Successful Selling, Successful Business: How to Lead Your Team Well into the New Year

It’s easy to get caught up in your day-to-day routine of checking emails, project management, checking emails, attending meetings and checking more emails. As a member of sales leadership, it’s your responsibility to take a step back and reexamine how you’re doing things. When was the last time you cleaned your contact database? Are you taking advantage (or even aware) of new sales tools? These routine jobs may be time consuming, but they’re necessary. Simply said, it’s time for Extreme Makeover: Sales Edition.

1.    Take Two: Look at the Customers POV

Do the messages on your website connect with your customers? Part of understanding your customers’ needs is communicating it to the customer. Avoid overusing the word “we” in any type of communication when describing your organization; instead exercise more customer-facing messaging. Successful businesses know how to market to customers so they clearly understand what the product can do for them. Here are several questions to ask when reevaluating your customer’s point of view:

  • Do you speak their language?
  • Do you anticipate and answer their questions?
  • Does your product fulfill the customer’s needs or solve their problems?

2.    Sort and Clean Databases

Don’t wait three years to scrub your database, make life easier for your team by doing an annual cleanse to remove duplicates, stale clients/prospects and organize sales stages. Here are five tips to keeping your database squeaky clean:

  1. Don’t waste space, identify duplicates and remove
  2. Set up alerts to be notified of duplicates so you can determine whether or not the contact is truly a duplicate.
  3. Get rid of inactive contacts
  4. Check for nomenclature uniformity (i.e. Business Name Inc., Business Name, Co.)
  5. Eliminate the junk or contacts with fake information. For example, some people will use false email addresses like asdf@hotmail.com.

3.    Take Advantage of Webinars for Lead Generation and Client Retention

Cost efficient and effective, webinars are a simple way to generate leads and maintain an active relationship with current clients. Webinars are an opportunity to display your industry expertise and increase brand awareness, as well as engage in conversation with prospects, customers or peers.

4.    Get Closer to Your Numbers

Digging deeper into your numbers and what they mean can help your team understand what is working, what’s not working and what areas need improvement. This is easier said than done. An article on Forbes.com says today’s successful companies are doing three things well:

  1. Use analytics to identify valuable opportunities
  2. Start with the consumer decision journey
  3. Keep it fast and simple by investing in an automated data system

What’s your strategy to staying on top of your team? If you can’t succinctly describe how your product/service helps your target customers, then you’re in trouble. Prospects can see fluff copy and messaging from a mile away—cut to the heart of your product’s benefits and you’ll be surprised how effective more targeted words and messaging can communicate to your customers.