Top 10 Sales Optimization Practices To Close More Deals

“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” – Nils Bohr.

According to a Forbes Insights report by Brainshark, organizations rank sales productivity as the most critical area of the management focus, ahead of product excellence and marketing effectiveness.

In B2B sales, you need every advantage possible to close leads via efficient sales processes. To optimize sales, you must fit the constantly changing box of needs of your buyers/clients and go for engaging sales productivity tasks. 

Strategy, technology, and an active sales team are the pillars of nurturing customer relationships and optimizing sales. It involves clubbing your sales process over time to win as many long-term customers as possible.

But do you know how to speed up the sales process and reach out to your potential leads? We got you covered! Let’s learn the Top 10 Sales Optimization Practices To Close More Deals.

What Is Sales Optimization?

Sales Optimization maximizes a sales team’s financial performance over multiple time frames by optimizing how systems, processes, people, technology, and finance deploy.

It simply means acting on what’s working and not your current sales strategy. Sales optimization is a recursive process of providing your sales team and reps with the resources they need to close more deals. These resources may include business content, tools, knowledge, and information to sell your product or service to customers.

10 Ways To Optimize Sales Performance

Are you curious to understand the best ways to optimize your enterprise sales performance like a pro? If yes, keep reading! 

You would agree that optimizing any sales team is a rigorous and refined process vital for every business’s profitability. Therefore, we have curated legit tips to accomplish your long-term sales optimization goals. 

Take a look! 

1. Track and Analyze Sales Data

Before you start optimizing your sales team or sale territory, you require two significant prerequisites – 

1. Tracking of sales data
2. Analyzing sales results

Why so? Tracking sales lead data gives your sales team leverage to track their performance and comprehend sales process statistics on what needs to be done and what has already been done. Many options are available to track sales data, including B2B tools like web traffic analysis like Google Analytics, mobile access updates, Sales 2.0 tools, etc. 

According to Harvard Business Review, companies with a formal sales process see up to a 28% revenue improvement versus those without. 

This way, your team can track customers and potential clients, where to spend more time, which aspect of your website/business needs campaigns, etc., to boost your sales performance.

2. Integrate Marketing and Sales

Integrating sales and marketing is another way to optimize your sales team and increase revenue. Despite their common objectives, such as growth and income, they often have difficulty working together. For an active management sale and sales optimization, you can integrate marketing and sales by:

• Creating a joint marketing/sales funnel to promote healthy competition and inform each team about what the other is doing.
• Marketing and sales team members plan together and bridge the gap by meeting regularly.
• Enable two-way lead flow from the sales team to the marketing team also. To illustrate, if a customer has not yet qualified, we can send him back to marketing, who will inform (nurture) the customers about the benefits (solving their problem) of your product/service.

Both teams can use CRM like Orgzit to support each other via activity notes with individual customers for territory management. 

Using a CRM to track sales is standard practice for 79% of sales reps (Source: Pipedrive State of Sales Report 2020-2021)

3. Optimise the Lead Management Process

The lead management optimization is crucial in generating B2B sales as it provides more qualified and long-term buyers for your product or services. Lead management is a blend of people, strategies, and technologies; shared accountability between marketing and sales. When you pay heed to your leads, you establish a strong relationship and good returns. 

Effectively nurturing leads is an important step, and you can optimize your lead management process by:

• Rewire the low-performing areas through continuous feedback from the existing customers.
• Make sure CRM is aligned with sales cycles. 
• Double opt-in approach (indicates a higher level of interest by a lead who verifies their email and confirms their interest) for incoming lead campaigns.
• Track lead type and lead source.
• Identify your most engaged leads through responsiveness.
• Focus on your lowest converting stages to cover the loopholes.
• Invest exclusively in activities that generate revenue for your business.

4. Motivate and Empower Team Members

High performing teams are 2.5x more likely to have outstanding or very effective sales training processes (Source: State of Sales Report)

A top-notch sales team makes a business successful, but your company can dwindle if they are not motivated or empowered. To optimize the sales process and long-term growth, you can use the following tips to empower your workforce:

• Take inputs from different teams to inflow out-of-the-box ideas to drive the sales process.
• Empower fellow members with certain decision-making rights, like providing incentives to potential clients. 
• Have a rewarding work culture to motivate teams, such as gifts, vouchers, appreciation posts, top lead conversion members, etc. 
• Provide a broad management system where new tools & techniques (to gain new clients) are readily accessible by team members. 
• Enable healthy brainstorming & train team members to provide innovative business models for sales process optimization.

These methods will enhance team productivity, boost sales optimization, and motivate them to attain more significant profits.

5. Understand Buyer Personas

Often businesses rely on numbers & stats to understand their potential buyers and ignore their buying behavior. An essential skill for generating sales and getting target customers. But how can you do that? 

The buyer personas describe your ideal/target customers, their likes and dislikes, how your products or services can fulfill their needs, what triggers the emotion of buying, what challenges they face, and how they make decisions. 

These detailed customer profiles enable you to address buyers’ concerns and frame strategies accordingly. Existing customers can provide valuable insights that can be used to optimize your product, service, or sales process. 

With handy buyer personas, you can convert a lead into a customer by providing a comprehensive view of their buyers’ journey, creating awareness about your product, hinting at a solution to their problem, and allowing them to decide. 

As per the ITSMA report, 90% of the companies that use personas claim to understand their audience well.

6. Embrace Sales 2.0 Methodology

Over the years, using technology has changed how prospects access information and make purchases. Since the customers inhabit the center of every sales process, companies have started using the sale 2.0 methodology to meet their sales goals and optimize sales.

Simply put, Sales 2.0 is where digital technology meets traditional selling techniques. The principle of Sales 2.0 is to leverage Web 2.0 technologies (leveraging Internet tools to maximize sales performance) to build long-term relationships with prospects and customers while streamlining sales processes. When your sales team has access to social selling (engaging with leads on social media), they can build relationships and optimize the sales process.
Pipedrive Sales Report states that the Sales reps who use technology and automation tools for lead generation were 14 percentage points more likely to have reached their annual sales target last year.

7. Automate as much of your sales process as possible

In addition to being time-sensitive and arduous, closing deals involves a lot of effort. If the sales reps constantly tackle banal tasks rather than selling in any given business, they stand a good chance of burnout.

Automation is one driving tool that empowers your sales rep to execute and optimize sales. Several examples of CRM automation include follow-up messages, appointment reminders, personalization, referrals, etc.

Here’s another instance – Orgzit’s series of automated actions allows users to create time-saving workflows. These actions enable sales reps to schedule meetings, follow-up demos, and contract signings on autopilot.

Automating these tasks means your team can devote more time to building customer relationships and focusing on sales optimization. It is imperative in the era where many sales targets require nurturing severely and, therefore, a more significant time commitment.

8. Reduce your churn rate

The churn rate is vital for most B2B & B2C businesses, especially those based on a subscription model. It refers to the rate at which consumers (potential/existing) discontinue their association/subscription with an enterprise. For a sustainable business, you can use the following to reduce your churn rate:

• By implementing customer relationship marketing
• Regular communication with customers to serve them with apt solutions in the future (like customer feedback).
• Try to build trust and healthy relationships through personalization for successful customer retention. 

The churn rate is essential for understanding your business’s short- and long-term implications. Therefore, companies use churn rate as a pivot to determine their sales process optimization to retain customers.

Note: Maximum customer satisfaction = Reduce churn rate

9.  Shorten your sales cycle.

YES. Having a good sales month is possible, but how can you grow a business instantly regardless of any situation? The answer is – shortening the sales cycle, but what is it?

It refers to a refined process where “more is sold in less time,” which helps faster revenue generation in your enterprise. Furthermore, a speedier sales process is always beneficial for reducing bottlenecks and yielding higher business output. So how do you speed and shorten the sales cycle? Here are must-try tips to accelerate and optimize sales:

• Segregate & define goals for each sales call
• Use automation tools for repetitious duties
• Personalize your prospects’ queries
• Provide prospects with a simple, convenient, and quick contract signing channel.

10. Tracking Sales Performance

To optimize sales & drive growth, you must check on sales performance. You can’t go blindfolded & rely entirely on sales planning for sales optimization; this is why sales tracking is necessary. It involves monitoring and analyzing sales data, various segments of your sales process, and framing an improved plan.

But do you know how to measure the sale tracking accurately? Here are some of the most convincing metrics you should be keeping tabs on:

• Sales Cycle Length
• Quota Attainment
• Lead response period 
• Win Rate 
• Average deal size

With these KPIs (key performance indicators), you can track how your business is going with the desired sales processes, opportunities, and potential leads. It assists the sales reps in growing the business abilities of their teams towards sales optimization.

Now that you have a substantial understanding of sales optimization, let’s do some toolsets that your organization can utilize to foster better results.

Build A Winning Sales Optimization Toolset

“It’s all about providing tools, systems, processes, training, coaching, and development that ‘enables’ sales to be more effective and efficient.” – David Brock.

Sales Optimization tools support your businesses to elevate sales performance and get leads. It is a valuable tool for nurturing leads, closing deals, and improving profitability.

54% of sellers say sales tools help them to build stronger relationships with buyers. (Source: The LinkedIn State of Sales Report 2021)

In addition to automating day-to-day tasks, they are devised to streamline sales reps, increase the efficiency of sales processes(like follow-ups, sales pipeline management, personalized communication, data entry, scheduling) and analyze sales data to track prospects and lead insights for sales. 

Along with tracking customer and sales activity, your sales optimization tools should fit all the boxes, i.e., align with your existing tools and processes such as CRM, website, etc., for an easy flow of the business activities (saves significant time and effort).

A study by GetApp found that 34% of salespeople aren’t using sales software, but 90% of those have seen an increase in revenue, and nearly 95% have seen an increase in productivity. 

The other benefits of sales optimization tools include:

• Territory management
• Lead generation & Lead tracking
• Sales process automation
• Lead scoring and prospecting
• Streamlining communication
• Equips transparency in the workspace

How Are You Going To Optimise Your Sales Process?

As you know, the sales process is a diligent task! The ultimate takeaway is that the right sales tools will help improve your team’s attainment and overall performance. You ultimately excel in your growth when you keep tracking your customers and fit their needs through your services.

And always remember: The Golden Rule is – there are no Golden Rules! 

Companies with successful sales organizations know that sales productivity involves the utilization of trends, tools, and solutions that are reliable and effective. 

With a flexible and straightforward design, in-built email tracking capabilities, and customized reports, Orgzit is the perfect sales CRM to help you facilitate your sales process.

Give a boost to your sales productivity today!!!

Connect at sales@orgzit.com & schedule a DEMO now! 
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