How to use sales process optimization to increase profitability

An efficient sales process can be the difference between an organization that’s winning and one that struggles to achieve its monthly targets. I often speak with businesses that are good at generating leads but are unable to successfully convert them into paying customers. This is where a well-optimized sales process can help you in improving your conversion rates. In this guide, we will look at how you can utilize sales process optimization to increase your profitability.

Why should you optimize your sales process?

We see that many companies have started utilizing digital platforms for lead generation. Thanks to the intuitive one-step lead generation ads on social media channels like LinkedIn and Facebook, getting leads has become easier. However, because these companies don’t have a thought-out sales process or lead nurturing strategy, they fail to convert most of them into customers. Due to the non-optimal sales processes, many prospects lose interest and fall through the cracks.

For example, your marketing department successfully ran a lead generation campaign and gathered leads; but if the sales team does not follow up their SQLs properly, they will not be able to move these prospects further down the funnel and convert them into paying customers. Sales reps also need to be aligned with one another to ensure they work as a united front and don't approach the same prospect with the same repetitive pitch.

So, where do I start?

The best place to start is to look at your current lead generation process and your overall sales funnel. Map out all the different steps from your current lead generation and lead nurturing efforts. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Find out where the bottlenecks are in your sales process. In which stage of the process do most leads exit the funnel?
• Where does the customer land on the website?
• Do you have conversion elements for customers at different stages of the funnel?
• How are you complimenting your sales effort through email marketing?
• How do you retain existing customers or upsell to them?
• What channels are your competitors currently using that you are not?

Look at your website’s analytics to see areas that are performing well as well as those pages and sections that need improvement. Once you’ve mapped out the sales funnel for your prospects as well as new and existing customers, you will have to look at how you can optimize your sales to increase profitability. More on that in the next section...

In which ways can optimizing your sales process increase profitability?

Your chances of getting a sale become much higher when you ensure that you have a seamless experience in place for your (potential) buyers. First and foremost, you should focus on the value and benefits you can bring to your prospects. When thinking about increasing profitability, you need to look at what will make your prospects buy your products. Here are some of the ways in which optimizing your sales process can transform profitability:

1. Optimized Sales Process = Higher Conversion Rate. Having an optimized sales process will help you close more sales - it’s as simple as that. You want to avoid giving your prospects any unnecessary distractions if you want them to make the decision of buying from you.
2. Increase Efficiency. Decrease Time Wasted. Having a good structure and automation of processes in place will allow you to save time wasted on trivial things. It will also mean that certain tasks will take much less time to set up, such as sending out emails.
3. Increase Your Revenue, And Profit. With an optimized sales process in place, you will be making more sales and revenue. And because of the more efficient processes and less time wastage, you will have bigger profit margins.
4. Help Address Weaknesses. Thoroughly investigating your sales processes and creating an optimized sales funnel will also allow you to see exactly where the leads slip through the cracks and work on that specific part.

How do I optimize my sales process?

Now that you know the importance of optimizing your sales process, you must be wondering “how do I do this for my business”? Let’s look at some of the 5 main steps you need to follow when optimizing the sales process.

Step 1: Think about your ideal customer

Having a clear understanding of your ideal customer is an essential exercise in optimizing your sales process. You need to create a buyer persona for your top two or three customer segments. Think about their pain points, motivations, and things that they will value the most in a business.

Step 2: Use your buyer persona to finetune your lead generation effort

Once you’ve figured out your buyer persona, you can start with creating sales processes for each of them. It is important that you don’t target all customers generically. You need to be precise in your targeting so that you are able to address their concerns and answer their questions, rather than providing them with unnecessary information. Your marketing efforts will have to be targeted to the buyer personas so that you get good quality leads. Not only will this help you get leads that have a higher chance of converting, it will also save you money and effort that was spent on too broad targeting before. Sales and marketing alignment is important to combat this.

Step 3: Start writing! Make sure you have enough content available for every step of the buyer journey

One of the most effective ways to target your buyer personas is through content. Think about the buyer journey your persona goes through before they decide to make a purchase. Think about the journey at each stage, such as awareness, consideration, and decision. You will need to have content tailored towards your persona for each of these stages. Think like the customer, at that stage when creating the content, so that you can solve the problems they might be facing and answer the questions they might have at that point.

Step 4: Have a detailed and structured lead nurturing strategy in place

Following steps 1 to 3 will help you get more leads and you will see an increased interest in your products and offerings. What you need now is to have a plan in place to convert these leads into customers. Prepare a lead nurturing strategy in which your sales team will work on developing relationships with the buyers at every stage of the sales funnel. Focus on the needs of the prospects and provide them a helping hand, instilling confidence in your business. Look at things like follow-up emails as well as attracting prospects with personalized offers and promotions. The good news is that with a proper CRM system in place, you can automate this entire process.

Step 5: Continuously analyze and finetune your sales efforts

The thing about optimizing your sales funnel is that it is a never-ending, continuous process. There’s always something that you can further enhance and improve, and you should continue to work on tweaking your strategy. Regularly review the data you have available on your sales efforts, which prospects successfully converted into customers, and which prospects you weren’t able to close the deal with. Use this data to finetune your buyer persona. Make sure to take a step back and reflect on your entire strategy to see if there are areas that you can still improve upon. In the analytics, look at things like:

• Where in the sales process are leads exiting the sales funnel?
• Where in the sales funnel do leads tend to stack up and stay for a long time before being pushed to the next step?
• How can we address these weak areas?
• Can new marketing materials (and content) address these exits?
• Is there something the sales reps need to improve on?

Which tools do I need for optimizing my sales process?

You can optimize your sales process using certain tools. Tools like draw.io are great for making flowcharts to help map out your sales funnel/processes. Moreover, using marketing automation tools is very helpful to a successful sales optimization strategy. Think about using a CRM system, as it has many benefits, including:

• Clear and thorough reporting.
• Visually showcase data with customizable dashboards.
• Improved messaging and communication with customers.
• Enhanced alignment between the marketing and sales teams.
• Efficiency enhanced by automation.

What to do if you can’t figure out how to improve and optimize your sales process?

Sometimes, it can be hard to analyze or even optimize your sales efforts. A big problem for many businesses is to figure out where to start, especially when you’ve been doing things in a specific manner for a long time. This makes it difficult to step back and find the weak spots. If you’re finding it difficult to work on a sales optimization strategy, it can be useful to bring in a third party (like LeadHQ) to help you out. Not only will these specialists help you analyze your sales efforts, but they will also come up with tried and tested solutions and recommendations for improvements.