Being good at sales is not a skill that comes with business experience, rather it’s the ability to focus on working hard to deliver a good product according to what the customer wants.

Improve sales performance through discipline and detail

The backbone that helps improve sales performance is in two things: discipline and detail. The former refers to work ethic, due diligence and focus. So, if the running of your business lacks discipline and an attention to detail, there’s good reason why your sales has dipped. Basically, you’re just going with the flow and hoping everything will just work out. That’s definitely not the best sales strategy.

Do your research, analyze the market and then make plans. Strategize the best way to reach customers and make your product or service attractive. The best way to figure out the ’best way’ is to experiment. Try different sales tactics and find a mix that best suits your business.

Improve sales performance by analyzing the sales process

If sales aren’t going as well as expected, you need to take a look inside. A good starting point is backtracking your footsteps in the sales process and looking for a leak. It may not be a broken part, but rather an area of improvement that can help boost sales.

The first stage in the sales process is prospecting. It involves people you know, people you don’t know and people your people know. The lowest conversion rates are understandably the second group – the strangers. It’s followed by people you have mutual acquaintances with and then your contacts.

As a salesperson, you need to lay a net to catch as much of your market as possible from these 3 groups. The most effective way to do that is to approach them from multiple channels. That predominantly includes social media, followed by networking events and cold market prospecting where you randomly approach strangers and pitch your product. You can never know which kind will work for you, so you need to try them all until you start to see results.

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