Sales leaders understand the importance of building a team that helps them drive revenue and grow bottom-line profits. In order to drive record-busting sales, you must create your own dream team and know how to leverage the right resources. Sales and marketing expert Tim White says it isn’t difficult when you begin with an appropriate strategy.
In this issue of Promotional Consultant Today, we share White’s tips on building an effective sales machine to boost your bottom line.
Define your ideal customer profile. What kind of customers do you want to attract? Define their demographics such as age and educational background. Also consider their geographical location and various psychographics such as interests, problems, hobbies and buying habits. Once you have this data, you can analyze your customers and align your products and services to best fit their needs.
Build and retain your outbound sales team. White says if you want to keep your sales funnel full, you need an outbound team that can help you pull in prospects. Use modern recruiting tactics to discover exceptional outbound sales candidates. Once they’re hired, support them with lead generation tools along with coaching and mentoring. Remember to recognize their efforts and provide rewards to motivate them to keep driving sales.
Build your inbound marketing engine. Pause and consider how effective your website is when it comes to driving sales. Is it optimized for SEO? Does it provide quality content using relevant keywords and links? Your website is often the first touchpoint prospects have with your business. It helps create awareness and helps you reach prospects all over the globe. White suggests using appropriate color schemes to identify call-to-action buttons and using responsive website design. While there are many actions you can take to turn your site into an inbound marketing engine, make sure you have the basics by testing your links and buttons, securing your site and regularly producing valuable content.
Run targeted outbound campaigns. One of the best ways to keep leads engaged is through targeted outbound campaigns. These campaigns allow you to build a relationship with leads and provide personalized content. To segment and qualify leads, White recommends using customer relationship management tools. You can include target filters that allow you to customize each lead’s emails. You can also personalize e-mails to reach out to leads after a certain amount of time has passed, reminding them to sign up for an offer.
Run effective inbound marketing campaigns. If you want to see leads pouring in, you must provide them with value. White says the best inbound marketing campaigns leverage many elements, including content marketing, e-mail marketing, social media marketing, SEO and pay-per-click marketing. Be sure to coordinate these elements to work with your landing pages to help drive leads down the sales funnel. Be sure you’re always testing your content through A/B tests to determine what your target audience wants to know.
You can expect to invest a lot of hard work in building a strong sales machine. By following the best practices above, you can simplify the process.
Source: Tim White is the director of marketing at People.ai. With more than 12 years of sales and marketing experience, White is responsible for strategic demand generation marketing activities including digital, SEO, SEM, marketing automation and customer acquisition.
