Get In The Habit of Building Revenue

The sales team is the life-breath of any company, they are the individuals who bring in business using their experience, personality, and their innate ability to match the right solutions with the right customer. As a result, they are always looking for new ways to continue to improve their sales strategies. This ensures that they can always perform at their best to achieve their sales goals. One tried and true way to assist your sales team is to teach them habits that will help them to build revenue.

Steps To Improve

Some of your sales teams may already be taking steps to improve by taking online courses, reading blogs, listening to podcasts, or consulting a mentor. While these are all great, your sales team should really focus on how to improve their revenue building.

While money isn’t everything when defining a great salesperson, it is tangible, and universally accepted proof of their success. Consider what motivates each individual salesperson on your team. Is it winning against competitors? Outperforming peers? Or simply making lots of money? Whatever their motivator a successful salesperson means increased revenue and revenue-building is an important aspect of every company.

Here are five revenue-building habits that your sales team should know:

 1. Check Metrics Daily

There is so much that can be learned by simply looking at the data. Therefore, if your team members check their sales funnel data daily they will be able to identify what went well and where there are opportunities available that they can take action with. It will also identify where things may be going wrong allowing them to catch the issue early and begin to correct their course.

A CRM integration will allow your sales team to clearly see how many calls and face-to-face meetings were held that day as well as where each prospect is in the sales funnel. This allows the team to make informed decisions to optimize their sales process.  Stick with the most important performance metrics, and keep the list short.  Too many metrics can quickly create “white noise” and dilute the focus on what is most important.  Often three or four key performance indicators are adequate for salespeople.  Be quantitative, consider trend direction, and compare your performance against realistic goals.

2. Track Your Competitors

As we have discussed data plays an essential role in your business and in your sales cycle. In keeping with that, we come to our next habit. Your sales team shouldn’t just be tracking customers and opportunities but they should be tracking their competitors as well. It is sometimes referred to as competitive intelligence. One effective and simple way to monitor success versus competitors easily is to start by ensuring that you track all competitors that you are up against on every opportunity you enter in the CRM.

Tracking this information will help you to establish your historical win ratios when certain competitors are in the mix.  It will also help you to research the steps taken and critical success criteria that led to past wins.  Imagine having empirical data to rely on when deciding on whether to participate in the next RFP you receive.

3. Qualify the Best Lead and Pursue the Best Opportunities

The most annoying scenario for a salesperson is spending inordinate amounts of time with a potential customer who can never seem to make a decision resulting in a deal that never closes. Avoid this by getting in the habit of checking your sales pipeline for the most qualified leads.

If you start pursuing leads based on quality then it will be much more likely that you will have leads that are primed to buy.  If you don’t have a reliable way to filter for lead quality in your CRM today, talk to your CRM consultant about this challenge, and work out a solution.  Using lead scores that rely on activity level, or progress through a sales process methodology is a good start.

4. Upsell ASAP

Get in the habit of upselling…immediately. Don’t wait. Upselling is the best way to build revenue and the best products to upsell are the ones that are complementary to the product that is already being purchased. A CRM system will even help you to upsell more efficiently. If you can view purchase history and segment customers by product preference, you’ll be better equipped to know how to upsell to that particular client.

5. Follow-Up

Arguably the most important habit to adopt is the follow-up. While the task may be daunting depending on your region size, it is a task that will be well worth the effort. Prospects and customers want to feel valued they want to know that their business is important to you. Your sales team should touch base and when they do they should remember what last they spoke about with the client. They should even remember things like birthdays and anniversaries. Make things personal, foster a relationship.

Implementing

If you have many clients, it becomes nearly impossible to remember all of this information, so, implementing a good CRM system that can keep track of this information for you, and prompt you on when to act is critical.  Just as friends, family (and even distant acquaintances) have become remarkably adept at noticing your birthday since the advent of Facebook, a well implemented and managed CRM can help you to become remarkable at staying up to date with important checkpoints impacting your business relationships.

Prioritize Strategies

These are just a few of the habits from which your sales team could benefit but remember to prioritize the strategies that build revenue. Adopting a habit is hard so it may be wise to implement a tool that will make it easier. Consider CRM software to assist your team in streamlining your sales strategy to build more revenue.  Start out with a CRM evaluation to see which system will work best for your company.

If you’re in the process of selecting a CRM system, make sure that the system includes options for automating repeated processes, and data enrichment tools that automate data entry for new contacts.  We, salespeople, hate systems that increase the amount of data we need to enter, and we love systems that help us to stay focused on closing deals.

Happy Selling!

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