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A sales team is the life force of a business. No matter how good your offering is, you’ll need boots on the ground to make people to open up their wallet and buy it. It takes more than just good communication skills to become a great salesperson. Perseverance, drive, empathy, optimism, sense of humor - the list of “nice to have” qualities in a sales person are endless.
Hiring in general is a tough nut to crack. Finding people with the right set of skills who will fit your organization’s culture will take time and effort. These efforts are easily doubled if your HR team is planning to build a great sales team. So, how do you plan and coordinate your efforts to build a productive sales force?
As your business grows, the need to scale up the sales efforts is bound to arise. Before jumping the hiring bandwagon, you need to have a clear plan to get the right persons onboard. A clear cut idea of what kind of salesperson your organization needs is the first step.
Create a profile of the ideal salesperson you want to have in your sales team. It’s just like customer profiling and you’ll have to figure out the demographics, skills and more that you want to see in your employees. Again, just like in the case of building customer personas, look at your current salesforce to paint a vivid picture.
Your best future employees should be in the mould of your current employees. When you are successful in getting this right, you won’t have to try very hard to achieve productive sales team collaboration. Remember, a team that gels well, sells well as well!
The second important thing is to define your organization culture, if you haven’t figured that out already. Is your business a fun and rewarding place to work at? Are you planning to build a sales centric or customer centric company? Answering these questions honestly will help you figure out the kind of people you want to be by your side.
Online forms are one of the most often used source for capturing leads. To this effect, we wanted to make it easy add these captured leads to ClinchPad. After all, the prospect has done all the hard work of typing all the required information into the form, why type or copy and paste all this information over again into ClinchPad?
To achieve this, we are announcing integrations with three of the most popular online form managers.
Wufoo
Wufoo is an online form builder that creates forms including contact forms, online payments, online surveys and event registrations. It allows people without a coding background to build their own forms and surveys. The company has a number of partnerships with real time notification technology companies including Dropbox, MailChimp and Twitter.
Support Article for integrating a Wufoo form with ClinchPad
Jotform
JotForm is a WYSIWYG online form builder with a drag & drop interface. It helps users of no coding skills to create online forms of any type including contact forms, surveys, application forms, event registration forms, and order forms. Users can later on integrate forms to popular social media platforms, to their own sites, or almost anywhere on the web.
Support Article for Integrating a Jotform form with ClinchPad
Formstack
Support Article for Integrating a Formstack form with ClinchPad
Companies like Zappos have set a high expectation level when it comes to delivering superior customer support and experience. Customers expect to be treated like royalty and that’s a tough act to follow. You can’t ignore them after taking their money only to reach out to them for a feedback survey or a follow up sale.
Customers want you to hold their hands even after the completion of the buying process. So, if you haven’t already, set up a sales CRM and add customer engagement efforts as a new stage to your sales pipeline.
A silver tongue is something of a mandatory requirement for a sales person. A major chunk of the deal closing magic is attributed to the spoken word. Be it cold calls, elevator pitches, informal conversations or an official meet and greet, “always be closing” is closely tied to “always be talking”.
Not all conversations are equal. Informal, spur of the moment conversations help build a rapport with prospects. Some among us are masters when it comes to convincing customers over coffee. Some of us do a great a job giving a hands on demo walking straight into the prospect’s place of business.
There is another type conversation that’s almost inevitable as well - sales presentations. Presentations have a formal tone and are more structured. There is little room for spontaneity and creativity.
Following a deck of slides to present your thoughts isn’t very interesting in the first place for most of us, isn’t it? The same is true at the other end of the table as well! The moment a prospect sees a PowerPoint presentation, you can be sure that his attention span gets cut in half.
Presentation decks are associated with boredom all through our corporate lives and it’s no wonder even your awe inspiring deck ends up yawn inducing. So, how to get your message across the table when pitching to a customer without making him doze off?
Alright, I admit that I’m stating the obvious here. Of course, there is some homework that goes behind every stage in the sales pipeline. It could be building customer profiles, making cold calls or preparing a business proposal - every single task needs some research and homework.
However, when it comes to a sales presentation, the time spent on groundwork has to be doubled at least. Let me explain why. Let us assume that you represent a marketing agency and you’re pitching to a bunch of top tier prospects. After a stellar presentation, you forget a thing or two about your offerings and tell the prospect that you don’t run pay per click campaigns any more.
In case if you missed something like this in a business proposal or during an informal sales pitch there is always a chance to go back to the prospect with the updated proposal or call him and tell him that you indeed help business run PPC campaigns.
However, when you miss a piece of information like this during a sales presentation, the odds of getting the message right with everyone in that conference room at a later point in time isn’t in your favor. There will always be someone asking, “Didn’t that guy say they don’t do PPC?”. This reduces your chances of moving forward with the deal when there are multiple stakeholders.
And then there is the conundrum of picking a PPT template. Pick a presentation template that’s simple and professional. A template that’s a riot of colors is not going to make the presentation appealing or unique. It might end distracting people.
Remember that a sales presentation is not a replacement to a warm conversation you are good at. Shake some hands, and deliver all your favorite sound bites before turning the projector on. This way, you can be sure that your audience don’t find you as a stranger in a suit.
Have you ever noticed something interesting in the sales funnel? It has a bottleneck (of sorts) and people are actually happy to have that one in their sales process. That narrow pathway is from where clinching a deal becomes closer reality. It’s the magical place where prospects become paying customers.
However, not all bottlenecks are as splendid. Any anomalies in the customer’s buying process or your sales pipeline will end up affecting your bottom line. Without much ado, let’s jump into addressing some of the common bottlenecks in the sales pipeline.
We are all creatures of comfort. It’s easy for many among us to remain attached to the same old things than to adapt to newer and better practices. Change isn’t something that people are fond of. But businesses can’t stay same for no good reason.
Bringing about a change in an organization and implementing new business processes are prone to resistance. Take everyone into confidence before tearing the wall down. An overnight makeover is definitely not going to make things easier for you and your team.
Take into account the workflow and habits of your team before making drastic changes to business processes. If an employee is comfortable and productive writing things down, forcing him to enter all his data into a CRM will throw him off his game. Allowing him to scan and upload the handwritten notes is a better workaround instead.
There is also the thing about perception. What looks like a no brainer sitting in a cubicle might not always be the best idea on a manufacturing floor. Ideas always look good on paper.
Will it fit your organization culturally is the question that needs to be addressed and not “If it is working for XYZ company, why wouldn’t it work for us as well?”. The idea is not to teach new tricks to an old puppy, but to teach it better ways to do the same old things.
Forecasting sales is an annual ritual for most companies. If you are a publicly listed company, sales forecasts are issued to give investors an idea as to how things will play out later in the year. In the case of small and medium businesses, sales forecasts are a way to optimize their sales management pipeline and to motivate the sales force to beat the numbers from the previous years.
Irrespective of the size of the company and the resources they dedicate to predict sales for the upcoming year, sales forecasts remain educated guesses at best. The unpredictable nature of the marketplace is one thing that makes most sales forecasts as reliable as weather forecasts.
If you follow quarterly earning reports of publicly listed companies closely, you might come across CFOs scrambling for reasons to justify the gap between the forecasted and the achieved sales targets. A flood halfway around the world to a coup in a tiny Eastern European nation will end up getting blamed for a poor show. If it’s that unpredictable, why do a forecast in the first place then? Well, there are four reasons for it:
For a small or medium business, forecasting sales is a great opportunity to better understand the marketplace and the forces that work in the background. After a period of trial and error, you’ll eventually be ready to predict sales for the next cycle with a justifiable margin of error.
It’s the time to look back at the track record and learnings from the previous years and apply that wisdom in the future. A quick SWOT analysis will help tying all loose ends together when you are trying to forecast sales. There is no better and practical way to spot and predict trends.
Once you ascertain the demand, it gets way easier to manage the supply. This way, you will be better off when it comes to allocation of resources and to easily curtail wasteful expenditure in supply chain management. Chances of you swamped with a stockpile of inventory go out the window with a sales forecast.
You’ll be better positioned to allocate marketing budgets with a clear understanding of the economic conditions for the year ahead. A slowdown period needs a marketing push with an advertising blitz coupled with a gamut of bargains and discounts. At other times, you can hold your purse strings tight and not splurge as much.
Sales forecasting is a great way to conserve cash. Savings happen across the board. Let’s take the case of an ecommerce business. Right from the amount that’s is needed to source raw materials to saving on logistics and warehouse rental, the online storefront stands to benefit financially.
The ecommerce venture can also plan its hiring based on the demand that they foresee. Why hire twenty people to handle packaging and logistics when they know beforehand that sales might not be great during the winter season? Your fledgling ecommerce business could save thousands of dollars by way of forecasting and sales tracking.
A sales forecast prepares you for handling downturns and economic hardships ahead of time. You’ll save yourself a lot of stress and heartburn by aligning yourself to a stark reality way before it eventually comes knocking.
Imagine a scenario when an impending Government regulation is about to curtail foreign investments to ecommerce businesses and you totally didn’t see that one coming. You and your team are better prepared to weather the storm together by opting for a comprehensive business forecast.