21 Sales Actions to Win Big in 2021
I present to you the entire list of 21 Sales Actions to Win Big in 2021 that I have been sharing the first 21 days of January 2021.
This is a list of sales actions that vary between advice to sales management to help their sales team succeed to useful sales processes, sales engagement, or sales tools for individuals with a sales role.
The sales actions are aimed to help account managers, sales people and independent professionals running their own businesses increase their conversion rate and success at landing more business and orders.
Whether you are a sales manager or a professional with a sales role, study and follow these tips and watch your sales performance increase.
21 Sales Actions to Win Big in 2021:
- Increase client retention through touch points.
Create a mailing list and send out anything that inspires, educates or promotes your services in a consistent frequency.
If that is not available, simple calls or simple emails make your clients feel remembered.
2. Forget about cold calls. Create warm calls.
How?
Connect on Linkedin, Offer some advice by email, congratulate them on an achievement to build connection and then, and only then ask permission to schedule a call.
3. Do something every day towards your goal.
Whether it be building an aspect of your business or of your client relationship, doing one thing, even just 10 minutes each day, that gets you closer to your objective helps your subconscious align with what you really want.
Repetition!
4. Consider long term coaching.
Rome was not built in a day. If your expectation is that you or your team can make 180 turnaround in 3 weeks, you will be disappointed.
Seek to work with a coach for the long run, like 6 months, with practical assignments and feedback along the way.
5. When training your team, add coaching.
Even if you are not a coach, you can add coaching to your base training. Coaching opens up your audience’s potential and interest.
If you don’t know how to coach, add a slide to your training asking
How would you do this?
before you share how to do it.
6. Sell to your dead list.
Your dead list is an opportunistic place to revisit as these prospects were interested at one point. Maybe their current situation now needs your solutions? Incentivize your team with a healthy % commission to get in contact again and sell.
7. Map out your target customer’s biggest challenges and objectives.
You may think you know your customer’s buying drivers, but once you put pen to paper so many more surface.
Make a team workshop where you list target segments and write columns of their biggest challenges and objectives that you solve.
8. Stop selling services/products and sell outcomes.
People don’t care about what you are selling and only care about the outcomes your service or product results in.
When speaking about your solution, speak about transformation, outcomes and end results, not features.
9. Focus on customer renewals first.
Customer renewals cost less energy and time than acquiring new clients.
In your forecast, don’t forget your renewals that bring in revenue also.
Investigate what makes clients leave your brand and make sure you get them (and your future ones) to stay.
10. Map out your sales process from opportunity to close.
Once you map out your sales process you will see areas of redundancy and where another touch point is needed.
Build a lean sales process ensuring each step contains an objective and a commitment.
11. Decrease your sales cycle by removing repetitive meetings.
Why 2 discover meetings and why 3 demo meetings?
Chart out for your team the exact meetings that they need to close and keep it lean.
Show them the least number of meetings to close, and challenge them to achieve it.
12. Determine your objective and desired commitment of each sales meeting ahead of time.
Win a commitment from your prospect for EVERY sales meeting, even if it is a small one.
You will increase your client base faster. Don’t walk into a meeting wanting to build trust or rapport.
Ask for something that shows their commitment.
13. Train and coach your team weekly.
Add a session to your pipeline review to improve challenging scenarios your team is facing with training and coaching.
Coach them to find the answers and make it tailored to their own selling circumstance.
Then share how you would do it.
14. Don’t forget the timeline questions.
Getting delayed by your prospects?
Ensure each meeting has a timeline question.
When do you want to achieve this? Or when do you want to solve this?
These questions will save you hours of grief.
15. Align your Product with your Prospect and your Process.
Becoming customer-centric means adapting your product and process to your market.
The “best product/service” that doesn’t solve a problem or help a measurable objective will sit on the shelf.
If you are not receiving positive responses to your pitches, pivot your product.
16. Sell the gap between your customer’s current situation and desired situation.
Once you adopt this perspective, your discovery will get deeper and you will stop pushing and start providing options and help your prospect make decisions.
This is a big one to digest!
17. Let the process replace continuous advice.
Create a Sales Tool Kit for your current (and more importantly future) team as an evergreen reference for all areas of your client acquisition and renewals.
A well- written process can save you hours of repetitious training.
18. Helping attitude is better than selling attitude.
Always be Closing by helping your prospect or current client make a decision. That decision can be based on your options.
A sales philosophy of helping vs pushing will eliminate rejection and increase the trust between both parties.
19. Eliminate common objections ahead of time.
Workshop idea is to create a joint list of common objections from 2020 and work together to come up with ways to eliminate them ahead of time through questions or in your solution presentation.
20. When they don’t buy, find out why.
“What is your hesitation?” and “Why?”
are the best questions to ask after an objection is put on the table.
Ask those questions until you get to the root cause and then solve the problem.
21. Stay optimistic.
Your thoughts control your behavior. Your behavior controls your actions. Your actions control your results.
Get to the root of it - do what you can to keep your thoughts optimistic.
My anticipation is that these sales actions have fueled your sales performance. Want to discuss further? Drop me a line.