When it comes to selling, personalization is the key. Thankfully, there’s a wealth of information on the web on appealing to your prospects’ needs in pitches. Still, it’s important not only how you pitch but also where you pitch. For some reason, salespeople usually focus on one channel of communication, mainly emails, and completely ignore others.
Here we take a look at tips and tools sales reps use to generate leads, build relations with them, and pitch products across major channels.
Sales Tips
Ensuring a pitch is heard in this immensely competitive environment puts a lot of pressure on a salesperson. Especially when they choose several channels to promote products or services on. Neverending switching between those channels makes workflow burdensome and disheartening.
The good news is you’re not alone in this battle: hundreds of sales reps have already been on this path and dealt with the same challenges. We’ve prepared some tried-and-true tips to help you make it big time on the main mediums.
Strategy
First and foremost, you need a strategy. With help of a comprehensive, achievable and specific roadmap you always remain focused on your long-term objectives. Just make sure to set overall goals as well as by-channel ones. In this way not only will you know what channels to use, but your predesigned plan will guide you how to employ each of them for your business.
Consistency
Once you start using a channel for selling, you’ve got to be consistent. No matter how hard you try, at first you will fail, and chances are you’ll feel discouraged. Please don’t let early failures discourage you from using the chosen communication channel. No one hits it big on the first attempt, not even on the second or third. You need consistency and persistence to move closer to your goals. Test and adjust your selling efforts specifically for each medium and with time you’ll gain more clients and more revenue.
Variety
And finally, shake things up. The last thing a sales rep wants is to sound like a broken record with the same pitch on the same channel. Change the message and the medium every now and then to make your offer more alluring. Not only will this entertain existing customers, but it will help deliver your offers to new audiences across various online communication systems.
Channels and Tools
Salespeople are swamped with the increasing number of tasks. Crafting emails, contacting leads, and negotiating with clients is not enough these days. Sales reps also have to maintain a constant online presence to nurture relations with prospects. We get how exhausting that must be, so we’ve prepared a top list of useful tools for the main channels. These will help you on your way to becoming the best closer.
Regardless of what alarmists and pessimists are trying to tell you, email still remains the most effective channel of communication with prospects. No wonder, as salespeople use this channel not merely to send coupons, but also to generate and nurture leads, upsell, cross-sell and build long-standing relationships.
Even though nothing can beat Gmail when it comes to email services, you can still upgrade it by employing a powerful CRM system. Why would you want to do that? To enrich your inbox with some impeccable features. NetHunt CRM allows you to focus on leads and sales pipeline. Also, it equips Gmail with powerful features for email marketing. The best part is that you use NetHunt right in your box: no switching tabs, data migration, or tedious synchronization.
NetHunt takes customer relationship management inside Gmail to a whole new level. With its help, you remember your clients no matter when they last contacted you. As soon as you open an email, you see all customer-related data neatly presented in a record. If you want to regroup your leads by stage, сreate a new view with multiple variables. Plus, with the kanban style, you can visually move prospects through the sales pipeline.
No email marketing is effective without bulk emailing. NetHunt makes it even more efficient. The system provides you with macros to compose personalized emails that address prospects by their first name and contain relevant details. Another advantage of NetHunt for bulk emailing is that your campaigns are sent directly from Gmail and thus end up right in the Primary inbox. Plus, you can always evaluate the response they receive by tracking open rate and link clicks.
Website
For some reason, when sales reps talk about ways to connect with prospects, they tend to forget about one of the main channels: the website. Quite often a website is seen only as a means to present a product or service, and the opportunity to chat with leads is missed. This costly mistake can and must be fixed.
You know how you visit a website and a chat window pops up with a manager wittily offering you assistance? Most likely this pop-up window was brought to you by JivoChat.
The company is correct in assuming people prefer now texting over calling. That is why JivoChat makes sure you don’t lose leads who don’t call. Not only does this widget enable you to communicate with website visitors, but it makes it easy to initiate a conversation. Moreover, lead information from your CRM, location, and links to social profiles make chat communication personalized and thus more effective.
Another advantage of JivoChat over phone calls is that you can chat with multiple customers simultaneously, letting you convert more clients in the same time frame. Furthermore, when you type your answers, there’s less time pressure and more freedom to come up with the most suitable offer than on a live call.
Have you heard about the increase of mobile traffic? The guys from JivoChat definitely have. That is why they made their widget accessible on mobile devices without sacrificing any of the features. Additionally, they made it possible to have the conversation with leads on Facebook Messenger, Viber, or Telegram.
Social Media
Social selling is on everyone’s lips now for one reason: it works. Nonetheless, many sales professionals see Facebook or LinkedIn as impractical distractions. How naive! With the help of Awario, a handy tool for social media, a sales rep is empowered to:
- increase brand awareness by joining important conversations across major social media platforms
- engage with existing customers by answering questions and replying to comments
- find new customers by solving problems of potential customers
Also, this service provides sales teams with invaluable market insights directly from the target audience. In the short run, this helps you find the right sales approach, and in the long run, it enables you to design more compelling marketing campaigns.
Awario also connects sellers and marketers with opinion leaders to boost sales and skyrocket brand awareness.
Messengers
Many social media sites are slowly but steadily being replaced by messenger apps. So it’s vital for sales reps to stay accessible for customers on messaging platforms. However, if you stay chatting day in, day out, you won’t have time to do any other work at all. That is why you need a chatbot. It is a natural and engaging way to help customers and collect data without your involvement.
It used to be true that to write a chatbot you need coding skills. Well, not anymore. With help of Flow XO, you can create a sophisticated chatbot for Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram and other platforms without writing a single line of code. Just choose if you want a fully automated bot, human, or a hybrid of both and get started.
What is really great about FLOW XO is that you don’t need to develop different chatbots for different messengers: build one and use it across all supported platforms. Once you do so, not only will your chatbot provide your leads with timely responses, but additionally they will gather the information provided by prospects. All this data is then stored it in over a hundred apps including Google Sheets and Trello.
Conclusion
The sales business is getting more and more competitive, so working hard is never enough these days. To stay on top of the game you need to work smart. With help of these tips and tools, you will make your efforts more productive and rewarding.
Victor Iryniuk is a content writer and manager at NetHunt – a Gmail-based CRM service. He writes about sales tips, tools and strategies, occasionally contributing to various G Suite and Android communities.
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