates and help the salesman to get in touch with a greater amount of prospects, hence leading to higher conversions and revenues. For example, statistics suggest that the open rate for a personalized email stands at 17.6% on average, compared to 11.4% for bulk emails.

5) Follow Up

Many salespeople do not lay any emphasis on following up. They simply send out the emails to a bunch of people and assume that the ball is not in their court anymore. This can be gauged from the fact that 38% of the salespeople say that getting a response from clients is becoming increasingly difficult.

This should not be the mindset of a successful sales guy.

He needs to be consistent and follow up since it is as much important as reaching out to the client in the first place.

What one needs to understand is that the prospect might have genuinely missed the opportunity to read your email. Some may have read it with a view to reply later, only to forget about it as the day progressed.

A follow-up email will remind them about the proposal and will increase the odds of a reply, thus improving conversions.

6) Email Tracking: Why it pays to Track Emails?

Tracking your emails is the best way to gauge the performance of your email campaigns. They tell you about the number of receivers who read your emails as well as the ones who click on your CTAs. Such crucial insights help salespeople to optimize their efforts even further.

For example, if it is found that the read count stands only at 10%, it is indicative of a weak email subject/headline since it is the first thing about your emails that the readers see in their inboxes. On the other hand, if there is a high discrepancy between your read count and CTR, your email body may need to be more convincing.

Hence, email tracking will only help you improve the quality of your campaigns and allure more prospects to check out your offerings.

7) Understand Customer Woes

There is something common between listening to the woes of your customers and driving more sales. Still, 40% of sales guys fail to understand the pain points of their customers.

True sales lie in talking less, asking a lot of intelligent questions, and understanding all about the requirements of the prospects. This helps salespeople to alter their pitches and present them to the customer in a way that makes him/her see real value in their proposal. Hence, a direct and personal connection is established. The relationship can now be nurtured to hook the customer to your services and boost the sales by getting repeat business.

8) Be Punctual

It makes no sense to focus on other things if the sales folk lack the discipline to implement them in the first place. They need to be punctual with their day to day agendas and follow them religiously in order to meet their sales targets.

Consistency is the key to achieve goals. Here are some disciplinary metrics that should be tracked:

  • Time of the day at which the emails are sent
  • The average time is taken to reply to inquiries
  • Number and stage of follow-ups for each client
  • Analysis lead scoring for each client

So are you ready to join the group of successful sales guys? Do tell us about the sales strategies that you use to close clients in the comment section below. We would love to hear your view!

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