8 Tips for Converting Sales Faster

Even the best salespeople still have a limited number of hours in the day. That’s a problem for any company that’s trying to ramp up their sales without massively increasing the size of their sales teams. Success for these companies means converting more sales faster. It’s an efficiency and productivity problem, and it’s easier to solve than you may realize.

Here are eight proven methods for improving your sales productivity.

Prioritize Your Prospecting:

It’s impossible to run an efficient sales organization without a steady stream of potential clients. If you want to drive more sales, the best place to start is by increasing the number of leads that enter the sales funnel. One of the most effective ways to do this is by spending the first hour of your workday on prospecting. It’s the toughest part of job — no one likes making cold calls, writing outbound sales emails, or trying to connect with people on LinkedIn — so why not get it out of the way as early as possible? They say whatever on your to-do list you want to do the least is the first thing you should do in your day. So, go and get after it. Do this every day, and you’ll quickly gain a better understanding of how your prospecting relates to your closed sales.

Carefully Qualify Your Prospects:

If you want to improve your sales results, it’s essential that you find ways to reliably identify the most likely customers from a pool of leads. The larger your pool of leads, the harder this becomes. To make things easier, adopt an automated lead scoring system to weed out low-quality leads. This allows you to invest your time on the prospects that are most likely to complete a purchase.

Improve Your Research Process:

There’s no better way to make a strong, positive impression on a B2B prospect than showing them that you understand their business. The more you know about their company, their customers, and their challenges, the more receptive they will be to hearing about the value of your products and services. This means doing the research — looking at their website, reading up on trends in their industry, and scanning through their social media mentions — before every sales call.

Automate Your Workflows:

How much time does your sales team waste every day on repetitive and tedious tasks? How many forms do they have to fill out exactly the same way, and how many standard documents do they have to hunt down for every sale? How many identical sales emails do they have to rewrite and send? These are all things that can be — and should be — automated, allowing the reps to focus on the important work of building prospect relationships and closing sales.

Focus Your Sales Activities:

Some common tasks are too complex or specific for automation. Writing a follow-up email to a prospect to answer a question about a product they’re interested in buying, for example, will always require an actual person with real knowledge. While you may not be able to automate these tasks, it is possible to optimize them. One of the best methods for this is to batch similar sales activities — responding to emails, updating CRM data, reviewing contracts — into a dedicated portion of the workday. This reduces the inefficiencies and distractions that come with attempting to do multiple tasks at once.

Update Your CRM Data:

Your CRM is a powerful sales tool, and it can dramatically increase the speed of the sales process when used correctly. Unfortunately, it still can’t read minds. The CRM is only as useful as the accuracy of the data that’s put into it. The more up-to-date that data is, the more reliable the CRM’s results will be. If elements of the CRM can be automated, automate them.

Streamline Your Sales Training:

Onboarding new salespeople is one of the most expensive and slow parts of running a sales team. Every moment that a new rep has to spend in training is time that they aren’t spending turning prospects into customers. This slows down the sales process for the entire company. Thankfully, there are obvious solutions to these problems: invest in a more streamlined onboarding and training process; make difficult-to-learn tools and workflows easier to use; and build incentives into the training process (such as gamification) that encourage new hires to master the system as soon as possible.

Track Your Results:

If you want to convert sales faster, you need to know where the speed bumps and roadblocks are. Without the right data, it’s impossible to track the improvement of your sales results. This means identifying your key performance indicators (KPIs), and measuring the changes to those KPIs as you try out new strategies, update your sales technology, and improve your workflows.

Conclusion

These eight tips are just a few of the expert-level insights available to companies that are looking to improve their sales conversion speeds. With the right advisors and partners — and the right technology — companies just like yours have been able to experience exceptional sales growth without needing to increase their overhead. To learn how FayeBSG can help your company with converting sales faster, contact us for a no-risk consultation.

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