You may have learned a little about what sales enablement is and found out that it is quite...
Did you know that only 1% of traditional cold calls result in meetings? Or that over 90% of B2B decision makers don’t answer cold sales calls?
Cold sales calls aimed at everyone, with randomly selected offers, no longer work as well as they did before. If you and your employees still do cold calls, it's time to hang up the phone and put yourself into a more modern sales process that is tailored to the modern buyer.
Does the sales team think it's hard to close enough deals? Then you may need some help with the sales process.
5 signs that you need help with the sales process
1) The sales department is constantly calling more people, but the sales still go down
You don’t really understand why your product doesn’t sell, or why salespeople performed so much better before. In order to sell, it is essential that you know why prospects don’t buy from you – or choose not to buy again.
Part of the inbound sales methodology is to analyse your customers buyer’s journey and look at which leads become customers, and which don’t. With this analysis, you will have more insight and therefore more information, which you can use to close more deals.
You’ll also be able to map out what needs to be done to close more deals. Using an external agency for this analysis may be beneficial.
Why? Because a fresh take on the situation can help you see things in a new light.
Read more about the inbound sales methodology here.
2) You don’t know who it really is you’re trying to sell to
The very first thing you need to know in order to close more sales (apart from the product or service you offer) is who you actually want to have as a customer.
You need to understand customers’ concerns, what can stop him or her from buying, what motivates them to buy, and how the person thinks. This is why sales and marketing go hand in hand.
Through using a form, you can collect information about current leads stored in HubSpot. Once the leads are all warmed up and cosy, they are sent from the marketing department to the sales department, with a wealth of information about their interests and needs.
This is the biggest advantage of the sales and marketing department working together, just like inbound sales enablement.
3) Your company's current sales process is: Always close deals
Today's customers don’t want to buy just any product or service, they want to buy the product or service that best meets their needs. Thus, customers have become more observant of what they really need and often know a lot more about what to buy when they make a purchase.
In order to be able to sell to the customer, you must have the same mindset: You should not sell to Peter because he is looking for the product your business happens to be selling, but because your product will solve his problem in the best possible way.
We repeat; solve the customer's problem!
You as a salesperson must change the mentality of "Always selling" to "Always helping.” In other words: inbound sales.
An inbound agency who are familiar with sales enablement and focuses on customers’ needs as a sales philosophy, will help you in the process of getting into this mentality. They know how to ask the right questions in order to map the customers’ needs.
4) You have a contact database with hundreds of names, but you don’t remember who is who – and who’s most interested in what you offer
If you don’t have control over the database, you don’t know which leads are the warmest and therefore whom you should prioritise first.
With HubSpot, all information about leads is stored on their contact card including everything from demographic data to activities they conduct, via web and email.
Inbound sales also focus buy. By using lists, you can also categorise leads according to interests and other factors. An inbound agency can help you set up all these systems and help you keep control of the contact page.
You can read more about this in our article about HubSpot and all the possibilities this software offers.
5) The customer never hears from you again as soon as you’ve closed the deal
Upselling will usually always be more profitable than constantly adding new prospects. Therefore, this is the stupidest thing you can do: to break all contact with a customer as soon as he or she has signed the contract.
An inbound agency can help you set up systems for follow-up of customers. Using automation of the HubSpot sales process, you can create templates and set up automated email sequences that is sent to customers after they’ve been customers for a selected period of time.