TL;DR

• Focus on efficiency over volume to win more deals.
• Align sales reps with customer needs.
• Studying wins is often more beneficial than studying losses.
• Customize sales coaching programs based on customer needs.

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Sales teams are responsible for one thing: Generating revenue.

Cash flow is the lifeblood of your business. So it’s no surprise that sales leaders are always on the lookout for anything that could give them an edge.

Here are 4 often-overlooked tips that can help your sales team close more deals, and beat out the competition.

Stop Playing The Numbers Game Wrong

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Every sales team has quotas, goals, and benchmarks.

For your average sales rep, the more calls you make, the more appointments you set, the more deals you’ll inevitably close.

So, most sales leaders try to optimize their teams for calls.

They fight for more headcount. They pressure marketing for more leads. They build cold-calling teams.

They are operating under the assumption that in the end, the team who plays the most games will win.

But there’s a better way to play.

Because, in reality, winning in sales has less to do with increasing the number of games you play, and more to do with increasing the percentage of games you win.

Think about it this way, what’s more valuable:

1. Studying your won and lost deals so you can find a way to go from winning 1 out of every 10 deals, to 2 out of every 10 deals? Or…
2. Hiring 2 new cold callers for every rep to generate enough qualified leads to double your sales?

You’d be surprised how often efficiency beats volume.

So stop mistaking volume for growth, when really efficiency is what’s most valuable.

Misalignment Between Sales and Customers

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Despite what they might think, most sales reps don’t know why they lose (or win) deals.

One comparative study examined buyers’ reasons for making a purchasing decision and compared them to what sales reps believed was the main motivator for the purchase.

A research study cited in the book “From A Good Sales Call to A Great Sales Call” found 32% of the time, sales reps were completely wrong.

There was no alignment whatsoever between why a rep thought they’d won (or lost) a deal, and why the customer actually made their decision.

Additionally, 28% of the time, sales reps were missing key information.

That means sales reps are accurate about their assumptions less than 40% of the time!

In a world where buyer empathy is one of the leading factors in why customers buy, if your sales team is out of touch, you’re unnecessarily losing deals.

A great way to create better alignment between your sales reps and your customers is to start interviewing your customers to get win-loss information directly from the source.

Studying Wins > Studying Losses

Your instincts will tell you that the most valuable thing you can do is study your losses.

If you can strengthen your weaknesses, address your shortcomings, and prevent more failures, you’ll win more deals!

What we’ve found after performing thousands of win-loss interviews is that there is often more power in the analysis of your wins.

If you can figure out what you’re already doing that’s causing you to win, you can double down on these strategies and perfect them.

Obsessing over what you’re doing well can help you create a powerful playbook for your sales team to follow, and win more deals.

No More Coaching In The Dark

It’s not uncommon for sales leaders who spend tens, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on sales coaching for their team.

When every team member is equipt with the best tools and techniques money can buy, they have no excuse to be anything but top performers.

Research shows that sales training programs often don’t have the desired impact. For example:

• Up to 80% of new skills are lost within 1 week of training if not used – ASTD
• Up to 85% of sales training fails to deliver a positive ROI – HR Chally
• 87% of new skills are lost within a month of the training – Xerox

Creating a custom sales training program that trains and tracks the behaviors that are proven to move the needle for your customers is what really makes the difference.

Top-performing sales reps need more than an inspirational keynote speaker, or one day of skills-building.

They need to be given a clear set of repeatable behaviors and reliable tools that, when followed, will help them achieve their desired results.

And you can’t get that playbook from a generic sales coaching curriculum.

The best sales coaching and training programs come from directly studying your customers, their needs, their pain-points, their objections, the solutions that will get them the results they’re hoping for, and the resources they need to get all the necessary stakeholders on board.

SaaS Sales Done Right

As you shift your focus to winning a higher percentage of your deals, helping your reps build empathy and understanding with your clients, amplify the things you’re doing right, and create a sales coaching program built around your customers’ needs, you are going to see your revenue move up and to the right.

The concepts may be simple, but none of these things are easy.

They require more effort than the generic sales solutions.

But the truly elite teams are willing to put in the work to be the best.

For a personalized Clozd demo, sign up here.