One of the best ways to increase sales is by engaging with your potential customers. That’s why it is called sales engagement. This term includes interactions between a seller and its potential or current clients.
In a nutshell, creating and nurturing relationships between the seller and their customers is the foundation and essence of sales engagement. Every technique starts from there. We will explain it in more detail, a little later in the article.
In today’s world, with the increase in competition and offers in general, it is tough to stand out and make sales. Yet, if you manage to engage prospects, there’s more chance you will succeed in sales, too.
What you have to know is that it is not enough to just have the first conversation when your potential customer shows interest in your service or product. You need to keep the conversation going because strong engagement is directly related to the possibility of making sales.
In the rest of the article, we will give you some key tips that may help you with this.
Tips That May Help You Engage Customers In Sales
Meet Your Customers’ Needs
To effectively increase sales, you need to know two things:
- what the customers need;
- how you can meet their needs through your service or product.
You should also define your sales funnel and its main layers – the top funnel (awareness), middle funnel (consideration), and low funnel (decision). Each of these layers relates to your ideal customer profile and the level of engagement they have or are developing with your brand.
Another important element of a sales engagement is explaining to potential customers why they should purchase from you. Customers can’t know that if you don’t communicate with them. It is also to choose the right channel of communication, following the customers’ lifestyle or maybe even age.
How exactly do lifestyle and age affect the channel we’re going to communicate with potential clients through? For instance, younger people use social media much more than people between 45 and 65 years old. The older would rather choose e-mail or direct communication, right?
So, if your product isn’t for Millenials or Zoomers, social media probably would not be the best place to communicate and engage your customers. Because they presumably are not there. At least not the majority.
For better outreach to old-schoolers, you can use cold email templates to initiate the conversation, but make sure to research so the start and the rest of the conversation may be as personal as they can be. This will help you build a long-term relationship with them.
What If You Struggle To Connect With Prospects?
This can also happen. It is most often because you might be misunderstanding what the prospects want or you should consider trying a new methodology.
For example, Gamification is one of the most efficient methods because you connect everyday work with game-like strategies, with rewards, scores, leaderboards, and bonuses. It makes the monotonous routine tasks more fun and in that way removes the boredom.
It brings excitement to sales and by increasing engagement, gamification encourages sales.
Maintain Relationships With Your Customers
Even if we leave aside the fact that customers buy your services or products, thus giving you money and allowing you to pay yourself or your employees if you own the company, they are also a perfect source of information about what they like and what they don’t. That will help you improve your service.
Besides, if the customer is satisfied with whatever you’re offering, they will be likely to share the experience with your business. However, good news travels fast, and bad news even faster.
Regardless of whether your service was good or not, they will share that with others for sure. If you’re a product owner, don’t forget that not only a good product is what customers expect but the way you treat them and talk to them will also make a great part of their experience.
Just try to remember how many times you didn’t buy something “only” because the seller was scowling or even worse rude. Many times? I thought so.
Now it is not that hard to understand, right? When you are in the role of a seller, just remember how it is to be a buyer and what is that you expect when you buy something, what kind of seller’s behavior makes you wanna say “Hell yeah!” to that product, but also keep in mind the kind of approach that makes you roll your eyes or turn around without even saying “No, thank you!”.
Yes, it is that simple when it comes to building and maintaining relationships with your potential and present customers. Treat others the way you want them to treat you. The more satisfied they are there are bigger the chances they will recommend your business and come back for something else from you.
One of the best ways to strengthen your relationships is personalized content. You can read about how to increase the level of personalization in cold outreach as one of the best ways to implement this within your content strategy.
Be Transparent And Keep Your Customers Updated
In whatever way you present your product or service to potential clients, it is necessary to be transparent and not hide any information from them. Also, if you change your policies, the present customers should be the first to know that.
Satisfied customers would certainly also like to be the first to know about your new products. As we said before, if they have a positive experience with one of your products and your business in general, they will probably want to buy some more.
There are a few ways you can present your products or services. For example, a blog is a good option, but some people and even salesmen would prefer a sales deck.
A good sales deck includes data visualization, video, and text that tells the story about your organization’s ability to solve concrete problems. Also, it should be personalized to your prospects. If you’re interested in that kind of presentation, here’s a little guide about how to make a sales deck.
Automate Your Sales
To improve your business’s sales processes, you should consider sales automatization and it is essential if you want to scale your business. You can do that by investing in email automatization, focusing on AI-based chatbots, or forming and training your sales team.
If you choose to do this by training the sales team, there are a few key things you should pay attention to:
- Your team should understand the product they sell. The starting point is to introduce all pros and cons to them, but they should also know how it works, what it does, and what makes it different from other products.
- They should also be able to connect with people and build trust.
- You should show your sales team how to know when is the right time to close the deal.
Here you can learn about all the ways to increase sales with sales process automatization.
Follow The Activity Of Customers
Tracking customer activity is also one of the brilliant ways to learn more about customers’ needs and priorities. Those pieces of information are helpful to keep the conversation going and if there are any problems with the product they bought from you.
Provide Forehand Updates
Yes, we have already talked about this to some extent, but it is important to mention once again that any type of update must be announced on time.
Now, we will mention two different and most usual ways to do that:
- Social media – as we said in the beginning, not all customers use them, but if you know your audience well, you will also know if social media is a good option for your business.
- Email notifications – 99% of working people open their email every day and there is a higher chance that they will actually see the notification there.
It is essential for increasing sales engagement but we shouldn’t forget that our clients agreed to make contracts on specific terms and if we change them, they may be wanting to close the contracts.
Conclusion
As it has been pointed out, you may use numerous ways to increase sales engagement. If you do it right, the results are unavoidable.
Bonus advice: don’t implement all these tips at once. Because, if you do, it can become chaotic and make things more confusing than they are.
Author: Nina Petrov is a content marketing specialist, passionate about graphic design, content marketing, and the new generation of green and social businesses. She starts the day scrolling her digest on new digital trends while sipping a cup of coffee with milk and sugar. Her white little bunny tends to reply to your emails when she is on vacation.
