To boost sales, you need to strategically evaluate and optimize your processes, try new sales tactics and explore creative ways to engage customers.
However, many sales leaders worry about increasing revenue as customer demands and trends shift.
According to a study by Revenue Grid, 80% of sales managers are not confident their team can meet sales targets. The same research also shows that 71% of vice presidents are not confident they can adapt their sales strategy fast enough to meet evolving customer needs.
Sales leaders are left wondering: what is a sure way to boost sales as these demands evolve?
In this article, we’ve compiled a list of six proven sales tactics to help your sales teams hit and exceed their targets to drive revenue.
How to boost sales and grow your business
The best way to boost sales looks different for each unique business. However, there are some key activities that help most companies grow.
Here are six tactics you can use to give your team the best chance of boosting sales.
1. Collect customer insights to improve your sales conversations
Every salesperson knows that understanding your target audience is key to boosting sales.
To get better results, dig deeper into the motivations and context behind your customers’ buying behavior by collecting insights.
Customer insights refer to the analysis of customer information that informs your marketing and sales strategy. It focuses on the “why” behind customer metrics, giving you a nuanced understanding of your prospects’ challenges in their buying journey.
Collecting customer insights helps you:
Uncover ideas on how to improve your product and content marketing messaging in ways that address your audience’s needs (i.e., market research)
Identify new products and trends in your industry to figure out your value proposition
Build a customer experience roadmap of your buyer journey
Identify problems your target audience isn’t aware of yet to inform your marketing plan
Predict churn and overcome sales objections that lead to it
Expand into new markets and sales territories
Gather more current customer data to enrich your buyer personas (or ideal customer profiles)
Here are four ways small business owners, entrepreneurs and salespeople can strategically collect and harness customer insights.
Analyze sales trends
Salespeople get a wealth of information about their prospects and leads through daily interactions. Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps consolidate all that information into sales data you can use.
For example, Pipedrive’s software lets you automatically track sales metrics and deal progress like “first email sent” and “negotiations started”:
Visualizing these metrics can help you track how deals are moving through the stages of the sales pipeline to becoming customers.
With sales data like this, you can perform a sales analysis and extract actionable insights to help with optimization.
For example, are your reps booking more calls when using a particular cold email subject line? Do you need to create sales enablement collateral (resources employees need to close deals) for your reps?
You can then use these data-driven insights to optimize processes, help sales reps improve and increase sales and revenue.
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Collect qualitative and quantitative data from surveys
It’s risky to make assumptions about your customers. For example, you may spend ample time highlighting a feature or benefit that doesn’t apply to your prospects’ or leads’ unique problems or circumstances.
If you want to figure out how and why people use your products or services, survey your customer base.
Surveys can be quantitative (e.g., multiple choice questions), qualitative (e.g., open-ended questions) or a mix of both.
Qualitative responses take more time and effort on the customers’ part and take longer to analyze, but they can give you unique insights into your customers’ voice, needs and desires.
The key is to use an approach that gives you the breadth of information you need to optimize your buyer personas.
Once you have detailed profiles that paint a more accurate picture of your target customer segments, you’ll find it easier to create relevant messaging for them.
Gather customer sentiment using social listening
You can better understand your customers’ buying behavior if you listen to what they say when you’re not “in the same room”.
A social listening tool helps you track conversations on social media for specific phrases and terms relevant to your brand, niche or industry in real time.
For example, it can alert you if an existing customer tweets feedback about your solution or if someone is looking for a feature only you can provide.
In other words, social listening helps you determine your position in the market and lets you know what your target audience wants (or doesn’t want).
You can also use social listening tools in combination with a social CRM and other tools to optimize your lead-generation efforts.
By connecting your social listening tool with Zapier, for example, you can generate leads from social media and capture customer sentiment data based on the conversations you’re tracking. Doing so helps generate insights that allow your sales team to more accurately answer questions and convert more leads.
For example, if a user complains on Twitter or LinkedIn because a competitor’s solution is confusing, you can use this as a competitive advantage.
Once you add that user as a lead into your sales funnel, you can then reach out and highlight your product’s intuitive user experience. By directly addressing a specific pain point, you’re engaging prospects in a way that will likely lead to further conversations and (eventually) a sale.
Use focus groups to capture qualitative data
To effectively engage your prospects, look at the “why” behind your quantitative data to understand customer behavior more deeply.
One of the best ways to gather qualitative data is to use focus groups.
Let’s say you sell business-to-business (B2B) accounting software.
By bringing together B2B decision-makers from that niche and assigning a moderator, you can conduct in-depth group interviews to obtain data about their feelings, attitudes and opinions on any subject related to your brand.
2. Leverage social proof to build trust
Before you can boost sales online and encourage customer loyalty, you need to build trust among your audience. To do this, you’ll need to go beyond offering the best solution in your industry and build credibility by leveraging social proof.
Research by Gartner suggests that 86% of businesses consider verified reviews as a critical part of purchase decisions.
Highlighting the positive experiences of existing customers makes prospects more likely to believe they’ll get the same results, resulting in more conversions.
Here’s an example of a testimonial from our website that helps build trust with prospective customers:
You can take this a step further and leverage social proof in your sales enablement strategy.
For example, ask your digital marketing team to create content that demonstrates loyal customers’ success and share it with prospects at relevant points in their buying journey.
The type of content you can use as sales collateral includes:
Testimonials and reviews. In your customers’ own words, these assets show how your solution has addressed their problems and improved their business.
Case studies. These data-driven and detailed executive summaries convey how specific clients have benefitted from your solution. For example, how integrating Pipedrive helped Motor Mart increase revenue by 25%.
User-generated content (UGC). Social media content that existing customers voluntarily create helps build credibility, like Sephora’s Beauty Insider community. You can track UGC with a social CRM.
Reps can use this content to effectively engage with potential customers and show them why your solution is the best fit for their problems.
For better results, share assets with prospects that fall into a similar segment as the client featured in the testimonial or case study.
For example, show a prospective vet owner that you’ve helped another veterinary clinic cut waiting times by 10 minutes.
3. Use email marketing to nurture leads
Email marketing continues to be an effective channel for nurturing customer relationships and boosting sales. It helps you reach and connect with your target audience at a lower cost than other channels.
You can send relevant and personalized messages directly to your prospects and customers without worrying about social media algorithms that may stop your messages from appearing in followers’ feeds.
Email marketing also provides high returns, with sources indicating the channel generates $36 for every $1 spent.
Here’s how to personalize your emails to engage and nurture your leads and contacts.
Strategically manage your email list
To consistently send relevant messages to every subscriber, you need to manage your email list. Doing so helps you clarify your goals and the steps to effectively reach your subscribers.
Are you looking to grow your list? Are you trying to reduce unsubscribes? Defining what to measure and where helps you spend your time and resources more efficiently when nurturing your subscribers.
Once you set your goals and objectives, segment your email list into different groups to strategically send the most relevant content to the right people (rather than relying solely on email blast campaigns).
You can segment your list based on:
Subscriber data (location, gender, interests, language, loyalty status for special offers and incentives etc.)
Type of activity (opt-ins, email opens and click-throughs on a specific date or date range)
How you segment your email lists should also align with your needs and business goals.
If you’re looking to boost retargeting efforts, for example, you’re better off segmenting subscribers based on activity.
That way, you can send a targeted email to subscribers who went to your product page but left without buying.
Optimize your emails for conversion
Even if you’re sending the right message to the right people, you need to craft emails that get results.
Here are five ways to create emails that get opened and convert:
Use irresistible email subject lines. Keep it clear, interesting and relevant to increase your email open rate.
Include high-quality and relevant images. Images matter in email marketing efforts. Custom-made images are far more likely to perform better than stock photos.
Send emails at the right time. Sending an email at the right time can turn your subscribers into lifelong customers. Reevaluate each segment and schedule emails accordingly.
Send follow-up emails when necessary. Just because a prospect hasn’t responded doesn’t mean they’re uninterested. Learn when to send a follow-up email and you might get a lead to say “yes”.
Conduct A/B testing. Send different variations of your email to different groups in your email list. A/B testing can boost conversions and help you understand your target audience better.
4. Optimize your automated marketing campaigns to boost sales
A marketing automation tool can handle routine marketing and sales tasks without direct human involvement so your reps can focus on sales activities that help convert new customers.
According to Ascend2, 91% of surveyed marketers have used marketing automation to successfully achieve their top priorities.
Rate the success of your marketing automation in helping you to achieve marketing objectives
An online marketing automation tool can help you:
Save time and reduce costs. From lead qualification to campaign deployment, a marketing automation tool takes care of low-importance repetitive tasks.
Increase return on investment (ROI). By outsourcing manual tasks, you spend more time focusing on activities that improve ROI and engagement, such as prioritizing qualified prospects, nurturing client relationships and sending follow-up emails.
To successfully optimize your automated marketing system, it’s important to choose the right workflows and tools.
Start by evaluating your current process to identify areas where a more hands-on approach makes sense vs. those that will benefit from automation.
For example, if manually sending lead information to your CRM takes too long and results in too many errors, you could be better off using a tool like LeadBooster to automate the process.
Here are four of the features that come with it:
When you decide which areas of your sales process and marketing strategy to automate, you need to consider tools that fit into your ideal:
Budget
Feature sets
CRM integrations
Quality of customer support
Let’s say you’re looking for a way to measure customer feedback and the impact of your loyalty programs.
One business may choose a fairly inexpensive tool with hundreds of survey templates. However, others may want feature-rich software with landing page builders, e-commerce integrations and bespoke support.
5. Use LinkedIn to optimize lead generation
Social media is an effective way to collect high-quality leads at scale.
When it comes to B2B sales, LinkedIn is a game-changer. According to LinkedIn, 40% of B2B marketers say it’s the most effective channel for driving high-quality leads.
However, social media is a crowded space and you have to compete for attention like everybody else.
Here are a few strategies to help you stand out from the crowd and boost your sales.
Build a strong LinkedIn presence
People use LinkedIn to build connections and stay on top of industry news and best practices, making the professional networking platform a great place to build a personal brand.
By offering value and contributing to conversations in your industry, you can enhance your position as a thought-leader and draw attention to your company’s offerings through word of mouth.
To take this a step further, encourage employees and leaders organization-wide to take part in the conversation.
Let’s say your company’s product is a user onboarding solution. Reps can educate their audiences on how product onboarding improvements can boost monthly recurring revenue (MRR).
Doing so on multiple fronts can help create more opportunities to position your company’s solution as the best fit for solving your target audience’s problems.
If you go down this route, make sure everyone’s personal branding efforts align with the company’s mission and core values.
It can help to create practical social media guidelines that outline how employees in your company should conduct themselves online.
Optimize your LinkedIn lead generation journey
Many B2B brands are turning to LinkedIn’s lead generation ads to fill their sales pipeline with leads.
It’s hardly surprising when brands can see a roughly 33% increase in purchase intent from LinkedIn ad exposure.
Using LinkedIn’s lead gen forms pre-filled with profile data, your prospects can send their information in just a few clicks, resulting in high-quality leads and higher conversions.
However, your lead generation is only as good as how well you nurture your leads.
Adding LinkedIn form leads as new deals in Pipedrive via the Zapier integration can help streamline your LinkedIn contact outreach and engage people in ways that close more deals.
6. Trade cold leads for hot leads to close more deals
A pipeline full of unqualified leads, or cold leads that aren’t warming up, distracts reps from focusing on prospects likely to progress through the sales funnel and close.
Learning how to quit on cold leads (and when) is a critical skill that saves valuable time and resources.
How to identify cold leads
There are four tell-tale signs that you need to give up on a cold lead:
The lead is not the right person. The person you’re talking to loves what you’re offering but can’t influence company decision-makers. Before losing the lead, ask the person whom you should talk to or to connect you personally.
The lead doesn’t have the budget. If the prospect can’t afford your solution right now, it’s time to let them go. It’s better to politely ask the lead to call you when they get the funding or set a reminder in your CRM to follow up later.
The lead turned down your outreach after several attempts. It’s better to walk away than to appear pushy and damage your reputation when a lead is clearly not interested. When you’re sure the lead is untenable, flag to try again down the line or cut your losses if you deem them unqualified.
Your lead isn’t the right fit. Trying to make the wrong lead fall in love with your solution will only waste everyone’s time. Suggest next steps to help that lead find success elsewhere and explore possibilities where your solution could be the right fit for the organization in the future.
Once you’ve weeded out current cold leads, define rules for flagging them in future and the sales activities that follow.
You can also use Pipedrive’s Rotting feature to quickly identify deals that have been idle for a long time. When a deal has “rotted”, you’ll see a red tile in the Pipeline view.
Final thoughts
Learning how to boost sales online involves finding ways to engage your leads in a manner that aligns with what they want and need.
It’s so difficult to do so because customer needs are constantly changing.
To boost your bottom line, identify your customers’ most pressing current needs, nurture leads with social proof and keep your brand top of mind with email marketing and social media efforts.
Finally, optimize your processes so your sales operations can keep ticking over like a well-oiled machine.
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