As your sales team comes up on the last leg of a long series of proposal and pricing meetings with a potential customer, they may be looking for a few ways to make themselves stand out. This is the time for them to communicate value props, highlight product features, and assert themselves as industry experts. However, it can be a lot to handle for everyone involved! Too much information is hard to handle, and too little is unconvincing. Striking the perfect balance is important, and getting your sales team equipped with the right strategies to move a sale closer to closing requires a little innovation.
Here’s how your sales team can leverage some simple strategies to achieve remarkable results and increase sales revenue.
Sales closing tips for the modern salesperson
Go into the deal prepared
After putting together proposals, pitches, and pricing models, you may finally be ready to cross the finish line. It’s common for teams to lose their speed here, assume the sale is theirs, and lean on relationship-building to make their final push. However, you may be surprised to learn that what really counts are the facts and figures.
In fact, rapport made up only 7% of a buyer’s decision to close with one company over another. On the other hand, credibility, knowledge, and communicating value collectively made up 58% of a buyer’s final decision.
It’s an important insight that reveals just how important it is to walk into the last leg of your deal prepared for any and everything. Having industry-specific information, a customized sales proposal, and case studies demonstrates that you are ready and able to set your plan in motion. You should have as much of this on hand when you walk into that final meeting.
Now, what will being prepared look like?
Well, it may have once looked like an industrial-weight binder or months-long email chain, but there are better ways of having materials on hand. Now, walking into a meeting is as simple as having a custom link to a microsite on hand. Odds are, your client will have it already open and ready, too.
A custom microsite allows you to create a highly informative site that doesn’t bog down your client. It’s a clean way to share information without overwhelming folks and makes it possible for you to effortlessly answer questions by pointing them to relevant content.
Use analytics to your advantage
Ever walked into a sales meeting only to be blindsided by some unforeseen gap in your pitch that has caught your client’s attention? It happens to the best of us, and when it does, it can feel like a deal breaker that requires a desperate last-ditch effort to redirect attention elsewhere.
This doesn’t make you or your team weak salespeople; it just means you’ve come to uncertainty about your client’s needs. Luckily, though, this could be a problem of the past. Data and analytics offer your team the crystal ball they wish they had months ago. It gives you an inside look at what client-facing information is being most, and least, engaged with.
This allows your team to tailor their strategy, address missed points, or stress the highlights that will push your meeting forward. It makes it possible for you to get everyone at the table on board, especially if you’re selling to folks in a range of roles and responsibilities. Best of all, you can use these tools throughout the process rather than just the final meeting.
Zoomforth lets you know exactly when your clients have opened and started engaging with shared materials, so you can start targeting those gaps in communication early on. It’ll streamline follow-up and make your team seem like genies, a huge bonus point in ways of demonstrating your understanding of a client’s problems.
Remove any obstacles
Making an offer your clients can’t refuse is one thing, but making a proposal that they can always access is a whole other ball game.
While it seems like a small detail to consider, keep in mind that time can kill sales. Moving your client from the top to the bottom of your sales funnel quickly makes conversion more likely, and slowing it down with missed communication and delayed information-sharing can hinder that process.
Making your collateral and sales material as accessible and shareable as possible is key here; unfortunately, forwarding emails may not cut it anymore. Not only is it a headache to track communication as it happens, but it also delivers content in a way that is potentially inaccessible—ever tried to open a slideshow on your phone during a business trip?
Microsites are an easy upgrade that don’t sacrifice the density of the content or information you’re sharing. You can house all of the same information from your PDFs and slides on a microsite that’s already formatted to open on a range of devices, including smartphones.
And, when it comes to secure sharing, microsites beat out traditional methods again. With password protection, SAML, and multifactor authentication, you can ensure that your and your client’s information only goes where it needs to.
Highlight the work put into the product
Oftentimes, it’s better to show than tell.
When it comes to emphasizing your value sells and making your product stand out, you shouldn’t cut corners. Capturing the behind-the-scenes, unique qualities, and use cases of the products and services you offer is a must.
Sometimes, though, teams cut back on the length of their victory lap in favor of making space for more pragmatic material, especially if it takes up too much space on a slide deck or printed document.
Microsites, though, don’t require this trade-off. While it may seem like less of a priority in your proposal, you can still showcase these elements on a subpage, or through carefully placed videos, images, and interactive features clients can peruse at their own leisure.
Share your testimonials
While they may seem like fluff, testimonials have been shown to make as much as 72% of consumers trust companies more.
Testimonials are powerful ways to connect with your potential customers. It gives them the opportunity to see your products and services used by someone with whom they can relate to. Plus, you can showcase your most optimal results. They’re an easy way for you to show that you walk the walk.
Incorporate past client reviews or interviews in a subpage on your microsite. Zoomforth even makes it easy to incorporate social media sharing, so you can easily connect potential clients to happy customers.
Provide multiple options
Your clients aren’t all the same, and it’s likely the one you’re working with isn’t the only decision-maker. Tailoring your approach is helpful when you’re working with like-minded people, but if you’re pitching to members in different departments, this may seem like a challenge. Luckily, microsites make it easy to create customized pages from templates that you know work.
For example, you may create a client-facing microsite that’s exclusively for finance and one that’s for human resources. The interests of these two groups are likely different, so it only makes sense to emphasize different value props to each respective party.
You can even change your graphic strategy here, too. Not everyone wants graphs and numbers, while some folks prefer facts to videos about client stories.
Zoomforth is the technology you need to close sales
Setting your team up for success can be a challenge, but arming them with the right tools makes all the difference. Microsites are elegant, all-encompassing tools that elevate your team’s sales strategies
Zoomforth allows you to create beautifully designed microsites you’ll be proud to share. Plus, you can easily create multiple sites and customize them for your clients. Best of all, using the drag-and-drop microsite editor, you don’t need any coding or web design experience.
Ready to get started? Try a risk-free demo!
Photo by Cytonn Photography on Unsplash
