No matter your brand, business, industry, or product, your goods won’t sell themselves. Effective sales strategies are crucial for your business’s success in any market.
The United Consumer Financial Services team outlines our top ten tips for ensuring successful sales performance from your team in 2024.
1. Back to Basics: Hire the Right Team
The pursuit of successful sales numbers begins long before the first customer interaction. Quality salespeople are the foundation of successful sales performance.
Hiring the right talent is step one in building your sales department. Look for team members with hard and soft skills that will enable them to engage customers and make sales. And remember, your team members must be just that: team players. Your sales team members work individually to contribute to the collective success of your company. Sales talent must be willing and able to work hard, be accountable, and always want to achieve more.
2. Create a Culture Your Team Wants to Emulate
The culture of your business will shape your sales team. Your responsibility (and a valuable opportunity) is to create a culture for your team to emulate.
Company culture trickles down from the top. Whatever values you set in leadership will flow to your teams, including your sales teams. Build a culture your salespeople want to support and can get excited about. Healthy, sustainable, and attractive company cultures help retain top talent while pushing your teams to perform their best.
3. Invest in Sales Training
The best salespeople are constantly learning to do better, reach higher, and make more and bigger sales. Seeing success on the metaphorical sales floor is predicated on effective sales training for your teams.
Sales training equips your team to achieve successful sales performance. Even if you have consistently high-performing talent, regular sales training empowers them to excel further, providing them with new insights and perspectives that help them sell more effectively.
4. Create Sales Strategies for Your Unique Audience
Sales is not a one-size-fits-all approach. To make more sales, you must know your audience, their pain points, and how to present your product, good, or service as their ultimate solution.
Shoppers expect personalized buying experiences. Creating sales strategies that cater to your unique audience is essential for your salespeople to sell more. Personalization in sales allows you to highlight needs and position yourself as the answer shoppers want.
5. Implement Rewards Programs that Increase Order Values
Loyalty programs incentivize consumers to shop often and increase the value of their purchases. A robust rewards program compels shoppers to spend before they ever speak to a salesperson, with one study finding that purchases increased by 20 percent thanks to loyalty programs.
The same study found that customers with the opportunity to earn instant rewards spent nearly 70 percent more in the next two weeks than customers who didn’t receive the same incentives. And while customers who spend more earn high rewards and incentives, loyalty programs motivate lower-spending customers even more than higher-spending shoppers.
Rewards programs motivate shoppers to come through your doors, shop often, and spend more. They’re a universally effective method to ensure successful sales performance for your business.
6. Set Concrete, Achievable Goals for Your Sales Team
Create sales targets for your team to strive toward. The best sales talent is motivated by goals –– and often works to surpass those goals. By setting concrete goals for your team, you communicate expectations and standards and inspire your teams to go above and beyond.
As you consider sales goals, keep them realistic and achievable. You want sales goals that push your team to perform while maintaining realistic expectations. When your teams hit their goals, they’ll gain confidence and be further motivated to work harder and sell more.
7. Make Data-Driven Sales Decisions
Your sales data should inform your sales methods and strategy. Sales performance analytics show you where you’re succeeding and what needs reworking. Evaluating data ensures your sales team operates cohesively so you can see higher numbers.
The following are a few sales metrics to track and manage:
- Sales Content Usage
- Sales Training Completion
- Sales Cycle Length
- Sales Quota Attainment
- Sales Pipeline Coverage
- Conversion Rates
As you can see, sales data begins before the first customer touchpoint. Making data-driven sales decisions ensures your team works efficiently and effectively, using your resources best.
8. Create a Personal Development Plan
Corporate training is an effective method to ensure your sales team utilizes company-specific sales strategies. But creating individual evaluations and goals is also essential to ensuring your salespeople perform at their best.
Create a personal development plan for your team members. These plans are living documents that outline skills the members of your sales team need to work on.
Each month, highlight one or two skills that need improving, then update the plan with the steps taken to build those skills. A personal development plan provides clear directives that enable sales talent to enhance performance and sell more.
9. Reward Results
The best sales talent is propelled by intrinsic motivation. But the reward for exceptional performance is always welcomed.
Draw attention to top-performing salespeople. Reward them for their hard work. Highlighting a job well done affirms the value you place on your sales team and motivates them to work even harder. Plus, it incentivizes other sales team members to go above and beyond to increase their performance.
10. Compel Purchase with Consumer Financing
Even the most effective, seasoned sales talent will have difficulty selling a product to an individual who doesn’t have the capital to purchase it. Bringing home big-ticket items can seem impossible to many without a credit card or lump sum cash.
But when you offer payment plans to your customers, you make purchases possible. Consumer financing through United Consumer Financial Services empowers shoppers to buy the products they want –– when they want them –– without disrupting their planned spending.
Financing makes big-ticket purchases accessible, allowing your salespeople to see higher performance numbers.
Equip Your Sales Team with the Tools They Need to Win
Many factors contribute to the success of your sales team. By providing your salespeople with the tools, training, and resources they need to close the sale, you can ensure a successful sales performance every time.
Contact the team at UCFS today to learn how our financing services can help you achieve higher sales starting today.