Implementing sales techniques to successfully meet goals is most effective when used as part of a sales plan. There are many techniques to choose from, and with practice, small business owners and their sales staff will find the methods most suited to their personal style and business. Common sales techniques used by successful salespeople include breaking down large goals into smaller targets, setting activity goals, focusing on customer service and pursuing qualified sales leads.
Manage Your Sales Target
Remove the stress of a high sales target by breaking down the annual goal into quarterly, monthly and weekly dollar goals. A goal of $1,000 in new sales sounds less daunting than a goal of $52,000, so focus on achieving a weekly sales target. Challenge yourself and your team to meet the weekly goal by posting your progress on a chart in the lunchroom or staffroom, and reward top performers with small weekly prizes such as a gift certificate to a local coffee shop.
Set Activity Goals
Include a sales activities target as part of your plan. Study previous activity records and review the number of phone calls, emails, referrals, appointments and follow-up contacts made by the most successful salespeople in your office or industry. Use these figures as a basis to set activity goals for pro-active sales activities. Review your own activity each week, and evaluate what works to increase sales and what doesn't. Adjust your activity goals accordingly.
Provide Excellent Customer Service
Instead of worrying about achieving your sales goal, concentrate on providing excellent service to the customer. Develop a personal sales script using language you are comfortable with to introduce new clients to new products or services. Give customers your undivided attention and focus on meeting their needs rather than "selling" anything. Anticipate questions, concerns, and future issues. Providing excellent customer service consistently results in repeat business and word-of-mouth referrals, increasing your sales and decreasing required prospecting time.
Prospecting vs. Cold Calling
Prospecting refers to searching for and cultivating relationships with customers who are more likely to purchase your product than the average person. Typically, there is a direct connection between prospecting activity and increased sales, so it's important to know how many prospects you need in the pipeline each month to hit your sales target for the year. Calculate the percentage of prospects that typically buy from you. Whether it's 5% or 25% of pitches that close, this critical piece of information lets you compute how many active prospects you need in the funnel at any given time by dividing your yearly sales target by your success rate, then dividing that number by the length of your sales cycle.
Focus on identifying target customers and getting quality sales referrals from existing customers to populate your pool of prospects. This is a more efficient way to achieve a sales target than "cold calling" or trying to sell to the general public.