Daniel Vaczi
I think we can all agree that a salesperson's time is their most valuable asset. I’ve been in sales longer than I can remember, so I know very well from experience just how much a salesperson’s effectfiveness can suffer by limiting their productivity and misusing their time.
Here are three time-saving tips to help you maximize the use of your time and close more sales in the process.
1. Educate Your Target Market Through Content Marketing
Prospecting can be the most time consuming part of a salesperson’s job. What you need is a mechanism that is sure to attract the right prospects your way. Most of your target market wants to do business with someone that is recognizable and that is great at what they do. They seek out knowledgeable industry leaders that they can trust to solve their problems. Creating blogs, ebook, presentations, videos and other forms of content is a great way to achieve this and showcase your leadership in your respective industry.
If you cringe at the thought of writing, don’t despair; there are other creative ways to achieve the same goal. For instance, you can start a video blog series featuring a tip of the week -- something brief and catchy, but more importantly, offers valuable insight that highlights your extensive knowledge in your industry.
Upon creating content, remember to focus on real issues that matter to your target market and how they can overcome them. Don’t be afraid to share real industry knowledge. Don't worry about losing prospects that will take the information to try to execute it on their own. Trust me when I say, you don’t want to waste your time with them anyway.
Educating your target market will help you attract a qualified prospect that already sees you as an expert. You will have a shortened sales process and you'll have more time allotted for reaching out to the right prospects, increasing your closing rate significantly along the way.
2. Marketing Automation
Using a marketing automation tool to help you stay in touch and nurture your leads down the sales funnel. For example, if your prospect downloaded a piece of content like an ebook or white paper, this action could trigger the marketing automation.
Instead of harassing each of the leads with a phone call, you can nurture your leads with valuable emails that position you as a thought leader while building a relationship with them in the process. These emails will be dripped out over time and include call to actions that lead to other content offers and opportunities further down the sales cycle (e.g. schedule an appointment, make a purchase, etc.).
3. Lead Scoring
I think we all can agree that the biggest waste of time for a salesperson is pursuing the wrong lead. Don’t let this happen to you by relying on mere trial and error. Take advantage of lead scoring tools that will allow you to find out which leads are the most engaged with your company's offering.
A basic lead scoring system will be able track who engages with your emails, if they convert on any offers or downloadable content, if they click through to your website and which specific pages they view. The system will give a score to each based on their engagement. You can then choose to follow up with the most engaged prospects who are most likely to convert into profitable clients.
Employing these three elements will help you attract, convert and follow up with sales opportunities in a more efficient manner. Follow these steps and you will be optimizing your time for peak performance -- pursuing the right leads at the right moment, while building relationships with the rest of your prospects.
