过筛
Sender ID
Sender ID is the email validation system designed to prevent spoofing. Sender ID, for the large part, relies on SPFwith only slight differences.
What is the difference between Sender ID and SPF?
The main difference between Sender ID and SPF is that Sender ID is there to improve the primary deficiencies of SPF. The principal weakness of SPF is that it does not identify the address in the header, which indicates the sending party. It often happens that the address checked by SPF is different from the one in the header of the email. The header addresses are shown to the users and serve to reply to an email. It means that SPF checks only the "mail from" email addresses.
Sender ID and SPF are almost identical, with only slight differences.
Microsoft held the critical part of the patents of the Subscriber ID, which were licensed in a manner that did not conform to the rules of GNU General Public License, and which were not suitable for the implementation of free software. In 2006, Microsoft placed the patents under Open Specification Promise, which conforms to free and open-source licenses.
Search engine marketing (SEM)
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a type of marketing aimed at promoting a website on search engine results pages. Securing your website a high position in search results, SEM helps you generate more traffic and gain more customers.
What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
It’s difficult to avoid ambiguity while speaking about the differences between SEO and SEM. Pushing your website to the top of the search engine results page (SERP) may include organic promotion and paid advertising, such as PPC ads. SEO has always been viewed as organic promotion, while views on SEM have changed with time.
At first, the term SEM involved both paid and organic strategies. In this case, SEO appears as a part of SEM. However, now marketers use the phrase “search engine marketing” more and more for paid activities only, which makes SEM and SEO two different categories. To avoid confusion, in this article we’ll use the word SEM for paid search advertising only.
Why is SEM important?
Coupled with SEO, SEM helps your business be on the top of search results in Google, Bing, and other search engine players. The first page of search results gets over 71% of all the clicks.
Search engine marketing becomes more and more significant as a traffic generation channel. While click-through rates of organic search results have fallen by 13% in the first quarter of 2019, SEM skyrocketed by 75% in the same span.
Better yet, audiences are loyal to SEM. 75% of people said paid search ads help them find the information they search for, and over 30% clicked on a paid search ad because it directly answered their search query.
This data shows that search engine marketing is a great traffic source and customer acquisition channel. Read on to learn how your business can benefit from SEM.
Benefits of Search Engine Marketing
Higher conversion rates
Better brand awareness
Immediate results
Consistent traffic
It’s tempting to neglect paid search activities and invest in other marketing channels instead. However, SEM has tangible advantages. Let’s take a closer look at some of them.
Higher conversion rates. Using keywords, search engine marketing only catches customers who are potentially interested in your proposal. Half of the audience that comes to a retailer's website from paid ads is likely to make a purchase compared to those who come from an organic link.
Better brand awareness. SEM not only converts audiences who already know your brand; it can also boost brand awareness by up to 80%. When people search for something and see ads, they may not click on them, but still can recognize the product, brand, or even the URL.
Immediate results. While pushing your website to the top of organic search results often takes months, paid ads appear on top and bring results immediately. They help you reach your target audience instantly.
Consistent traffic. While your SEM campaigns are running, they generate additional traffic to your website. According to Google, 89% of this traffic is not replaced by organic clicks when ads are paused. This number is consistently high among different industries, such as automotive, healthcare, or travel. Put simply, SEM generates sustainable traffic all the time during your ad campaigns.
With all those benefits, search engine marketing looks too appealing to leave it on the table. Now it’s time to discover how SEM works.
How does SEM work?
From a searcher’s perspective, SEM looks like answers to their queries with “ad” or “sponsored” labels beside the search results. Search engines show them at the top of the results page. It helps paid ads gain more visibility compared to organic results.
From a marketer perspective, SEM appears to be a bit more sophisticated. Business professionals use a bunch of networks, such as Google Ads, Bing Ads, and so on. To start advertising, a marketer chooses the network and sets up the campaign by themselves.
To craft a campaign, you need to choose keywords – the words related to your promotion and used by searchers to find the information they need. For instance, if you are promoting running shoes, your keywords might be “running shoes” or “buy running shoes”. You can use specific, or long-tail, keywords to target your audience more precisely. Another option to make your campaign more effective is implementing other criteria, such as searcher’s location, age, gender, the device they use, or a certain time of the day to show ads.
Once your campaign is ready, SEM platforms decide when and where to show your ads considering competition with other brands targeting the same keywords. This system is called an Ad Auction. Your place on the SERP depends on the maximum amount you’re ready to pay for a click and your rating on the platform.
There are a ton of visual formats for how your ads will appear on the search results page. Let’s dive into this subject and unpack some popular types of search engine marketing.
Types of SEM
Text ads
Google shopping ads
Responsive ads
Local services’ ads
Here’s the point where the meaning of the term “search marketing” becomes a conundrum again. Referring to SEM as a whole lot of search promoting ways, we can divide it into organic search activities (SEO), paid activities, and local search, or marketing your business locally.
Meaning SEM as paid activities only, it’s possible to talk about different types of ads used by search engines. Let’s discuss the types the most popular platform – Google Ads – offers its users. Here are some of them:
Text Ads
This type is the most popular and easiest to craft. Text ads include headlines, body copy, and links to your website. Depending on the cost of the ad and the search engine, they may appear above, to the right of, or below organic listings.
Google Shopping Ads
This type of ad is based on the same principles of using keywords as the previous one. The difference is the visual part – Google shopping ads include pictures and prices. This format is perfect for selling products.
Responsive Ads
This format boils down to letting Google automatically adapt your ads to different searchers’ behavior patterns. All you need to do is type several headlines and descriptions for your campaign; the ad platform will test all of the possible combinations and show searchers the top-performing ads.
Local Service Ads
This option was made for local businesses, such as coffee shops, plumbers, real estate agents, and so on. Local service ads allow you to advertise only in a certain area and receive leads directly from potential customers.
Although we’ve only listed Google ad types, other search engines use similar formats. For instance, with Bing, you can find ads analogous to text ads and Google shopping ads.
We’ve unveiled search engine marketing benefits, essential work principles, and several types of ads. Let’s discover how to implement SEM in your marketing strategy.
How to Use SEM
Create a strategy
Collect a list of keywords
Add organic search promotion
Experiment with different types of ads
Check your campaign regularly
Launching a new complicated marketing channel from scratch can be tough. To make your experience with SEM smoother, stick to this list of the essential steps.
Create a strategy. Start by setting short and long-term goals for your SEM and align them with your business needs. For instance, if you want to gain more revenue, decide how many new customers you need to acquire to achieve this result. Then, define the amount of traffic you need and the budget you have. It will help you understand what campaigns, and with which frequency, you should use to meet your goals.
Collect a list of keywords. Before rolling out a paid campaign, generate a list of keywords associated with your business. You can copy keywords from competitors, generate them with online tools, such as Google Keyword Planner, or brainstorm with your colleagues. You are free to use more specific or general keywords and combinations of both. The main rule here is to only go for relevant words.
Add organic search promotion. Paid and organic search engine promotion activities work better together. Produced correctly, they reinforce each other and bring greater results. So, remember to add or tailor SEO to your SEM. To start search engine optimization from scratch, follow the tips from our guide on building an SEO strategy.
Experiment with different types of ads. Different types of ads may be more or less effective for certain businesses. To find the best option for you, try various ad formats, such as text or shopping ads. Test several ad platforms; chances are that underestimated paid submissions with Yahoo will be more effective for you than popular Google ads.
Check your campaign regularly. To evaluate the effectiveness of your search engine marketing campaigns, remember to keep track of their results. Check them once or twice a week to be able to make changes in case something goes wrong. Record all of the data and look for trends.
These basic rules will help you roll out and maintain search engine marketing. If you want to take your SEM game a notch higher, you’ll need to implement advanced strategies.
SEM Strategies
Voice search optimization
SEM automation
Device customization
Alternate ad platforms
Like every marketing channel, SEM changes every now and then. We’ve picked four strategies, which will help you stay on top and crush your business goals.
Voice search optimization
33% of adult audiences reported using voice search monthly at the beginning of 2019. Half of all searchers have used voice input in 2020. Voice search shopping is predicted to be a $40 billion market in two years. To stay ahead, you need to apply voice search optimization to your search engine marketing.
Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done – options for voice search optimization are quite limited. However, you can adjust your search ads right now. First of all, include more long-tail keywords – it will help your ads appear in more search results.
Another trick is to make your content more conversational. Notice how people chat in everyday life and apply this style to your search engine marketing.
SEM automation
Investments in search advertising are predicted to reach over $151 million in 2020 with annual growth of around 6%. For marketers with limited budgets, this means colossal competition and, probably, a drop in conversion rates. Thus, you’ll need to become even more creative to win the race.
SEM automation will help you get rid of routine tasks and find more time for planning strategies and activities. Consider using the Google Adwords automation features, such as smart campaigns, automated bidding, automated rules, and more.
Device customization
In 2019, 52% of internet traffic worldwide was generated on mobile devices. Probably, your potential customers see your ads on mobile screens rather than desktops. Track the amount of traffic from different devices and try to adjust your search engine marketing to the most prevalent type.
Optimize your ads and content connected with them for mobile to get more customers. For instance, Google mobile users would love to see ads with shorter headlines – 12-15 characters in comparison with 15-20 characters for desktop devices.
Remember to optimize the landing page for your ad leads too. Try to reduce the loading time to less than one second and make your webpage convenient for mobile users. You may also go for bigger buttons, lighter images, simpler design, and so on.
Alternate ad platforms
Google is considered to be the most popular platform for search ads – it makes up more than 70% of the market. However, the share of this giant has been falling for the previous three years, while other market players gain market share.
Take a closer look at other platforms, in particular Amazon. Not only this service is growing year after year, but it also has interesting features, especially for those who sell goods. The bottom line is Amazon ads have higher conversion rates; people may discover your brand on Google, but they come to Amazon with the intent to purchase. It makes Amazon ads the perfect channel to interact with your prospects in the lower stages of the marketing funnel.
Knowing more about SEM strategies, you may think it’s time to call it a day. However, there is always some space for improving your performance. To take it to the next level, consider adopting some industry best practices.
4 Best Practices to Improve Your SEM
Personalize Your Ads
Create Urgency with Countdowns
Align Your Ads with Landing Pages
Use Similar Audiences for Remarketing
We’ve collected several best practices to help you enrich your paid search program. Think about implementing some of them into your search engine marketing strategy.
Personalize Your Ads
Personalization is a must-have for every marketing channel; it brings amazing results. Adding personalization to your marketing activities helps you return 5-8 times more money than you’ve spent. Better yet, it can boost sales by 10% or more. To make your ads more relevant for your potential customers, you can tailor them by device or by the audience.
Use IF functions in Google Adwords to craft personalized messages. For instance, you can offer different discounts to different types of users: new customers, returning customers, cart abandoners, and so on.
Create Urgency with Countdowns
People fear missing an important opportunity, for instance, a great offer or bargain. It is called FOMO, or the fear of missing out, and can be used successfully in all possible marketing channels. You can play on this psychological trait in search engine marketing too.
Add an element of scarcity to your campaigns by using a countdown timer in Google Ads. It will count days, hours, and minutes until a certain event. You can set up countdowns in any text, responsive search, and other types of ads.
Align Your Ads with Landing Pages
Don’t underestimate the importance of search ads and landing pages they send searchers to. However, even if both are done perfectly, they do not always work their best in combination. If your ad doesn’t match your landing page, people will leave without making a purchase. On the other hand, the harmonized landing page and ad lead to a 39% increase in conversion.
Make sure your ad and landing page have the same design, addresses the same audience, uses the same call to action and copywriting style. To get even better results, follow our guide on increasing the landing page conversion rate.
Use Similar Audiences for Remarketing
Marketers and business owners realize how important it is to know your audience. They create typical buyer personas and try to target people based on their demographic data.
You can do the same thing for your search engine marketing in two clicks. Google collects data about your existing remarketing audiences. Better yet, it can recommend showing your ads to people with the same interests. All you need is to choose a campaign, select the “Audience” tab, and click the “Similar audience” bar. According to Google, this simple move may result in 60% more impressions, 48% more clicks, and 41% more conversions.
Here are some popular practices brands use to improve the performance of their search ads. Let’s learn a couple of new tricks from search engine marketing examples.
SEM Examples
Practice is the best teacher, but sometimes overlooking other brands’ tactics leads to better results. We’ve picked several examples of search engine marketing from different companies for you to adopt.
Numbers for Higher CTR
Numbers have a magical effect on the human brain – we consider them more valuable and trustworthy. Thus, texts with numbers tend to outperform text-only ads. For instance, numbers in headlines resonate with the audience more than any other type of headline.
The same principle works in search engine marketing. According to WordStream’s experiment, ads with numbers in headlines showed a 217% increase in CTR and a 23% improvement in conversion rates compared to the non-numbered ones.
The SEO agency Searchberg decided to make the most of the power of numbers and used them twice in their ad headline. At first, the company indicated the exact price for its service to underline the accessibility. Then, Searchberg added the number of days you need to see the result of their work. Combined, these figures create reasonable anticipation in prospects and boost the credibility of a company's proposal.
Sitelinks for more clicks
Extra links in search ads are a golden opportunity to hook more potential customers. You can tailor them to be shown on specific devices with tons of variables. It allows you to create a more personalized experience for different viewers and compose various calls to action. Better yet, sitelinks help you segment prospects instantly sending them to different landing pages.
The most significant advantage of sitelinks is their effect on conversion rates. Google claims that ads with sitelinks have a 10-20% higher CTR. To make those links even more effective, adjust them to the searcher’s needs and keep them short and sweet.
Look at this search ad from the travel agency CheapOair. The headlines of each link are concise and straightforward, which makes them crystal-clear for a reader. Better yet, they are tailored to the searcher’s query “Alaska cheap flights” – four of them offer reasonably priced plane tickets or great bargains.
Social proof for better performance
Social proof underlies and increases the credibility of every business. The majority of people tend to believe user reviews as much as personal recommendations. Testimonials on sales pages increase purchases by 34%. So, the efficiency of social proof is beyond controversy, but you might wonder how to use it in search engine marketing.
The term “social proof” encompasses a wide variety of formats, such as case studies, influencer marketing, ratings, and so on. The easiest way to implement them in your SEM is to refer to your exact number of your customers, add brands you work with, or show your ratings. The trick here is to make sure the latter is high enough – consumers will ignore star ratings lower than 3.3.
EconomyBookings promotes its car rental service and refers to its rating on Google. The company has good marks – around 4.9, which sky-rockets its credibility. To increase it even more, EconomyBookings adds a reference to the reviews on its website. There is no possibility to show the exact mark, but the service makes an impression by writing the line “70k+ positive reviews.”
Additional marketing activities can improve search results. For instance, email marketing provokes your subscribers to interact with your website more actively, which eventually affects its rankings. To reinforce your SEM with email and messenger marketing, web push notifications, chatbots, and more, sign up with LIKE.TG.
Sales volume
Sales volume equals the number of units sold by a company during a particular accounting period, for example, a year.
In the video below, Edwin Dearborn shares effective tips to increase your sales volume.
Why is sales volume important?
Unlike total sales, the sales volume metric focuses on the number of products sold rather than monetary profit. It may seem that sales volume is notas important as total sales, but that is not the case. Sales volume is an essential indicator of business health. It allows you to track the performance of marketing campaigns, evaluate the efforts of sales representatives, and choose the best places for physical stores.
Evaluating total sales, marketers endeavor to increase their revenue while monitoring sales volume to look for strategies to sell more products. If you have several offline stores in one city and the volume of items sold differs a lot, you should pay special attention towhere you put your new storesince shopping opportunities underlie this factor.
Besides, you can track sales volume from each of your sales reps individually. This will help you find out the most effective member of your salesstaff, say goodbye to unmotivated colleagues, or invest in their education.
You'll also get a clear picture of your top-selling products and those that need either more promotional activities or should be discontinued.
Read on to discover how to calculate your sales volume.
How to calculate your sales volume?
As we compare sales volume to total sales, let’s take a look at the calculations for both business health indicators with an example.
To find out your sales volume, you need to multiply the number of items you sell per month by the necessary period — a year, for example.
If you sell 300 light bulbs a month, your sales volume would be 3,600.
300*12 = 3,600
This means that you sell 3,600 bulbs a year.
If you want to find out your total sales, you need to multiply your sales volume by the cost of a bulb. Let’s say the price of a bulb is $15.
3,600* $15 = $54,000
So, your annual total sales would be $54,000.
So now that you know how to calculate your sales volume, you may be interested in some methods that will help you increase it. We’ve shared some effective tips below.
8 Strategies to Increase Your Sales Volume
Identifythe unique values of your product
Put customers’ needs at the heart of your business
Nurture and qualify your leads
Invest in marketing promotion
Speed up your sales cycle
Reward loyal clients
Align your marketing, sales, and support teams
Motivate and reward your sales reps
Remember that these methods should concentrate on optimizing your work with both prospects and sales representatives. Make sure that you take into consideration each aspect described below.
Identify the unique values of your product. This step is a must when developing a new product. Answer the following questions: “What makes our product unique?” “Why doesour product stand out in a row of similar products?” and “Why should people buy out product?” Having this list of unique qualities at hand will help you easily persuade prospects that they need your product.
Put customers’ needs at the heart of your business. If you know nothing about your clients’ problems and preferences, they won’t come back to you. People love brands that appreciate their customers’ choices and do their best to improve. For example, if you own a cosmetics store and want to launch a new line of face foundations, you should research and consult with a dermatologist to produce different variations of the same productfor clients’ problems, wants, and needs. You should consider age, gender, skin types, presence of skin problems (large pores, acne-prone skin, redness, bruises, wrinkles, etc.), the level of coverage, SPF presence, the type of finish, etc. This will help you create the best product for each client.
Nurture and qualify your leads. People are not ready to buy when they first meet your product. Hence, you need to qualify your leads based on their willingness to buy and financial opportunities. If you evaluate them as unqualified leads, they need nurturing. This process entails providing people with relevant content based on their stage in the sales funnel. This content should answer their questions, remove objections, and build trust in your brand. You can nurture your leads via email campaigns and chatbots for messengers. LIKE.TG offers its clients to send up to 15,000 emails and create up to 3 botsfor free every month.
Invest in marketing promotion. You may sell unique products, but what’s the good in that if nobody knows about them? Well-thought marketing campaigns will help you increase your outreach dramatically, acquire more leads, and boost brand awareness. Choose a reliable marketing service that provides a set of features for this purpose. LIKE.TG allows marketers to reach their clients and bring in more leads on almost every digital channel available today. Inform clients about sales and hot deals, remind them about items left in their shopping cart, communicate personalized offers, and answer their questions via email campaigns, web push notifications, SMS, and chatbots.
Speed up your sales cycle. This term entails the sequence of steps necessary to sell a product. Your task is to sell more products in a shorter period of time. The faster you do this, the bigger your sales volume will be. We recommend investing more time and money into the best-performing channels, automate routine tasks via emails and chatbots (such as handling orders, reservations, answering FAQs), work on customers’ possible objections in advance, simplify the ordering process and site navigation, make a one-step checkout, make use of social proof, personalize communication, create acustomer profile, and arrange meetings with prospects.
Reward loyal clients. Let customers know that you appreciate their choice. Working on building customer loyaltyallows brands to increase retention, boost sales, and facilitate word-of-mouth. For this purpose, create a loyalty program. Give them points for using your service or buying your products and let them exchange them for a product or gift. Encourage customers to share their feedback. It will help you reveal what clients appreciate the most about your business and reveal your weak points and improve. Build a warm and long-lasting relationship with customers. Send them birthday emails, remind them about plan expiration, and recommend the product they may like.
Align your marketing, sales, and support teams. These departments complement each other perfectly since support and sales teams know both customers’ pain points and what they like about your brand. Pass this information to the marketing department, and it will plan communications accordingly. You may even improve and optimize your product if you cooperate effectively.
Motivate and reward your sales reps. These are exactly the people who make the biggest impact on your sales volume offline. So, you should hire them wisely. Following a pre-written script no longer works, so reps should be savvy people able to adjust anytime. Create the sales plan, mention the number of deals you expect to achieve each month. If a rep overachieves your sales quota, reward them with a commission. If they miss the quota, analyze the probable causes or consider hiring another more experienced specialist. Remember that your staff should be highly-motivated, and the salary isn’t the only element of motivation. Create a positive and friendly working atmosphere, improve team bonding, and be ready to help your colleagues.
Congrats, now you know why sales volume matters, how to calculate and increase this metric. Register in LIKE.TG to build long-lasting relationships with your clients and promote your products on any channel you need.
Sales prospecting
Sales prospecting is a process that implies identifying and interacting with qualified leads to convert them into customers. Examples include calls, direct mail, events, and social media networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. It helps companies convert prospects into customers, increase revenue, and improve ROI.
In this article, we’ll unveil the importance of prospecting in sales, review 10 prospecting techniques, and 7 tips. We’ll also show you how to prospect using LIKE.TG.
Why is prospecting important in sales?
The success of every business depends on the number of customers it has and the purchases they make. Prospecting is essential to generate leads and convert them into consumers. It enables business owners to create a pipeline of clients for their brands. Besides establishing a customer base, the process helps build trusting relationships with potential customers.
With sales prospecting, sales representatives send emails, make cold calls, and reach potential customers at events to increase the company's customer base. The more qualified leads they attain, the more people are converted.
Prospecting is a complex process that implies finding potential customers, interacting with them through the most effective channels, and encouraging them to buy. Email campaigns, calls, events, and social media networks are the touchpoints for communication with prospects.
Before contacting leads, sales reps should conduct research, qualify prospects, and create a personalized sales pitch. Going through all the stages is crucial for finding something in common and establishing good relationships with potential clients. Prospecting helps understand leads’ needs, preferences, problems, and interests and communicate a relevant offer. When sales reps reach potential customers with a personalized pitch, they increase the chances for conversion.
Now that you know about the importance of sales prospecting, it’s time to check out some best prospecting techniques. They will come in handy when you look for new leads for your business.
10 Prospecting Techniques
We’ve decided to provide you with a list of the most effective techniques that prevent you from racking the brain on how to start with prospecting. Let’s have a look!
Introduce your brand to prospects. First of all, you need to initiate the first contact with your potential clients so that you can make warm calls and send warm email campaigns. You can do it through shared connections, paid ads, or influencer recommendations. This way, your brand’s name will be familiar to leads before you make the actual contact.
Make calls. If your potential clients have already heard your brand’s name and the product you offer, it’s easier for you to make warm calls. Warm calls will help you explain your product’s benefits. By communicating with prospects in real-time, you can increase the chances of conversions. Calls allow you to provide personalized offers based on customers’ needs and problems. You can hear their requirements directly through the phone and search for the perfect solution together.
Send email campaigns. Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels which enables you to reach potential consumers with news, product releases, and attractive offers based on browsing history and wishlists. With email campaigns, you can send targeted offers that meet customers’ requirements. LIKE.TG empowers you to create professional, personalized emails and schedule the sending time to reach the right clients at the right moment.
Demonstrate your expertise. To earn the credibility and trust of prospects, you need to show that your product and company is the best solution available. If you want to become an opinion leader in your industry, consider running a blog, creating guest posts, and becoming a speaker on webinars, trade shows, and other events. This way, you’ll establish brand recognition.
Use social media networks as a medium. Since more and more people use social media to search for brands, listen to recommendations on particular products, and order items, consider prospecting through these channels. Use Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok as sources of information about prospects, tools for communication with them, and promotion channels for your products. With social media, you can explore the necessary information about customers and reach them with highly targeted offers. Paid ads will help you with that. Targeted advertising will reach people based on the criteria you choose. For instance, if you sell pizza in one specific city, the ad will communicate the message to prospects from this city with related search history.
Implement a referral program. Referral marketingis a wise way of attracting qualified leads without your sales reps’ intervention. Your existing customers will do everything by themselves if they perceive your brand as a good one worth recommending to friends and family. Offer an incentive to current and potential clients to join the program. You can encourage new customers to make the first purchase for a specific sum of money to get even more benefits. As a result, you attain high-quality leads by spending little money on the lead generation process.
Consider hosting a webinar. Webinars allow you to reach a wider audience and attain more prospects for your brand. You can position your brand as an expert in the industry and show your competitive advantage. With webinars, your brand can engage with the audience and demonstrate the benefits of your product. It’s a cost-effective way of generating qualified leads and building brand awareness.
Represent your company at various events. By attending trade shows, conferences, and other events, you can increase recognition. First, search for events related to your industry and participate in them. By doing this, you can reach people interested in your product. You just need to communicate with prospective customers face to face, speak to a wide audience, and show what makes your product stand out. If you manage to demonstrate your product in the best light, you’ll be able to convert them.
Monitor QA forums. Forums are the perfect channels to educate your audience. Quora and LinkedIn Groups can serve you as mediums for communication with prospects. Search for questions related to your industry and answer them. Start by providing tips relevant to your industry and eventually introduce your product. Once you gain trust and show your expertise, you can continue with product promotion. Position your product as the best solution to their problems.
Use Twitter for communication. Twitter is a great social media network where you can discuss topics and share opinions. With Twitter, you can establish relationships with your prospects and build brand awareness. To discuss a topic, interest, or trend, you should use a specific hashtag. Consider joining a chat based on the product you offer by searching for an appropriate hashtag. Chat runners share the topic of the discussion under a specific hashtag, and users provide their opinions and questions under this chat hashtag.
Now that you know how to prospect, it’s time to find out how to use LIKE.TG to your advantage and convert more leads into customers. Let’s dive in!
How to prospect with LIKE.TG?
Sales prospecting can be challenging for your company. That’s why it’s important to use automation tools. LIKE.TG is a multichannel platform that allows you to reach your leads through multiple channels for free. In this section, we’ll uncover how to use the platform to achieve your main prospecting objectives.
Add subscription forms to your website
Subscription forms are designed to collect customers' personal information. With subscription forms, you can get prospects’ phone numbers, names, emails, and social media. By adding such a form to your website, you can collect contact information of your site visitors, increase engagement, have more touchpoints with your prospects, and build your email list.
With LIKE.TG functional form builder, you can create a subscription form from scratch or select one of the pre-built templates. Change your form's style, text, and format to meet your brand requirements. You can add a lead magnet to increase the likelihood of users sharing their personal information with you. The platform enables you to add files and images and display the subscription form on any device for free.
Below you can see an example of a subscription form designed in the service.
Create pop-ups
A pop-up is a small window that appears while browsing a website designed to collect site visitors’ data, inform about events, discounts, and special offers. A pop-up appears based on the conditions (behavior and user engagement). With these forms, you can convert visitors into customers by engaging with them.
LIKE.TG empowers you to create pop-ups and add them to your website within minutes. Consider using ready-to-go templates to create a smart widget. You can develop pop-ups for different scenarios and craft your interaction with potential clients based on their behavior and actions on your site.
Below you can see how to create a pop-up using one of the ready-to-go templates.
Send email campaigns
Email marketing is a great approach for reaching prospects and telling them about your product in detail. Besides educating leads, you can interest them by providing personalized offers. Discounts and special offers for products they were browsing, the information they needed, and news about product releases. Email campaigns are suitable for educational, promotional, and informational purposes.
In LIKE.TG, you can send 15,000 emails per month for free. The platform’s drag-and-drop editor enables you to design emails to your liking without any knowledge of the code. Use personalization and segmentation features to divide your prospects into groups and send them relevant email campaigns. For instance, if leads have specific products in their browsing history or wishlist, you can send them campaigns informing them about discounts on mentioned items.
Below you can see an email campaign created to inform subscribers about the upcoming webinar.
Connect a free CRM
CRM allows you to automate interaction with prospects and clients, securely store customer data, and manage deals in one place. With a CRM, you can accept orders, keep an eye on the sales process, gather customer personal information for your customer list, and run marketing campaigns. If you need to check the status of your deals, it’s enough just to open the CRM. We recommend you use CRM from LIKE.TG for free to directly interact with your prospects through the most effective channels from the CRM, collect and store information, and track your deals for free.
The screenshot below shows the Kanban board with deals and their statuses.
Now that you know how to use LIKE.TG to reduce the workload on your team during prospecting, it’s time to uncover some valuable tips on how to succeed in this process. Check the next section to find some effective approaches.
7 Tips for Successful Prospecting
In this section, we’ll unveil some effective tips to work with your potential clients successfully. By using these best practices, you’ll be able to become closer to your main business goal. So, let’s start.
Develop a buyer persona. Before prospecting, you need to find out who your ideal customers are, their needs, problems, requirements, preferences, age, gender, occupation, etc. To receive this information, you need to conduct research first. During this time, you’ll be able to get all the data you need for your ideal profile. Once you gather this information, you can find a personalized approach to your audience. A buyer persona will guide you through the process.
Establish a presence on social media channels. Social media networks have already become a part of every person’s life. Users read news, search for information, look for products, and purchase items through Facebook and Instagram. Consider creating content for your Instagram and Facebook accounts (stories, posts, reels, and paid ads). All these tools will enable you to reach a wider audience and educate them about your product.
Share relevant content with your leads. To convert leads into customers, you need to demonstrate the value and benefits of your product. Consider sharing detailed information about your product with potential clients through the most effective channels, such as email campaigns, landing pages, tutorials, videos, and blog posts. You can share all materials by sending them to your leads’ inboxes. With LIKE.TG, you can create and send relevant email campaigns about your promos, product benefits, features, and discounts right to leads.
Create videos to demonstrate your product. Video is the best tool to reach your potential clients and show the real you. Instead of creating production videos, consider making amateur videos with sales reps sharing information about your products and the results it brings. Add these videos to your articles and accounts on social media, and send them to prospects’ inboxes. You can tell how to start using your product, share tips and tricks, and explain new topics.
Improve your call strategy. Making calls is still an effective technique when applied right. To have a constructive dialog with leads, you need to prepare your sales reps first. Make sure to research these people’s needs, issues, and requirements to create an effective sales pitch. You need to understand your prospects’ problems to provide the right solutions. Get ready with your pitch, and any questions prospects might have. Consider developing a script so that a sales rep knows how to act when having this or that situation.
Support your clients at every stage of their customer journey. After closing the deal, you need to follow up with your customers. Send them relevant email campaigns with products they are interested in, answer their questions, and share tutorials on how to start with the service. This way, you show customers that you care and ensure they use your product or service effectively.
Write scripts for different communication channels. It can be challenging for new salespeople to find the right approach and convert leads into customers without preparation. For such situations, it’s necessary to create scripts as references. Although some companies don’t use scripts to sound natural, this document is still relevant. When a sales representative communicates with your potential customer for the first time, it can be difficult to adapt to the situation and provide the right responses. So, if you want your new salespeople to use the right language, avoid pauses, and work with objections, write scripts. Later, your salespeople will know your product perfectly and be ready to work with customers without them.
Congrats, now you know what sales prospecting is and why it’s crucial. Hope that our tips and techniques will be useful when working with prospects. Use LIKE.TG to automate the sending of information to prospects and following up with them.
Scrum
Scrum is a project management framework in which teams complete tasks in sprints. Everyone has a role and a defined goal.
In this article, we’ll unveil how scrum works, its principles, pros, and cons. We’ll also review the difference between scrum and kanban and uncover how to implement scrum.
How does scrum work?
Teams using scrum for project development focus on constant improvements. They don’t know everything from the start but explore the peculiarities and evolve when they receive new experiences and knowledge about the product. The framework is well-structured, so the teams can adapt to the needs and desires of customers. It consists of short cycles which help prioritize work and focus on improvements.
This project management framework adapts to the requirements of any organization and helps finish tasks in stages. However, each company should ensure transparency, eagerness to improve, and seamless communication among team members to achieve the necessary results.
Now that you know how scrum works, let’s discover its pros and cons. The next section will enable you to uncover the things you might face when implementing this project management framework.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Scrum
Once implemented, the scrum framework can bring many benefits to business owners. Let’s review all the advantages you can reap after incorporating this project management system.
Scrum helps you
manage your time and resources efficiently;
reach the company’s goals within a given period of time;
deliver higher visibility to team members through meetings;
ensure that all the changes and improvements are mentioned;
make sure that you see all the efforts of your team members;
work on large projects;
reduce costs;
work in different environments and situations;
obtain quality work and high productivity;
initiate creative approaches between team members like brainstorming;
divide big projects into small tasks (sprints);
test all development processes;
increase customer satisfaction;
cover stakeholders’ and customers’ inputs.
However, as with any other agile framework, scrum also has drawbacks. It
has no definite due date;
requires training for a team to understand the system and how it works;
has a high possibility of failure if team members aren’t cooperative;
might require changes within the company;
can cause challenges for big projects;
requires experienced team members.
Now that you know the advantages and disadvantages, it’s time to explore key scrum principles. The next section will help you figure out whether it suits your team and product.
Scrum Principles
Scrum, as any other framework, has its principles. In this section, we’ll review each of them in detail. They set the direction, and team members should follow these fundamentals to obtain effective results.
Self-organization. Since a scrum team often consists of up to nine people, self-organization is crucial. Every team member should know what tasks to complete and what work to do. Every employee should be ready to work independently and in a team. Every person should contribute to the successful final result. That’s why it’s necessary to be a self-organized person who can manage time and resources efficiently.
Cooperation. Team collaboration is a must in a scrum team, which is often quite big. Although everyone always has specific tasks, team members still need to communicate to align the direction of product development. Every employee should be aware of the work of each team member.
Adjustments during the development process. A product can’t be perfect after the first development process. Everything needs alterations and improvements. So be ready to provide them. Consider using iterative development to make some changes to your product faster and easier.
Time orientation. Since teams with a scrum system finish tasks in stages, you should stick to that time and have your tasks completed. A team has a specific period of time called sprint assigned to each piece of work and must be ready by the due date. Team meetings also have a predefined time to start and end. Time orientation enables you to finish your project at a necessary date and ensure that every goal is reached at the right time. As a result, a company avoids delays and time inefficiency.
Tasks prioritization. In a scrum system, there’s task prioritization. It means that your team should organize the existing tasks by urgency and their importance for your product. The most important tasks need to be finished first.
Now that you know the principles, let’s proceed to the difference between scrum and kanban. It’ll help you make the right choice.
Scrum vs Kanban
Since there’s still confusion between a scrum and a kanban system, we need to unveil the difference. We’ll uncover it in detail in this section.
Scrum is a project management framework that divides work into sprints (fixed time boxes) during which a team should deliver a ready product. With this Agile system, team members have a structure for the project and a schedule for completing each task. Team members don’t wait for the final deadline of the project to finish all the tasks, because they complete them in phases. This system is designed to help companies manage big projects. A scrum team usually consists of around nine people, including a product owner and a scrum master. Since the tasks are delivered one by one, team members can instantly react and adapt to changes. As a result, the final product complies with all the requirements.
Kanban is a project management framework perfect for companies in continuous flow (move an item through the production process without stops). A company sets a deadline, and team members chase it to deliver the necessary results and an excellent product. The kanban board enables you to visualize all your tasks and set a direction for all your team members. The productivity and efficiency of workers improve when they know and understand what and when to do. Moreover, the system allows businesses to perfect transparency across departments.
Simply put, scrum enables you to structure your work while kanban helps you visualize it. Both frameworks bring benefits to the right companies.
Now that you know the difference, it’s time to figure out how to implement scrum. If you researched and identified scrum as your perfect project management system, let’s find out how to incorporate it into your company.
How to implement scrum?
To incorporate the framework, you need to stick to a plan. We’ve prepared a list of steps necessary to take steps when you use scrum for your projects. Let’s dive in.
Determine the elements. The two essential elements in every scrum project management tool are the product owner and the work team. The product owner should know the objectives and determine the manufacturing needs. Product owners also take care of the risks the product development team might face. A work team usually contains from four to nine people. These individuals should be ready to work independently and organize their work in an appropriate way. These employees are expected to perform, test, and implement the tasks. At the end of each sprint, the team should present the results of their work in accordance with the deadline. You should also have a scrum master who controls the effectiveness and progress of the work team. This person leads team members to the successful accomplishment of the project while removing obstacles. Moreover, you need to determine sprint duration. Usually, one sprint lasts between one and four weeks.
List your key goals. Developing a great product requires you to list all the activities you should do. You need to cover the functionalities, pending activities, and task priority to make a good project and reach all your goals. Before diving into the sprints, you should understand how much time you need to accomplish each task. Make sure to do all the necessary calculations to figure it out. You should also recheck the information you have about the project and the tasks to avoid any conditions that might influence the duration of each sprint.
Define the sprint. The completion of each task should be done based on pre-defined deadlines. It’s necessary for the team's effective work and the project's successful development in time. That’s why ensure that your team can manage a specific number of tasks within a given timeframe.
Conduct meetings. If you want to see the results of your team’s work, consider organizing meetings regularly. Carry out a demo for your team, including a scrum master and product owner. This way, you and all team members will understand the progress. Use project management tools to track the progress of each item and plan your meetings. As a result, the workload of your scrum master will reduce.
Review your work. Review and demonstrate your progress to everyone involved in the process of product development. You’ll be able to assess whether the results of your work meet the initial requirements. If you aren’t satisfied with the work, you and your team can make some essential decisions to improve the situation. Show only finished tasks with working functionality.
Analyze the problems. Identifying the problems allows you to avoid them in the next sprint. That’s why make sure to find out what went wrong and why it happened. Share this information with your team so that they can bring in new ideas on how to eliminate these issues. Find a constructive way of making your product better for customers.
Start a new sprint. After analyzing the previous work, you can step forward and start a new sprint. Consider using your experience and knowledge to deal with the next stage. Avoid making the same mistakes and ensure incorporation improvements.
Congrats, now you know what scrum is and how it works. Hope that our guide will help you implement the system.
Scheduled email campaign
A scheduled email campaign is an email marketing campaign that a company sends at a particularly scheduled time, not instantly after creating. Scheduled emails play a significant part in email marketing strategy.
Why are scheduled emails important?
Easy multi-campaign management
Reduce mistakes
Help send your email at the right time
Assist in holiday marketing
Easy multi-campaign management. It is more convenient to use scheduled emails for those who have to manage a lot of campaigns within a short period. There is no need to send each email campaign manually.
Reduce mistakes. Working out a schedule for email marketing efforts helps to avoid human factor mistakes. If you need to automate the routine but not ready to use a more advanced Automation 360 feature, then scheduled emails are a fantastic idea.
Help send your email at the right time. You may find out the best time for sending emails to your audience. If you aren’t able to send emails yourself at non-working hours, scheduled email is the option that enables you to set time for sending future email campaigns when it is convenient.
Assist in holiday marketing. Email scheduling helps to get ready for holidays like Christmas, New Year, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc., long before they take place. You can also create a scheduled anniversary email campaign beforehand to celebrate with your subscribers.
How to Schedule Emails
Create an email campaign
Set “Sending time
Check the time zone in account settings if necessary
Create an email campaign. Fill in all the necessary data. Customize the elements to your liking in a drag-and-drop editor. Add text and images into the components. Here’s how to create an email campaign.
Set “Sending time”. Choose the time you want to send your email campaign automatically.
Check the time zone in account settings if necessary. If you send a scheduled email, for instance, to a foreign segment of your mailing list, you should click on time zone in parentheses under “Send message on” and edit the time zone settings of your account in a new tab.
Sales promotion
Sales promotion is a set of marketing technologies aimed to stimulate the demand for particular products and increase brand awareness. Limited in time, it creates a feeling of time-sensitiveness, generates new leads, and keeps existing customers engaged.
In this video, Anna, a LIKE.TG marketer, shares top sales promotion tips.
Sales promotion is one of the core elements of the promotion mix. To build long-lasting relationships with users, you need to find out the types of sales that work with your target audience. At the same time, you should provide customers with value that’s relative to your field of expertise.
Benefits of Sales Promotion
It helps to generate new leads
Allows re-engaging with your existing audience
Skyrockets revenue
Increases brand awareness
It helps to generate new leads. Sales promotion can boost your product image since it encourages sharing information about it within social groups related to your business. If you sell training football shoes, people keen on playing football will share the message.
Allows re-engaging with your existing audience. Once a person subscribed to a brand’s email newsletters, they will receive regular sales promotions. It is a way to keep the audience engaged and maintain a close connection with the company, which is crucial for building loyalty.
Skyrockets revenue. Sales promotions help companies to increase the number of sold goods, even though they need to lower the price to achieve that goal. Of course, merely reducing the price is not enough, people should need your product, while the discount is only another reason to make a purchase.
Increases brand awareness. Sales promotion is a way to make a name for your brand because people are more likely to talk about a сompany that proposes benefits and saves their money. That’s what sales promotion does.
Sales Promotion Objectives
Launch a new product
Attract new clients
Stay competitive
Make existing customers buy more
Sell during off-season
Run clearance campaigns
Although the main goal of sales promotion is to increase demand in a particular product, you can reach several important goals. Understanding them will help you create an effective promotion strategy.
Launch a new product. If you're going to expand and turn your small coffee shop into a bakery, you need to reach new market segments. You can attract new customers by offering a free cookie with each cup of coffee or suggest visitors set their own price once in a while.
Attract new clients. This objective should be your long-term goal since it allows your business to grow. Your potential clients are likely your competitors' customers, so analyzing their product and benefits, you can offer something more valuable.
Stay competitive. Researching and analyzing your competitors will not only help you attract new clients but constantly improve your product and customer service.
Make existing customers buy more. It's always easier to make an existing customer buy more than attract new clients. Provide each client with a personalized approach — it will help you build customer loyalty. As a result, clients will promote your brand organically.
Sell during the off-season.Goods like swimwear, boats, tents, air conditioners, refrigerators are definitely more popular in summer but you should consider special strategies to sell them throughout the year. Offer time-limited discounts, "1+1=3" campaigns, and other marketing tricks.
Run clearance campaigns. They're especially popular before summer and winter. As dealers need to make room for a new collection, they often run total clearance campaigns when users can buy goods from old collections at extremely reduced prices.
There are several types of sales promotions that will help you reach your objectives.
Types of Sales Promotion
Price deal
Loyalty reward program
Bonus-pack deal
Giveaways
Coupons
Mobile couponing
Sampling
There is a variety of ways to run a successful sales promotion, but let’s focus on some most frequently used ones, using a cup of coffee as an example.
Price deal. It is a temporary cost reduction, for instance, 20% off for a coffee for a week.
Loyalty reward program.This means that customers collect points or credits when they buy coffee. If they get 10 points, for example, they will have one coffee for free.
Bonus-pack deal. It means that a customer can get more products paying the original price. For instance, they pay a dollar for one cup of coffee and get free candy, which gives some positive emotions and makes them come back in the future.
Giveaways. These tactics aim to increase brand awareness. It means giving some items for free in exchange for personal information to use in further marketing. For example, offer a free cup of coffee in exchange for a phone number, which you can use for many purposes: promotingnew sales, sharing updates and news with short text messages, etc.
Coupons. You can sell coffee for the original price and give a coupon, which will make the next purchase 5% cheaper.
Mobile couponing. It stands for coupons received on mobile phones via SMS. To get a discount, a customer needs to show the coupon on their smartphone.
Sampling. Choosing this promotion type, companies give a sample of the product; for instance, the first cup of coffee to promote a new taste.
Sales Promotion Techniques
Discounts
Time-limited offers
Seasonal promotions
“1+1=3"
Holiday promotions
Gifts
Contests
Reward points
Special prices
First-purchase coupons
Free shipping
In this section, you'll see some popular techniques as well as less used methods that will help you increase sales without much effort.
Discounts. This technique is as old as the hills. Small companies and big corporations use this method to sell more. One of the reasons it's so popular, even today, is that discounts are great for both consumers and retailers. Sellers can clear room in their warehouse for new arrivals and customers can buy more at reduced prices. Keep in mind that a normal discount shouldbe between 5-20% since clients won't even notice less than 5% discount, but more than 20% off will make them feel suspicious about your brand.
Time-limited offers. This technique works even better than a big discount. With this trick, marketers manage to create a sense of urgency and fear of missing out on their products. You can give clients 24 hours to grab this special offer. To make this technique perform better, you need to advertise your promotion on each channel you use. This will bring more sales and increase your site traffic.
Seasonal promotions. People often buy ski suits in summer and air conditioners in winter to save money. Selling products during off-seasons can be a real challenge, so we strongly recommend you to run seasonal promotions. Sell items from old collections at reduced prices and don't forget to advertise your campaign via email and social media.
“1+1=3"."Buy one and get one for free" and "Buy 2 items and get the third one for free" are very familiar marketing tricks. Such campaigns help you sell products at a low price or save money shopping together with a friend. Retailers can significantly boost sales with this technique reinforcing clearance sales.
Holiday promotions. Christmas, New Year's Eve, Halloween, International Women's Day, and Valentine's Day are great chances to skyrocket sales. People are extremely generous when buying presents for their friends and family. Launch your holiday campaigns in advance, and invest in advertising via email, PPC, social media, and other channels. This will help you increase brand awareness and site traffic.
Gifts. Who doesn't like freebies? If you are a startup or about to launch a new product, go for this technique. It will help you reach big audiences fast, build brand recognition, and collect user-generated content which is especially valuable for every type of business.Let users try your service for freefor 7 days, launch a campaign that will let each client who spends $100+ receive a gift, or give away free samples with each order.
Contests. Competitions are a great opportunity to boost user engagement and increase brand awareness and sales. You canlet your audience to create a slogan for your brand, a new advertising message, design, or share creative ideas on how to use your product in an unusual way. Make sure that the prize correlates with the effort spent on participating in your contest.
Reward points. You definitely should reward clients who buy from you regularly - people love brands that appreciate their choice. So, with this technique, you can start building customer loyalty. Give points to each client whomakes a second purchase or spends a certain amount of money. Then, let them exchange those points for a product they like.
Special prices. Marketers usually run a 1-day campaign when users can buy everything at a fixed price.These prices usually look tempting for users and they can’t overcome the feeling of missing out. The goal may be an annual clearance of goods. You can set a fixed price for each product category of your store. For example, sweaters for $5.99, jeans for $9.99, coats for $15.99. This technique works.
First-purchase coupons. It always takes time for people to give money to a new store especially when buying expensive products. To make them think over the purchase faster, offer a special incentive. You can send a welcome email to a new visitor with a coupon to get a 10 or 15% discount off their first purchase. For better performance, limit this appealing offer to a couple of days.
Free shipping. Very often users leave your site without buying just because of expensive delivery options. To win back these potential clients, you can run a time-limited campaign that allows them to receive their orders for free if they spend a certain amount of money. If you sell medium-priced goods, do not make this fixed sum too high. Otherwise, people won’t fall for this trick.
Now that you know a bunch of effective sales promotion techniques, choose the most profitable methods for your business, and try LIKE.TG to run an effective campaign via email, SMS, or Facebook.
Sales Promotion Examples
Email marketing
Facebook marketing
SMS marketing
Email marketing
It is one of the most efficient digital marketing channels, with the ROI up to 4000%. Marketers usesales promotionfor lead nurturing, reactivation, promotion, etc. To succeed, marketers combine sales with educating materials. In this sales email, Grammarly offers users a chance to upgradeto a premium plan and shows the multiple benefits and suggests taking advantage of the 40% discount limited it time.
Email is also an effective platform for holding giveaways. You can create a giveaway campaign on specialized resources like Rafflecopter, and keep users engaged with giveaway emails along the way. The example below shows how the Apple Music Festival encourages people to participate, using the names of famous artists who are going to perform there.
Facebook marketing
Facebook is one of the most powerful advertising platforms due to its global coverage and detailed targeting options. Facebook marketing allows using various types of ads to fit any demand and budget. Here’s an example of a carousel ad with a 10% discount by iHerb.
SMS marketing
This channel is excellent for instant updates and flash sales. It works out well for local businesses. The example below shows how sales promotion in SMS marketing can create a sense of urgency, stimulating people to visit a restaurant for lunch.
Sales Promotion Ideas
Give an adequate range of discounts
Target sales promotion to the right people
Take advantage of the shopping holidays
Create a sense of urgency
Develop a loyalty program
Use sales promotion to generate leads
Offer free shipping
Give an adequate range of discounts. Avoid more than 50% discounts, because they make you look desperate. Don’t give discounts, like 2% either, as they won’t thrill your customers.
Target sales promotion to the right people. Find out which people are likely to buy a particular product you want to promote. For instance, if you run a sports shop and you want to increase the demand for skateboards, target your promotions to teenagers and young people.
Take advantage of the shopping holidays. Marketers have developed a system of consumerism based on traditions. As a result, people spend more money on shopping in particular days called shopping holidays. These are Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, New Year, Halloween, to name a few. Any holiday meaningful for a specific group, like Mother’s day for women, can be a reason for companies to promote sales.
Create a sense of urgency. Create time-limited offers to make your audience feel they are going to miss something important. Time-sensitiveness is an excellent incentive for people to purchase since it appeals to their emotions.
Develop a loyalty program. This technique will help you keep your customers engaged for an extended period. Offer to collect points from every dollar spent, so in the future, your customers could use them to pay for new purchases in your shop.
Use sales promotion to generate leads. Use a discount as an incentive to subscribe to your email newsletters. Lead magnets help to cover this process during the subscription.
Offer free shipping. It is the right motivation for people from distant regions to decide to buy from you.
Watch this video to find out how to increase sales quickly and promote your products at the right place at the right time.
Scrum master
A scrum master is a person responsible for adhering to the scrum process in the company. According to the Agile methodology, a scrum masterensures that their team works smoothly and efficiently andpinpoints the opportunities to improve the workflow and develop the product more efficiently, bringing more value to customers.
In this article, we will describe the role of a scrum master, talk about their responsibilities and essential skills, cover the difference between scrum masters and project managers, and provide a step-by-step guide on how to become a scrum master.
What is the role of a scrum master?
The Agile methodology is becoming more and more popular among IT companies. This approach to project management enables businesses to accelerate the delivery of value to customers. Instead of releasing the entire product, the Agile team gets the job done in small parts. They rely not only on pre-created detailed plans but also on urgent changes.
There are businesses that use onlya fewtechniques from the Agile methodology. However, a great number of companies useevery single principle of this methodology in their work— this is wherea scrum master steps in.
The primary role of a scrum master is teachingteam members to communicate effectively with each other and with business representatives. These people help companies optimize theirbusiness routine to raise efficiency. Scrum masters are leaders, but not in the traditional sense of the word since they have no formal authority over their team.
In some companies, scrum masters playthe role of a link betweena product owner and their team. They guide the product owner on how to achieve their businessgoals and, at the same time, help resolvecertain issues that can emerge during the development process.
The primary mission of a scrum master is to create conditions for self-government in the team and not let this self-governmentcollapse due to micromanagement or a directive management method.
In the next section, we will review scrum masters' responsibilities to better understand what they do in the company.
Scrum Master Responsibilities
The profession of a scrum master is comparatively new. Moreover, in the ideal Agile world, the team itself manages the processes. However, in real life, almost every company that works with Agile needs a scrum master.Hereis a list of scrum master's most common responsibilities:
Teaching the team the Scrum methodology. This isa key task for scrum masters who work with a teamthathas recently started using the Agile methodology. They should helpteam members implement the Scrum practices and optimize the way their company works.
Holding "stand-ups" and sprint planning meetings. According to the Scrum methodology, "stand-ups," during which the team discusses current tasks and creates a roadmap, should be held on adaily basis. Scrum master also holds sprint planning meetings, where participants evaluate their future work, break it down into sub-tasks, and plan specific actions.
Reviewing the results of the sprints. During the meetings, scrum masters review the results of the sprints and highlight what can be improved. They also capture team members' feedback.
Working as aboard administrator. Every companythat uses Agile has a scrum board. The responsibility of a scrum master is to keep all the cards up to date and check them regularly.
Organizing personal meetings. A scrum master has to hold personal meetings with other team members. The aim is to resolve disagreements around certain processes and workflows to developa team and improve internal communication.
Consulting with the team. It might be challenging to organize the work according to Agile at once. The responsibility of a scrum master is to exchange views and decide how to managea scrum team together with the team itself. Scrum masters might have personal consultations with team members who have certain problemswith their work processes.
Analyzing reports. Scrum masters should analyze performance statistics regularlyto understandall the processesa company is going through.
Removing obstacles. The responsibility of scrum masters is to provide intensive and productive work. They shouldeliminate external blockers and help the company deal with internal barriers.
The Scrum Guide does not list all of the responsibilities of a master. Therefore, scrum master responsibilities may change from company to company.
Now let's move onto discussa set of skills essential for every scrum master.
Top4 Scrum Master Skills
There are certain skills that every scrum master should have. Check them out below.
Hands-on knowledge and experience. It iscrucial for scrum masters to constantly improve their knowledge and skills of the Agile methodology to have an optimal decision in any situation. A scrum master is responsible for organizing scrum processes and should be ready to change their usual way of working.
Leadership skills. Scrum masters are the leaders who motivate and teach their teams. Consequently, they should understand who should be given more freedom and who needs to be micromanaged. A scrum master needs to know how to find an approach to different people and be able to organize an effective workflow.
Strategic thinking.A scrum master should understanda company's key strategy and follow it, keeping thisbusiness's success in mind. The ability to analyze current data and plan future actions according to it, flexibility in decision-making, andrational thinking are essential in this field.
Stress tolerance. Scrum masters face challenges and changes every day, which requires them to be stress-resistant. They need to be ready for everything. Even in the most difficult situations, scrum masters should motivate the team and look for solutions to their problems.
It takes years of hard work to develop all these skills and become a professional. Mind that if you have skills 2-4, you can also become a project manager (PM). In the next section, you will discover the difference between project managersand scrum masters.
Scrum Master vs. Project Manager
These two positions may seem the same. However, they are quite different. In this section, we'lltalk about the peculiarities of each one.
Both specialists have the same goals. They focus on how to get the job done and solve workflow problems through management and coordination. However, their approaches arequite different.
Project manager
Scrum master
Works from a position of control and plays the traditional role of a leader.
Acts asateam leader but does not lead in the traditional sense of the word.
Managesa project and its team and isaccountable for achieving theproject's goals.
Helps their team improve and optimizecertain processes but can only advise without making decisions.
As we can see, PMs are more about management and strong leadership, whereas scrum masters are more about coaching. They support team members and train them to work according to the Scrum methodology.
Now Agile is becoming more and more popular. Lots of successful companies hire scrum masters every day. Learn more about how to get into this profession in the next section.
How to Become a Scrum Master
There are several opportunities that allow you to become a scrum master. You can start as a project manager and then master your scrum skills, or you can start in the Agile world right away. Your way of becoming a master matters littlebecause qualification playsthe most vital role in Scrum.
Discover more about Scrum by self-education.All the must-have theory is stated in the Scrum Guide. You can also read the books by Jeff Sutherland, one of the founders of Scrum.
Attend courses. Scrum founders and certified trainers conduct training courses and give certificates to Scrum specialists. Scrum master skills are an obligatory basis for everyone, and if you have them, you can be recognized as one.
Grow as a professional. If you wish to further improve your knowledge and skills of Scrum, aftergaining more than a year of experience in the role of a scrum master, youcan take Advanced Certified Scrum Master Training (A-CSM).
Mind that the Scrum certificate is valid for two years. If you want to renew the certificate after these two years, you must get a certain number of Scrum Education Units. They are given for completing Scrum courses, participating in Global Scrum Gathering and Regional Scrum Gathering, teaching Scrum, and other activities aimed at improving your Scrum qualifications. Such a system shows that your knowledge is relevantand significantly increases the value ofyour Scrum certificate.
It is not difficult to find a job as a scrum master. However, to become a professional, you need to fully accept the principles of Agile and be able to use them for the success of your team.
Congrats, now you know much more about the profession of a scrum master.
Sales slump
A sales slump is a decrease in sales during a period of hard work that emerges by chance. A company’s team can’t predict it because it happens randomly.
In this article, we’ll unveil how to get out of a sales slump.
How to get out of a sales slump?
After months of hard work and successful deals, sales representatives often experience unpleasant conversations with prospects, unanswered phone calls, rejections, and many unclosed deals. Sales slump happens randomly without any dependence on the level of your productivity, salespeople’s efforts, or key message. Startups and large enterprises can face it at any time. You need to take several steps to overcome unsuccessful deals during this time. You’ll find some effective tips below.
Apply the most effective approaches. Look through successful deals with customers. Focus on the tactics that worked. For this purpose, check the activity in your CRM. High-performing months will hint at the methods that work well with your prospects. You need to recall the sales pitch you used to attain high conversions.
Contact customers with successful deals. Reaching out to your existing customers is always a great idea. Besides providing you with self-confidence and inspiring you to work on your deals, your clients can help unveil why they decided to purchase with you. Give them a call or reach them through email. By communicating with current consumers, you can uncover whether they need your help or assistance. After-sales service is crucial since it establishes trust with consumers and ensures solutions to problems with the product. Moreover, you can upsell additional products if clients look for them.
Work with consistency. Your business will overcome a sales slump over time, but to ensure successful deals in the future, you need consistency. Work on your strategy, set your key goals, and schedule specific daily sales activities. You can do it when prospects aren’t willing to get in touch. By creating a plan, you can establish consistency in your work and nurture your leads. It will help build trusting relationships with your prospects and encourage them to purchase.
Ask your team for help. There’s no need to hide the current sales situation, as this can happen to any sales representative. On the contrary, share your experience with your team members at the nearest meeting. Lean on their support and positive sales experience. During the meeting, you can find out whether other salespeople have the same situation. Collaborate with your team to develop an effective plan to help you get back on track with successful deals.
Listen to industry leaders for motivation. Searching for top salespeople in your industry and listening to their tips might help you get motivated for your work. Moreover, educational videos, webinars, and seminars provide you with new approaches to win deals. Sometimes you need to listen to industry leaders to change something in your strategy and increase conversion rates. Look for YouTube videos, podcasts, or read motivational speeches to get a clue about successful sales.
Look through customer success stories. You can receive inspiration by reading success stories and case studies. It’ll allow you to figure out how your product helped these customers and the tactics salespeople used to sell the product. Search for customer feedback to find out what clients say about your brand and what they appreciate the most. Their reviews empower you to improve your strategy and approach prospective customers from a different perspective. You can also get new ideas from customer reviews and success stories.
Review communication with prospects that didn’t close. Facing rejections and unsatisfied leads isn’t an easy task. However, it’s crucial to understand the reasons and find a pattern when you have a sales slump. Divide these prospects into groups based on the reason why they churned out. Potential clients might reject you because they don’t need or already have your product, want to buy it from another brand, or don’t have the necessary money. After categorizing leads, search for a common pattern. If you identify more significant reasons behind their rejection, revise your strategy and tactics.
Change your work environment. If you experience burnout, which is why your sales slump, you should switch to non-sales activities. Give you time to relax and gain new strength for new successful sales. Get busy with activities you are good at. Consider writing a new sales pitch or organizing a team meeting. It will help you find the motivation to go on with sales.
Congrats, now you know what a sales slump is and how to overcome it. Hope that our tips will help you defeat the sales slump. With LIKE.TG’s bulk email service, chatbots, web push, and pop-ups, you can improve your sales situation.
Sales velocity
Sales velocity is a metric that shows the speed at which you convert leads into clients. Calculating it will reveal the performance of your pipeline, sales team, and the health of your business in general.
In this article, we’ll unveil the importance of this measurement and explain how to calculate your sales velocity and increase it.
Watch the video where Dan Martell shares a strategy that will help you boost your sales velocity.
Why is it important to track sales velocity?
This measurement is one of the A-list metrics each business should monitor. It shows how fast you manage to move your prospects through the pipeline. The higher your sales velocity rate, the more deals your team closes during an accounting period.
It is quantified as a monetary value. For example, the sales velocity of your team consisting of 5 reps is $5000 per month. You can measure the productivity of every sales rep and compare the performance of your teams from different regions or countries. This way you’ll get to know who brings more money to your business. Finally, you can take measures to motivate, educate, reward, or fire colleagues.
Besides, this measurement allows you to identify the stages at which your leads drop out and never convert. This will help you analyze your pipeline andlead nurturingstrategy and optimize themaccordingly.
Now let’s move on to calculating your sales velocity.
How to Calculate Sales Velocity
The formula you need to measure this metric is below.
Sales velocity = (Number of opportunities× average deal size× win rate or conversion rate)⁄ sales cycle length
As you see, there are four essential values you should know to calculate your sales velocity. Let’s take a closer look at each factor influencing this measurement.
The number of opportunities. You should have a clear picture of the number of leads you can close a deal with in your pipeline. You can divide them by country, region, store, sales rep, etc. Remember that this number includes only qualified leads. It means that these people are the decision-makers, have financial opportunities, and do need your product. According toSales Insights Lab, 50% of leads aren’t a good fit for your company. Don’t try to collect as many contacts for your database as you can — they won’t bring you any revenue. Instead, focus your efforts on people whose problems you can solve.
Average deal size. It shows how much money your company receives after an average sale. To calculate it, divide the total revenue from all deals by the number of deals. If you are a SaaScompany or work on a subscription-based model, you can rely on your customer lifetime value. Keep in mind your customer acquisition costbecauseif the total revenue doesn’t cover the costs of attracting new clients, you won’t profit.
Win rate or conversion rate. It shows the percentage of leads that you’ve converted into clients. To calculate this measurement, divide the number of closed deals by the number of interactions. If you want to know the percentage, multiply by 100. For example, if you had 500 leads at the beginning and 150 bought from you, then your conversion rate is 25%. This metric will help you evaluate your sales strategy performance. You’ll be able to discover the weak points where you lose leads and make the necessary changes.
Sales cycle length. This value shows how much time you need to convert a lead into a customer. Sales cycle length depends on your product price, complexity, and the number of stages a prospect should go through to close a deal with your brand. Usually, B2Bclients need much more time to make a purchasing decision.
Now, when you are aware of the factors that influence your sales velocity, you know which direction to choose to improve this metric. Below we’ll share some practical tips each brand should consider.
How to Increase Sales Velocity
Re-consider your lead generation strategy
Qualify and score leads
Automate nurturing leads
Build trustful relationships with your customers
Educate your sales reps
In this section, we’ll provide some best practices to fine-tune each factor mentioned above to boost your sales velocity.
Re-consider your lead generation strategy. This step should be the first point of your investigation. Pay special attention to customer acquisition channels. You should analyze your most profitable opportunities to capture leads. They can include social media platforms, retargeting, influencer marketing, chatbots, etc. To improve your lead generation, provide them with special offers relevant at each stage of the sales funnel, make use of lead magnets, and simplify your site navigation.
Qualify and score leads. The first term implies the process where your sales reps evaluate leads in terms of financial opportunities, the power to make a decision, and the need for your product. To cope with it effectively, select anappropriate framework. Scoring leads allows you to understand how much value each prospect can bring to your business. This way you can identify the best fit for your business without wasting time and money on every prospect. In addition, you can create tailored offers for each type of lead. Follow five steps to build a lead scoring plan.
Automate nurturing leads. To save time for nurturing each lead, we recommend that you put this process on autopilot. Collaborate with your customer support and sales teams to identify prospects’ frequently asked questions, stages at which they get stuck, and common issues that postpone the purchase. After that, you can create a series of educational lead nurturing emailsto be sent automatically right after a lead joins your mailing list and performs a certain action. With LIKE.TG Automation 360, you can do just that for free.
Build trustful relationships with your customers. No one will buy from you if they know nothing about your brand. You need to build brand awareness to make people choose your company. Show prospects that your brand is worth their trust. Share your most successful cases, provide social proof, encourage customers to follow your brand on socials. Let them see the people behind your brand name. This tactic will contribute to building long-lasting relationships with your audience.
Educate your sales reps. Monitor how they treat each lead. Make sure your reps know how to present your company, handle objections, and win over customers. This way, you’ll get to know your strong and weak points and be able to assess your selling techniques. Let your team attend conferences, workshops, and seminars to improve their skills. Motivate your colleagues and reward top performers.
Congrats, now you know the factors that influence your sales velocity and how to improve it. Register with LIKE.TG to enhance communication with leads via emails, SMS, web push notifications, and chatbots.
Sales turnover
A sales turnover is the number of items or services a company sells during an accounting year or a specific timeframe. It helps businesses ensure that a company has enough inventory to complete orders on time and determine whether they need a restock.
In this article, we’ll unveil the importance of calculating sales turnover and ways to do it. We’ll also make the difference between a sales turnover and revenue clear.
Why is calculating your sales turnover important?
Estimating sales turnover for a business is crucial since it helps calculate revenues, manage inventory, and avoid unnecessary spending. After figuring out the measure, a company owner can assess the profitability of the brand and take the necessary measures to improve it. The figure also provides brands with a clear understanding of the number of items in stock and the number purchased. Having a clear picture of inventory is essential since it prevents customers from inconveniencing by waiting for weeks for the order to arrive. It can happen when a company has many orders and insufficient stock to fulfill them.
The sales turnover rate is especially useful during the holiday season when there are great promos and discounts and people rush to buy items for an attractive price. Calculating sales turnover helps business owners make sure that they have enough products for their customers. There are even more reasons to calculate your sales turnover. It enables you to:
identify growth and success rates;
find out new effective advertising strategies;
calculate the number of items purchased and available;
estimate common revenue;
calculate returns.
Now that you know why estimate sales turnover, let’s proceed to the next section to compare sales turnover and revenue to avoid any confusion about these two terms.
Sales Turnover vs Revenue
Since people often misinterpret these terms and use them interchangeably, we need to uncover the difference. We’ll review each concept in detail so that you can identify them within your business.
Sales turnover defines the number of items customers purchase from a specific business within a given timeframe, usually a year. It unveils the effectiveness of inventory management and helps control it. With its help, company owners always keep their hands on the pulse when a brand needs to buy new inventory or sell old items. After calculating sales turnover, brands can identify the right production levels to help prevent overstock or shortage of items.
Revenue defines the amount of money a brand receives from selling its products. It allows businesses to assess their profitability, size, success, customer base, and share. After estimating the measure, company owners can decide what steps to take next: produce more products or change their strategy to win more clients.
Now that you know the difference, it’s time to uncover how to calculate the measure.
How to calculate your sales turnover?
In this section, we’ll provide you with short instructions on how to identify the measure for your company. Let’s dive in.
Determine the sales period. If you need to calculate the indicator, identify the sales period. You should have accurate data for this timeframe to estimate the right measure. Make sure to select a completed sales period you hold full information of. Remember, getting the right figures for a running sales period is impossible. For your estimations, you can define a monthly, quarterly, or annual sales period.
Calculate the cost of goods sold (COGS). The next step involves identifying the cost of your items. To find out COGS, you need to sum up the initial and additional inventory expenses. After you finish with this step, subtract the total number of ending inventory from it. The final figure will be the cost of goods sold.
Identify average inventory. Determining your average inventory requires you to sum up your starting and ending inventory. After, divide the sum by two.
Estimate sales turnover ratio. Finally, to figure out the turnover ratio, you need to divide COGS by the average inventory. The figure you will get is your sales turnover ratio.
Say there’s a company owner who wants to estimate annual sales turnover to find out how many items it’s vital to provide the necessary products to consumers in the upcoming year. Brand’s team calculated that the company had $400,000 in starting inventory, $100,000 of extra inventory expenses, and $40,000 of ending inventory. The team estimates that COGS is $460,000 (subtracting ending inventory from the sum of starting inventory and extra inventory expenses).
The next step is calculating the average inventory. They add the cost of starting inventory to the ending. It’ll be $400,000 + $40,000 = $440,000. After, divide by two. The final result will be $220,000.
Finally, they need to divide the cost of goods sold by their average inventory. It’ll be $460,000 / $220,000 = 2.09. This means that the company succeeded in selling average inventory more than two times during one year period.
Congrats, now you know what a sales turnover is and why it’s crucial. Hope that our guide will come in handy when estimating it for your company.
Sales plan
A sales plan is a document that encompasses goals, target audience, and sales strategy aimed at attaining necessary results. It enables a company’s team to predict business-related risks and avoid them.
In this article, we’ll uncover the importance, components, and examples of sales plans. We’ll also find out how to write a sales plan and explore 8 tips to follow to create a successful sales plan.
Why is it important to have a sales plan?
Planning is an essential point for any business, especially when talking about sales targets. Before selling your product, you need to outline your main goals and the ways you can achieve them. This includes various sales strategies, tactics, and approaches. Once you have your objectives identified, you need to create a plan where you can mention all the details of your marketing strategy.
A sales plan enables you to predict possible problems and risks related to your product and sales. As a result, you can eliminate these risks before the problem arises and escalates. When you have a clear plan of action, you can be confident about the correctness of your decisions. Besides, you can keep an eye on the product’s sales performance and decide what else you can do to get closer to your short-term and long-term goals.
A sales plan will also come in handy if you conquer international markets. This document will serve you as an overview of customers’ needs, requirements, and preferences in different countries. Also, it’ll contain sales strategies that suit different geographics. As a result, you can successfully reach your goals.
Now that you know the importance, let’s discover the components of a sales plan.
What should a sales plan include?
A sales plan is a comprehensive document covering many aspects of your business. You need to create it as detailed as possible to attain your objectives faster. Your plan should contain the following sections:
mission;
company goals;
revenue expectations;
target market;
business performance for the previous period;
market trends;
industry conditions;
competitor analysis;
marketing strategy;
sales strategies, tactics, techniques;
software;
human and financial resources available;
tasks and responsibilities of different departments;
metrics.
It’s time to reveal how to write a sales plan.
How to write a sales plan?
Creating a sales plan might require you to spend some time defining goals, revenue targets, tasks for departments, but it’s worth it. In the end, you’ll have a clear roadmap for a certain period your company’s team should follow to get great results in sales. If you don’t know where to start, we’ll help you. Follow our guide to clarify the details of the process.
Determine your major goals. The first and foremost is to define your main goals. Think of the things you want to achieve related to sales. For example, sell 500 items in one month or earn $20,000 in one year. Make sure that your goals are specific, achievable, and measurable. Besides accurate sales targets, you can also think about more general things like the growth of your brand, new markets, or the production of new products.
Make your targets more specific and accurate. If you are ready with more general objectives, it’s time to proceed to the next stage and identify more specific goals. Be realistic and set goals possible to reach. Let’s imagine that you want to enter the Latin America region. In this case, you need to list all countries where you want to present your product. As an option, give tasks to your team members to research which countries will accept your product.
Assess your resources. At this stage, you need to evaluate your human resources and money opportunities. Analyze whether you have enough employees to bring your plan to life and financial support to purchase all the necessary inventory.
Choose KPIs. Key performance indicators are necessary to figure out whether your plan works and brings you closer to your main goals. Choose the most appropriate metrics. It’s perfect to have 3-5 indicators to control business performance.
Allocate time wisely. There’s no need to rush since this process can be time-consuming. Your company’s team will help you manage all the tasks efficiently. Have a week or more to develop an accurate and realistic plan that includes all the details of your sales strategy, tactics, goals, revenue targets, etc.
Now you know the steps necessary to write a sales plan, so let’s proceed to the next section to explore tips for creating a successful plan.
8 Tips for Creating a Successful Sales Plan
Sales plans vary in different companies. However, there are some critical points you should consider in your sales plan to be more effective. The following tips will provide you with a clue.
Make sure that you have realistic objectives.
Set deadlines.
Consult with sales representatives.
Conduct competitive analysis.
Develop a budget proposal that encompasses previous performance data and forecasts for the future.
Write specific plans for each department of your company.
Analyze issues your sales representatives find challenging.
Use special tools to simplify your work.
You need to do profound research and work with your teams to understand what information to include in your sales plan. For sure, it’ll require your effort. However, after you do all the work, you’ll be able to develop a plan that will lead you towards success and growth.
Now that you know some tips, it’s time to grab some inspiration from the examples below.
Examples of Sales Plans
We’ve prepared different examples of sales plans you can consider for your business. The type you choose depends on your business objectives, so take a closer look at each of them to find a perfect option.
Market expansion. If you decide to reach new markets, you should consider this sales plan. This document outlines your tasks, goals, and metrics to track your progress. With its help, you’ll address the needs of a new target audience in a completely new geographic area. Besides, a market expansion plan usually includes distribution costs, logistics, and time zone.
New product. The main aim of a new product launch is to bring ROI. That’s the main focus of the new product sales plan. When you create this type of plan, it’s a must to conduct a competitive analysis, identify sales strategy, and take care of your brand positioning.
30-60-90-day plan. This is the most general sales plan which focuses on a timeframe by which you should reach certain goals. You can set a deadline to do something in 30, 60, and 90 days. For example, you can decide to acquire 10 new customers in 30 days, increase ROI by 10% in 60 days, and reduce churn by 2% in 90 days.
A sales plan is an essential element of your business that helps predict all the possible risks and prevent them. Once you have a roadmap, you know in what direction you should move to attain your targets.
Sales pitch
A sales pipeline is a way to track prospective customers as they go through the stages of the buyer’s journey. It helps control each sale’s progress, generate more conversions, and increase revenue.
In this article, we’ll compare a sales pipeline and a sales funnel, explore the 7 stages and 4 metrics of the sales pipeline. We’ll also uncover ways to make your sales pipeline better.
Why is a sales pipeline important?
Having a clear sales pipeline is crucial for every business. Users with different intentions browse your website in search of solutions. Some look through the best possible options, and others are ready to interact and convert into consumers. To keep track of prospects who can become your consumers, you need a sales pipeline. Your sales representatives will lead your potential customers from the start until deals close, increase conversions, and boost profits.
A sales pipeline guides your sales reps to reach key business objectives. They can monitor all deals and make sales forecasts. If a company succeeds in implementing a comprehensive sales pipeline, it’ll have a clear picture of the brand’s health and sales progress. After categorizing deals in the pipeline, sales managers can increase their work efficiency. They identify deals with higher conversion rates and work with them first to increase profits. When a business uses a CRM, it can transfer and store the necessary information on the cloud and reduce manual work. As a result, the company's team will close deals faster.
Now that you know why a sales pipeline is important, let’s uncover the difference between a sales pipeline and a sales funnel.
Sales Pipeline vs Sales Funnel
People often use the two terms interchangeably to define prospects’ place in the sales process. Yet these concepts indicate different things. We’ll review the sales pipeline and sales funnel in more detail to show you this difference.
A sales pipeline is a visualization of prospects’ position in the sales process. The stages include prospecting, lead qualification, demo, proposal, negotiation, closed deal, and post-purchase. A sales pipeline represents the sales process from the perspective of sales reps and describes the actions a sales manager makes to move a lead toward a successful deal.
A sales funnel is a marketing model that represents a journey a lead goes through from becoming aware of the product until the act of the purchase. The stages include awareness, interest, decision, and action. A sales funnel focuses on the decision-making process of customers.
The difference is clear, so it’s time to proceed to the next section to review the 7 stages of the sales pipeline.
7 Stages of Sales Pipeline
A sales pipeline consists of seven stages sales representatives take control of. We’ve prepared a list for you to consider when you decide to develop a sales pipeline for your business. Let’s dive in.
Lead generation. At this stage, marketers take a closer look at creating accurate customer profiles. Focus on customers who brought your company's biggest profits to find out the similar characteristics. Align the work of your marketing and sales team to deliver the right content to people. Use brainstorming of the two teams to find the best ideas for the content of your website, email campaigns, web push, pay-per-click ads, etc. This will help you gather insights and create valuable and informative blog posts, videos, and infographics for visitors. Besides, consider implementing referral marketing since it helps bring in qualified leads that are more likely to convert into customers.
Prospecting. At the prospecting stage, consider a personal approach to your leads. Use industry events as a moment to communicate with your audience and establish trusting relationships with them. You can raise relevant topics to show your company’s expertise and make a positive first impression. Before selling your product, show your expertise to establish trust and credibility. People should know about the company they buy from and its experts.
Lead qualification. According to statistics, 61% of marketers consider lead qualification their main challenge. Brands qualify prospects to avoid wasting their time and money on attracting leads who have no interest in their solutions. For this reason, you need to make sure that the prospective customers you’ve identified are a good fit for your business. Leverage the BANT (budget, authority, needs, and timeline) method, at the qualification stage. After using this technique, you’ll get to know the main customer insights critical for your company. Then create a list of companies that compete for the same customers’ attention and offer a similar product. Figure out what these prospects like and dislike about other vendors’ products and decide whether these people fit your description.
Contact. Now that you have your highly qualified leads identified, it’s time to contact people likely to purchase from you. Use a phone call, video meeting, email, demo, physical meeting, or even messenger. There are several things to consider when conducting a meeting or a call. Before setting it up, select the people involved. Decide who will represent shareholders and decision-makers. Secondly, get ready with the agenda. Although you might have some questions from potential customers when you speak about your product, you still need to have a plan to run the meeting smoothly. Webinars, data sets, and case studies will come in handy when discussing results.
Proposal. Outline the prospect’s pain points, the solution that addresses these problems, pricing information, and terms. To win customers, personalize your offer to meet their needs and requirements. Make every customer feel special and delight them with your solution. Communicate the benefits your potential customers will obtain once they use your product. Make sure to include some accurate data and statistics about the results your solution brings. Besides, ensure that your proposal encompasses FAQs to prevent leads from having no answer to some common questions.
Negotiations. At this stage, sales reps and marketers answer some last questions and sign the contract. The parties of the deal discuss the scope of work and expectations and adjust pricing. These steps are necessary to develop a beneficial partnership for both a business and a customer. Digital signing will simplify the process and help avoid several problems.
Retention. Once you close the deal, your work isn’t finished. It’s equally important to retain this client. So you need to keep in touch with customers and keep them updated on your products and news.
Now that you know the stages, let’s jump into the next section to unveil how to build an effective sales pipeline.
How to build an effective sales pipeline?
Your business needs an effective sales pipeline to win customers and close more deals. That’s why we’ve prepared a short step-by-step guide on how to do it.
Determine the stages of a sales cycle. Make sure that the stages you define match the nature of your business. They should encompass the way customers make their decisions and feedback from different company departments, including marketing.
Identify goals for each stage. Each sales cycle stage needs to have its objectives since sales reps are highly target-driven. You should identify the number of customers to win to reach the goals. Make sure to analyze the time the sales team spends on sales and non-sales activities to distribute time to perform specific tasks correctly.
Develop a sales process. If you create a sales process from scratch, you need to define the activities to do at each stage of your sales pipeline. The stage of the sales process determines the tasks your team should perform. For instance, you focus on adjusting the budget, approving it, and composing a proposal document at the proposal stage.
Create a database of prospects. Sales managers have a list of leads, prospective customers, and clients in front of them. It keeps them updated on the actions they should take to reach these people. Creating a database in CRM enables you to store all necessary data, track interactions, and plan. Your sales reps can always access the software and update data. They can add new leads, tasks, and other marks so that every department knows about the progress of the deals.
Train your sales team. Your sales representatives should be strong communicators who understand customers' needs. That’s why consider conducting training to educate your team on how to communicate with leads and customers to win their love. Make sure that your sales managers know your product, have a strong pitch, and are confident in their own words.
The process of building an effective sales pipeline is clear, so let’s jump into the 4 key metrics to consider.
4 Key Sales Pipeline Metrics
You need to keep an eye on the most critical metrics to make sure that you go through the sales cycle smoothly. We’ve prepared a list of the key indicators for you to track and stay updated about your business health.
Customer lifetime value. LTV enables companies to predict the revenue they will generate over the entire relationship with a specific customer. With its help, marketers estimate the profitability of a customer and assess the potential of a business for further growth.
Win rate. This measure shows the number of prospects a brand managed to turn into customers. Entrepreneurs track the measure over specific periods to see the changes. If the win rate is low, marketers change the strategy, train sales reps, and leverage new marketing tools. If the win rate is high yet your total sales don’t meet your expectations, revise your marketing strategy and tools.
Average sales cycle. This metric shows the period a company needs to close the deal. After identifying the length of an average sales cycle, marketers find out what deals have longer sales cycles. With this information, you’ll be able to figure out the problems in these deals and find the solution to manage them. Automate the process with CRM to shorten the sales cycle. Often, it’s a human factor that causes the slowing down of the sales process. LIKE.TG offers business owners to make use of its CRM for free. You can control all your deals and facilitate communication with leads through various channels on one platform.
Customer acquisition cost. The measure indicates the cost a company spends to win a new customer. After calculating CAC, brands gauge how much they spend on marketing, salaries, and other efforts to bring a new consumer. It helps marketers evaluate the effectiveness of customer acquisition strategy and make some changes to improve it.
Now that you know the metrics, let’s explore the ways to make your sales pipeline better.
3 Ways to Improve Your Sales Pipeline
In this section, we’ll review the three ways to improve your sales pipeline. Let’s explore them in detail.
Provide users with guides, eBooks, and white papers. To build a list of leads, you should gather their contacts. To do it, you need to ensure your website visitors with valuable materials. Ask users to provide their contact information in exchange for your guides, eBooks, and white papers. Once you receive their contacts, you can send an email campaign that contains the additional information this person was interested in.
Interact with prospects on social media platforms. Now, when many people worldwide spend their free time on social media networks, businesses need to develop their accounts on these platforms. Sales reps should communicate with leads to establish relationships with them and encourage prospects to convert into customers. Marketers should provide relevant content that might come in handy for visitors, deliver the right message to the followers about the brand’s product, and implement various programs to show users the benefits they can obtain.
Leverage a CRM. CRM will help you keep the information about all your deals, customers, and leads in one place. With its help, you’ll avoid losing any essential data about your prospects and consumers and keep track of your sales progress. Check out our CRM to figure out how it can help you manage your business.
Congrats, you know how to build an effective sales pipeline, and we hope you’ll do it soon. Make use of our tips to make it perfect and close deals faster
Sales forecasting
Sales forecasting is the process of predicting the company’s revenue within a specific period in the future. Sales forecasts estimate the number of products the company will sell and the time period needed to do it.
In the article, we explain why sales forecasting is important and highlight its benefits. We provide the factors affecting sales forecasting and outline its methods and examples.
Why is sales forecasting important?
Companies with accurate forecasts are more likely to grow their revenue over the previous year and two times more likely to become the top company in their field. Such inspiring statistics show the importance of sales prospecting and its direct influence on the companies’ success. We explain this process is so powerful below.
A sales forecast is a benchmark that helps make more conscious business decisions. It allows businesses to predict their short-term and long-term revenue, and plan their investments accordingly. Companies can estimate their budget for a certain period and be sure that they will have enough costs.
Moreover, sales forecasting helps plan the usage of resources better. Business owners can make decisions about shipping the raw materials, hiring staff, and spending on marketing based on the forecasts. It allows them to optimize companies’ decisions according to the current situation in the market.
The sales forecasting process is an obligatory part of work in successful companies. Read about its benefits in the next section.
Benefits of Sales Forecasting
Some junior marketers may neglect sales forecasting and think this step is challenging and unimportant. However, it is not so. Below we provide the main benefits of sales forecasting and explain why this process is necessary.
It helps estimate future revenue and plan the budget. Smart sales forecasting allows your company to develop a competitive strategy based on this information. Knowledge of the approximate future income lets you optimize spending, feel more confident in making investments, and avoid mistakes in budget planning.
It shows the company’s needs in staff and resources. Sales forecast helps estimate the number of employees and raw materials your brand will need to work successfully. Forecasting allows you to ensure that the business has all the necessary resources and avoid problems with inaccurate management.
It helps develop a well-defined marketing strategy. Sometimes revenue predictions may be dissatisfying, and it is the reason to consider changes in your promotions. Based on the current forecast, you can identify the roadblocks in the customer journey and improve them to close sales faster and smoother.
It represents possible problems with your company’s health. By predicting future revenue for a certain period, you can find out some seasonal problems with demand. Sales prospecting is a great way to discover these possible issues and make necessary changes before directly affecting your revenue.
It helps companies grow faster. Understanding brands’ future earnings is necessary for business owners to make informed decisions. You can use sales forecasts as benchmarks to focus on the most profitable products and audiences. Such a strategy leads to higher flexibility, increased revenue, and faster company growth.
Now you understand why accurate forecasts play an important role in business development. Continue reading to discover the factors that affect sales forecasting and their peculiarities.
4 Factors Affecting Sales Forecasting
Below we provide the most critical factors that affect sales forecasting accuracy you should consider.
1. Business conditions
These factors include the general economic and legislative state of the country. People tend to be more confident in their purchases and spend more money if the national economy is strong. Moreover, general trends for inflation or deflation influence consumers behavior and, consequently, sales forecasts. You should also pay attention to the general price levels and people’s income while predicting your company’s revenue.
One more factor is new laws and political changes. They can increase or decrease the level of your sales. Take into consideration the import and export policy if you use materials from abroad. Remember that we can not control general business conditions, so your company should be flexible and react to all these factors while developing a strategy and predicting future sales.
2. Industry changes
These factors include changes in market share, product innovations, new companies in the industry, and trends in product promotion. For example, if your competitors raise prices, some clients can switch the brand and start buying from your company, increasing predicted revenue. On the other hand, if your competitor suggests an innovative product, you may lose some clients.
Marketers should pay attention to the trends in the industry and change their strategies accordingly. It is important to improve your products constantly. Increasing average deal size with upselling and cross-selling can positively influence your sales.
3. Internal conditions
They include pricing policy, marketing strategy, number of employees, product quality, financial distribution, etc. Changes in these factors can increase or decrease sales and, consequently, affect the forecast of your future revenue. The good thing is that we can influence internal conditions directly.
For example, if you hire a new sales manager, the number of deals can also increase. On the other hand, the company may lose revenue if there are not enough workers in a certain department. To make an accurate forecast, you should consider all possible changes in the company and predict sales based on the existing development strategy.
4. Sociological conditions
Sociological factors include all the demographic information related to your clients. While making a sales forecast, you should take into consideration the size of the population, the level of your clients’ education, social status, personal income, etc. Public moods can sometimes be unpredictable, but they influence sales too.
One more important factor is seasonal changes in demand. For example, according to Cloudways, holiday shopping made up 19.5% of total annual income in retail. Moreover, even the weather can influence sales of such products as clothes, travel vouchers, coffee to go, etc.
Some of these factors are easy to predict, but some can be unexpected. You might be confused about doing an accurate forecast with so many variables. In the next section, we provide the most effective sales forecasting methods and techniques and explain how to use them with examples.
7 Sales Forecasting Methods and Examples
Continue reading to discover 7 sales forecasting methods to make your sales predictions as accurate as possible.
1. Intuitive forecasting
The essence of this method is that business owners ask their sales managers to predict the company’s future income based on their feelings and subjective opinions. Intuitive forecasting is rarely accurate because many employees tend to be optimistic and can not pay attention to all possible affecting factors. Moreover, such predictions are difficult to scale. However, many business owners use intuitive forecasting when they only found their company and do not have enough resources to make more complex forecasts.
Imagine that your company has 2 managers and you ask them to forecast your sales for the next year. One manager predicts 2000$ of revenue, the other one — 3000$. The arithmetic mean of these two predictions is 2500$ a year — it will be the intuitive forecast for your company.
2. Historical forecasting
This method is a quick way to predict future income based on historical data. For example, if you want to forecast sales for the first quarter, your manager may look at the results of the previous years and assume that demand will be the same or a little higher. The disadvantage of such a method is that it does not consider changes in the market and your own sales pipeline.
For instance, your revenue in spring 2021 was 1400$. You can assume that in spring 2022, your company will earn 1400$ too. If your sales are constantly increasing, you can add historical growth. Imagine that you grow 10% a year, so in spring 2022, your revenue may be 1400 + 1400*0.1 = 1540$.
3. Forecasting based on the length of the sales cycle
Marketers use this method to predict future revenue based on the time needed for the clients to make a purchase. You can use it if your company has a limited number of potential clients. Moreover, if there are a few different pipelines for different products, you can separate leads and predict the total company’s revenue. The advantage of this method is that it is completely objective and can be scaled. The disadvantage is that continuous new data tracking is required to make accurate forecasts.
For example, if the approximate amount of time your clients need to make a purchase is 2 months and four leads have been considering for 1 month, there is a 50% possibility that they will buy your product. Imagine that you have only these four leads and the cost of the purchase is 5000$, so your sales forecast is 10000$. ((4*5000$)*0.5)
4. Opportunity stage forecasting
This method is similar to the previous one, but it is based on the lead’s stage in the buying process. You can divide your sales cycle into several parts and assign the percentage of the probability that the customer will make a purchase to them. Then you multiply the potential cost of each purchase in the period of purchase by the likelihood of its closing and sum up all the results.
The advantage of this method is that it is rather objective and easy to calculate. On the other hand, if there are any changes to your strategy, the forecast will be inaccurate. Moreover, it can be based only on the limited number of potential clients.
For instance, your company has two potential clients. One of them is in the first stage and 30% likely to purchase the products for 2000$. The second one is in the last stage and is 80% likely to purchase for 4000$. The sales forecast will be 3800$ (2000*0.3 + 4000*0.8).
5. Portfolio forecasting
This method combines all the previous ones. To use portfolio forecasting, marketers take into consideration the historical data, the length of the sales cycle, the number of leads, the possibility of closing each deal, and the sales representatives' intuitive predictions. A combination of all these factors shows a more holistic picture of the company’s sales. On the other hand, this method requires lots of data that is rather difficult to combine accurately.
Imagine that the company sold products for 6000$ during the same quarter in the previous year, which is a historical forecast. Now there are four clients that may buy products for 2500$ each that are 50% likely to make a purchase. Consequently, the opportunity forecast is 5000$. At the same time, sales managers predict 7000$ in revenue. Based on these numbers the simplified portfolio forecast is 5000$ ((6000+5000+7000) / 3).
6. Test-market analysis forecasting
Marketers use this method to predict the success of the products based on pre-launch testing. Usually, companies suggest their new goods to the limited groups of potential clients divided into a few segments. According to the market response, businesses can predict the approximate demand and the number of products sold within a set period.
Test-market analysis results are easy to scale. This method allows you to increase consumers’ brand awareness and attract their attention to your product launch. However, this method does not take into consideration market trends and internal factors, such as pricing policy changes. It is also very important to keep in mind the period when the customer needs to repeat the purchase.
For example, you sold 100 products that cost 5$ each to 300 people during a pre-launch. Your total revenue is 500$. The total number of your target audience in the country is 30 000 consumers, which is 100 times more than the number of consumers in pre-launch testing. Consequently, your revenue after the launch will increase 100 times, and your company will earn 50 000$ before the consumers need to repurchase.
7. Multivariable analysis forecasting
This is the most accurate but the most complex method for sales forecasting. It requires lots of historical data, sales cycle length, test-market analysis statistics, the possibility of closing the deals at all customer journey stages, individual sales managers’ performance during the stated period, etc. Companies use analytical tools and different machine learning algorithms to reach the best results in revenue predictions.
The advantage is that multivariable analysis forecasting is reliable. AI calculates all the forecasts, so marketers do not need to deal with lots of numbers. However, tools for sales forecasting may be rather expensive for small businesses. To get accurate forecasts, you need to update data regularly. Moreover, it is sometimes difficult to understand the principles used by AI to make sales predictions.
Congrats, now you know what sales forecasting is and why it is important. You understand how to use the prediction methods and what factors affect your forecasts.
Sales optimization
Sales optimization is using technology to maximize your sales performance and increase the number of conversions. You can do it by studying interactions with the target audience and improving them to sell more effectively.
In the article, we explain what sales optimization is and provide the top 9 strategies to blow up your sales.
9 sales optimization strategies to drive more revenue
According to Statista, the average conversion rate of online shoppers was about 2.14%–3.23% in the third quarter of 2020. If you think this percentage is extremely low and want to generate more sales check out 9 effective strategies below.
Set short-term and long-term goals. To improve your sales processes, it is vital to understand the company’s future actions. Define potential growth areas, predict possible roadblocks and find ways to overcome them. Describe your brand’s aims and create a plan for the next few years. Then divide it into the parts, establish goals for each part, and set deadlines. Share this plan with your sales team to be on the same page.
Create profiles of your buyer personas. According to Madmarketer, 71% of companies that exceed goals in revenue documented their ideal clients. Analyzing and describing the audience you work with can help you understand their behavior and provide better service. Moreover, having definite consumer profiles will allow your sales representatives to concentrate on your buyer personas and avoid wasting the budget on uninterested leads. To study your target clients, focus on their demographics, needs, pains, motivations, and emotions that trigger them to buy. Share this information with your team and use it during the sales process.
Study your pipeline. Improving roadblocks is as important as looking for future ways to develop. To understand your company’s issues, examine all the stages of your sales pipeline. Discover the length of the client's journey, the number of conversions, customer acquisition cost, and return on investments. The most important metrics can differentiate from company to company and depend on your goals. Then fix the leaks in the pipeline to make the sales process smoother.
Use business automation tools. According to Emailmonday, 56% of businesses use marketing automation. It allows companies to save their employees time, regulate operations and streamline processes. Chatbots are a current trend in business automation that helps answer FAQs faster and free your workers for more important tasks. LIKE.TG provides a cutting-edge chatbot builder that lets you create bots for Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Telegram. You can set up auto-replies, add content, insert buttons and accept payments right into the bot. Try it for free to optimize your sales right now.
Build long-term relations with clients. Most companies are focused on getting a quick profit and don’t concentrate on building strong relationships. This strategy allows businesses to survive but not to develop. Smallbizgenius states that 65% of the brand's revenue comes from regular customers, so it is vital to improve their satisfaction and loyalty to reduce brand switching.
Try different marketing strategies. You can interact with the audience across various channels within an omnichannel marketing strategy. Test different formats and understand what converts clients better. There are many ways to advertise your products, such as social promotions, ads on TV, influence marketing, etc. LIKE.TG lets you launch bulk email, SMS, and web push campaigns. You can personalize marketing messages, segment target audiences, and use A/B testing to make sending more effective.
Empower your sales team with CRM. Findstack states that 74% of sales reps are sure that using a CRM gives them better access to customer data and helps provide personalized service. This fact is crucial because 80% of people are more likely to buy from a company that offers a personalized experience. If you are looking for a platform that will help you streamline your sales — try the built-inCRM from LIKE.TG. It allows you to manage the deals, store clients’ information, check the tasks’ progress and connect with customers in two clicks. Moreover, you can integrate the CRM with other LIKE.TG products to make it even more powerful.
Analyze the results regularly. Continuous tracking of your sales performance lets you improve roadblocks as fast as possible. You will find unnecessary stages of the customer journey and speed them up or optimize them to prevent leads from leaking out. Also, studying your sales processes helps define the most profitable segments of clients, prioritize them and increase profits.
Choose the right people and improve your sales reps’ qualifications regularly. According to HubSpot, 20% of sales reps generate 80% of sales. It means that the choice of employees is crucial. Once you put the team together, create a client-centric culture within your company. Explain your values to the workers and motivate them to transmit them to the customers. Identify KPIs according to your goals and track the staff performance. Also, it is vital to improve your employees’ skills regularly. Provide training and courses within the company to educate them on optimizing sales. You can also use our blog as a free source of information to find out the ways to improve your digital marketing strategy.
Congrats, now you know what sales optimization is and how to improve your sales. Use these ideas to optimize processes within your company and drive more revenue.
Sales pipeline
A sales pipeline is a way to track prospective customers as they go through the stages of the buyer’s journey. It helps control each sale’s progress, generate more conversions, and increase revenue.
In this article, we’ll compare a sales pipeline and a sales funnel, explore the 7 stages and 4 metrics of the sales pipeline. We’ll also uncover ways to make your sales pipeline better.
Why is a sales pipeline important?
Having a clear sales pipeline is crucial for every business. Users with different intentions browse your website in search of solutions. Some look through the best possible options, and others are ready to interact and convert into consumers. To keep track of prospects who can become your consumers, you need a sales pipeline. Your sales representatives will lead your potential customers from the start until deals close, increase conversions, and boost profits.
A sales pipeline guides your sales reps to reach key business objectives. They can monitor all deals and make sales forecasts. If a company succeeds in implementing a comprehensive sales pipeline, it’ll have a clear picture of the brand’s health and sales progress. After categorizing deals in the pipeline, sales managers can increase their work efficiency. They identify deals with higher conversion rates and work with them first to increase profits. When a business uses a CRM, it can transfer and store the necessary information on the cloud and reduce manual work. As a result, the company's team will close deals faster.
Now that you know why a sales pipeline is important, let’s uncover the difference between a sales pipeline and a sales funnel.
Sales Pipeline vs Sales Funnel
People often use the two terms interchangeably to define prospects’ place in the sales process. Yet these concepts indicate different things. We’ll review the sales pipeline and sales funnel in more detail to show you this difference.
A sales pipeline is a visualization of prospects’ position in the sales process. The stages include prospecting, lead qualification, demo, proposal, negotiation, closed deal, and post-purchase. A sales pipeline represents the sales process from the perspective of sales reps and describes the actions a sales manager makes to move a lead toward a successful deal.
A sales funnel is a marketing model that represents a journey a lead goes through from becoming aware of the product until the act of the purchase. The stages include awareness, interest, decision, and action. A sales funnel focuses on the decision-making process of customers.
The difference is clear, so it’s time to proceed to the next section to review the 7 stages of the sales pipeline.
7 Stages of Sales Pipeline
A sales pipeline consists of seven stages sales representatives take control of. We’ve prepared a list for you to consider when you decide to develop a sales pipeline for your business. Let’s dive in.
Lead generation. At this stage, marketers take a closer look at creating accurate customer profiles. Focus on customers who brought your company's biggest profits to find out the similar characteristics. Align the work of your marketing and sales team to deliver the right content to people. Use brainstorming of the two teams to find the best ideas for the content of your website, email campaigns, web push, pay-per-click ads, etc. This will help you gather insights and create valuable and informative blog posts, videos, and infographics for visitors. Besides, consider implementing referral marketing since it helps bring in qualified leads that are more likely to convert into customers.
Prospecting. At the prospecting stage, consider a personal approach to your leads. Use industry events as a moment to communicate with your audience and establish trusting relationships with them. You can raise relevant topics to show your company’s expertise and make a positive first impression. Before selling your product, show your expertise to establish trust and credibility. People should know about the company they buy from and its experts.
Lead qualification. According to statistics, 61% of marketers consider lead qualification their main challenge. Brands qualify prospects to avoid wasting their time and money on attracting leads who have no interest in their solutions. For this reason, you need to make sure that the prospective customers you’ve identified are a good fit for your business. Leverage the BANT (budget, authority, needs, and timeline) method, at the qualification stage. After using this technique, you’ll get to know the main customer insights critical for your company. Then create a list of companies that compete for the same customers’ attention and offer a similar product. Figure out what these prospects like and dislike about other vendors’ products and decide whether these people fit your description.
Contact. Now that you have your highly qualified leads identified, it’s time to contact people likely to purchase from you. Use a phone call, video meeting, email, demo, physical meeting, or even messenger. There are several things to consider when conducting a meeting or a call. Before setting it up, select the people involved. Decide who will represent shareholders and decision-makers. Secondly, get ready with the agenda. Although you might have some questions from potential customers when you speak about your product, you still need to have a plan to run the meeting smoothly. Webinars, data sets, and case studies will come in handy when discussing results.
Proposal. Outline the prospect’s pain points, the solution that addresses these problems, pricing information, and terms. To win customers, personalize your offer to meet their needs and requirements. Make every customer feel special and delight them with your solution. Communicate the benefits your potential customers will obtain once they use your product. Make sure to include some accurate data and statistics about the results your solution brings. Besides, ensure that your proposal encompasses FAQs to prevent leads from having no answer to some common questions.
Negotiations. At this stage, sales reps and marketers answer some last questions and sign the contract. The parties of the deal discuss the scope of work and expectations and adjust pricing. These steps are necessary to develop a beneficial partnership for both a business and a customer. Digital signing will simplify the process and help avoid several problems.
Retention. Once you close the deal, your work isn’t finished. It’s equally important to retain this client. So you need to keep in touch with customers and keep them updated on your products and news.
Now that you know the stages, let’s jump into the next section to unveil how to build an effective sales pipeline.
How to build an effective sales pipeline?
Your business needs an effective sales pipeline to win customers and close more deals. That’s why we’ve prepared a short step-by-step guide on how to do it.
Determine the stages of a sales cycle. Make sure that the stages you define match the nature of your business. They should encompass the way customers make their decisions and feedback from different company departments, including marketing.
Identify goals for each stage. Each sales cycle stage needs to have its objectives since sales reps are highly target-driven. You should identify the number of customers to win to reach the goals. Make sure to analyze the time the sales team spends on sales and non-sales activities to distribute time to perform specific tasks correctly.
Develop a sales process. If you create a sales process from scratch, you need to define the activities to do at each stage of your sales pipeline. The stage of the sales process determines the tasks your team should perform. For instance, you focus on adjusting the budget, approving it, and composing a proposal document at the proposal stage.
Create a database of prospects. Sales managers have a list of leads, prospective customers, and clients in front of them. It keeps them updated on the actions they should take to reach these people. Creating a database in CRM enables you to store all necessary data, track interactions, and plan. Your sales reps can always access the software and update data. They can add new leads, tasks, and other marks so that every department knows about the progress of the deals.
Train your sales team. Your sales representatives should be strong communicators who understand customers' needs. That’s why consider conducting training to educate your team on how to communicate with leads and customers to win their love. Make sure that your sales managers know your product, have a strong pitch, and are confident in their own words.
The process of building an effective sales pipeline is clear, so let’s jump into the 4 key metrics to consider.
4 Key Sales Pipeline Metrics
You need to keep an eye on the most critical metrics to make sure that you go through the sales cycle smoothly. We’ve prepared a list of the key indicators for you to track and stay updated about your business health.
Customer lifetime value. LTV enables companies to predict the revenue they will generate over the entire relationship with a specific customer. With its help, marketers estimate the profitability of a customer and assess the potential of a business for further growth.
Win rate. This measure shows the number of prospects a brand managed to turn into customers. Entrepreneurs track the measure over specific periods to see the changes. If the win rate is low, marketers change the strategy, train sales reps, and leverage new marketing tools. If the win rate is high yet your total sales don’t meet your expectations, revise your marketing strategy and tools.
Average sales cycle. This metric shows the period a company needs to close the deal. After identifying the length of an average sales cycle, marketers find out what deals have longer sales cycles. With this information, you’ll be able to figure out the problems in these deals and find the solution to manage them. Automate the process with CRM to shorten the sales cycle. Often, it’s a human factor that causes the slowing down of the sales process. LIKE.TG offers business owners to make use of its CRM for free. You can control all your deals and facilitate communication with leads through various channels on one platform.
Customer acquisition cost. The measure indicates the cost a company spends to win a new customer. After calculating CAC, brands gauge how much they spend on marketing, salaries, and other efforts to bring a new consumer. It helps marketers evaluate the effectiveness of customer acquisition strategy and make some changes to improve it.
Now that you know the metrics, let’s explore the ways to make your sales pipeline better.
3 Ways to Improve Your Sales Pipeline
In this section, we’ll review the three ways to improve your sales pipeline. Let’s explore them in detail.
Provide users with guides, eBooks, and white papers. To build a list of leads, you should gather their contacts. To do it, you need to ensure your website visitors with valuable materials. Ask users to provide their contact information in exchange for your guides, eBooks, and white papers. Once you receive their contacts, you can send an email campaign that contains the additional information this person was interested in.
Interact with prospects on social media platforms. Now, when many people worldwide spend their free time on social media networks, businesses need to develop their accounts on these platforms. Sales reps should communicate with leads to establish relationships with them and encourage prospects to convert into customers. Marketers should provide relevant content that might come in handy for visitors, deliver the right message to the followers about the brand’s product, and implement various programs to show users the benefits they can obtain.
Leverage a CRM. CRM will help you keep the information about all your deals, customers, and leads in one place. With its help, you’ll avoid losing any essential data about your prospects and consumers and keep track of your sales progress. Check out our CRM to figure out how it can help you manage your business.
Congrats, you know how to build an effective sales pipeline, and we hope you’ll do it soon. Make use of our tips to make it perfect and close deals faster
Sales performance management
Sales performance management (SPM) is an approach to managing your business processes to sell more products and drive more revenue. It uses real-time insights to create a holistic image of the sales performance and make data-informed decisions.
In the article, we explain what sales performance management is and why it is essential. We also describe the top 5 software to manage your sales performance effectively.
Why is sales performance management important?
According to Korn Ferry, only 53% of sales reps succeed in making or exceeding their quota. These statistics prove that many companies on the market have issues with sales performance. SPM aims to increase the number of successful deals and help businesses drive more revenue. Read more about its importance below.
In today's dynamic market, it is necessary to react to changes quickly and adapt the strategy to the current situation. Sales performance management lets you get an overview of the sales processes and define the leaks in your pipeline. You can build a flexible sales ecosystem based on real-time insights provided by AI. Use machine learning to get alerts about problems with your sales performance and improve them immediately.
Also, SPM helps with sales forecasting. You can predict the success of your future campaigns manually or automatically using analytics collected by the software. Sales performance management services provide different possible scenarios for you to make more informed decisions and understand their consequences.
Finally, SPM helps control and increase the effectiveness of your employees’ work. It allows companies to improve their territory management and balanced distribution of quotas and bonuses according to your team's success. You can also use interactive elements and gamification to motivate staff to work better and increase your sales performance.
Now you understand the importance of sales performance management. Continue reading to discover the best software that can help you create action plans, improve your sales and increase profits.
Top 5 Sales Performance Management Software
Effective sales performance management is impossible without powerful software that lets you automate the majority of time-consuming processes. In this section, we describe the top 5 platforms for successful SPM and outline their peculiarities.
Anaplan
This software provides insights into the sales performance in real-time and forecasts future results for you to make data-driven decisions. Anaplan helps plan and incentive sales, track market changes, manage your employees' work and collaborate with different departments to get better results. We describe the main features of this service below.
Sales management. With Anaplan, you can design account segmentation strategies, identify key performance indicators and define quotas and territories to make your team’s work more effective. This cloud-based software helps foster real-time collaboration across different departments and, in such a way, increases the efficiency of your staff.
Building a flexible strategy. This service allows companies to predict their revenue, anticipate market changes, evaluate various strategies and prepare for different scenarios beforehand. Anaplan has a single platform for agile sales planning and management that lets employees from different departments align their efforts.
Team management. You can identify the gaps in your workers’ skills and get a holistic image of your human resources by studying headcount and key talent metrics. Anaplan also lets you build compensation plans, track the relevant metrics and turn these plans into reality to motivate your representatives to perform better.
Analytics. This software provides a few real-time scenarios to consider while planning your future actions. You can also increase the accuracy of your predictions not only by internally collected metrics but also by AI insights and machine learning suggestions.
Pricing is discussed individually.
Look at the screenshot below. Here is a pricing analysis in Anaplan. You can track volumes, revenue, margin, and trends. It lets companies set up the optimal prices on their products and, in such a way, drive more revenue.
Xactly
This cloud-based software aims to automate manual processes and optimize your operations, providing data-informed insights. Xactly helps with go-to-market planning, pipeline and employee performance management, and process extension. Discover more about its main features below.
Territory, quota, and credit management. This platform lets you control and maintain transparency of quotas according to the company’s goals and reduce the administrative burden on your team leaders. You can build a strong strategy, and make it more flexible and less affected by changes in personnel and territory.
Administration of everyday changes. Xactly helps automate routine tasks and scale them easily to save your reps time for more important issues. You can also optimize sales operations with the help of AI to avoid manual mistakes.
Powerful analytics and customizable dashboards. This platform allows companies to gather data on consumer behavior and analyze the pipeline to define ways to improve their sales performance. You can also track the work of your employees and identify problems immediately using customizable dashboards. Moreover, Xactly helps manage compensation programs to motivate employees to improve the results of their work.
Tailored solutions. The service provides customizable solutions to optimize processes and overcome unique operational challenges in different industries. With the help of Xactly, you can improve your rosters, territories, quotas, and credits.
Integrations. Xactly has an open and scalable architecture that allows you to customize processes in the way your company needs. This software can connect seamlessly with your company's existing systems, such as CRM, HCM, ERP, and others to make your work more effective.
Pricing is discussed individually.
Below there is a Home tab in Xactly. You can open analytics dashboards, track year credits by type, discover quarter and period attainment and find out more about accepted payments.
Board
This cloud-based platform has a hybrid in-memory architecture that helps in business planning and analysis. Its flexible data model lets companies unify information to create a single view of their sales and be confident in their data security. You can generate unlimited future scenarios to optimize your strategy and have the best performance. We provide more Board features below.
Data management. This service unifies and organizes information from different sources in data models, where sales reps can change it anytime. Also, Board offers a set of pre-built data connectors, so you can reach the data in a few clicks and enhance it easily.
Sales planning. You can forecast sales, plan quotas, territory, and budget according to a what-if analysis provided by the platform. This service lets you modify data during the forecasting and, in such a way, change the results of your sales predictions in real-time.
Analytics and reports. You can create on-the-fly calculated metrics with Board’s formulas and use them immediately to analyze your sales performance. Explore all collected information in detail as the service provides automated possible drill-down paths. Also, you can conduct your analyses using data from different data sources.
Workflow management. This software helps model key business processes based on pre-built rules. You can get alerts and create trigger events if certain conditions are met. Entry data simultaneously with other users and see the changes in all levels of detail.
Building business intelligence applications. Board’s HTML5 technology lets companies build and launch applications for your business needs. You can do it without coding and use the apps immediately from any device.
Integrations. You can implement the software on-premise, on-hosting, or on-cloud and change the work model anytime you need. Such flexibility lets the Board create seamless integrations with other tools, applications, and CRM systems to manage activities in a single platform.
Pricing is discussed individually.
Look at the client account in the Board below. Here you can discover more about customer behavior patterns, find out key value drivers, and track buyers’ preferences to provide more personalized experiences.
InsightSquared
This software provides machine learning-driven insights, demand generation analytics, and SaaS reporting to help you improve your sales processes. You can discover more about the customer journey and the way to improve it, get pipeline and revenue forecasts, and find out the ways to optimize your sales processes. Discover more about its features below.
Data tracking. This service lets you collect data connected not only with your sales reps but with everyone involved in creating your customer journey and delivering experiences to consumers. All the information from the software and other integrated tools is collected right in your CRM to ensure complete records of all interactions.
Analytics. You can capture and analyze all the data through the sales processes automatically. InsightSquared has real-time dashboards and reports that make every update visible immediately. This software helps visualize the sales funnel, track the effectiveness of your interactions, and provides insights into what influences customers’ decisions.
Account management. You can add new reports and dashboards, create your hierarchy, and segment sales forecasts in the way you need to make work more effective. Also, InsightSquared lets users filter the data by any field and track changes in metrics in real-time.
Pipeline management. This software allows companies to manage all their sales processes from one central dashboard and detail the pipeline at any level to understand the current performance better. You can discover the reasons for the changes in sales using reports that InsightSquared can generate at any time.
Team management. The service lets you track the performance of each team member, identify the leaders and discover the weak points of your staff. You can break down the activity of each account over time and gain insights into how certain actions influence your sales.
Pricing is discussed individually.
There is an analytics dashboard in InsightSquared. You can track buyers’ activity, find out about the places of interaction and switch the tabs to discover more about the sales opportunities that AI predicts.
People.ai
This software helps teams manage the data about their sales and revenue. Its main advantage is patented filtering, SOC II-Type 2 certification, and data encryption that help keep your information secure. Discover more about People.ai’s features below.
Pipeline management. You can connect all stages from the top funnel buyer engagement to the purchase to create a well-defined sales pipeline. Unify the data about buyers with account and opportunity information to get a holistic image of your sales performance and define the ways for future development.
Integrations. People.ai integrates easily with your existing stack. You can empower your systems with new revenue-related data, such as emails, meetings, calendar events, etc., and get a deeper understanding of your sales processes.
Data and opportunity management. This software automatically captures and analyzes buyers’ and sales reps’ activity and provides insights into their engagement. People.ai provides AI-powered suggestions on the activities that impact the outcome of a deal and how to improve them.
Pricing is discussed individually.
Below there is an Opportunities tab in People.ai. The software lets you track the cost of each deal, its stages, close dates, and engagement scores. You can also filter the data by any metric.
Congrats, now you understand what SPM is and why it is important. Also, you know the top 5 best sales performance management software and how to use them to improve your business processes.
Sales management
Sales management is the process that entails developing new selling strategies, gathering and training sales teams, and coordinating the practices aimed at pursuing a company’s sales goals. It helps businesses create excellent sales teams, develop good relationships with their consumers, reduce costs, and reach sales targets.
In the video below, Alex shares killer sales management tips for your marketing success. Check it out!
In this article, we’ll explain why sales management is essential and talk about its objectives, functions, and key principles. In addition, we’ll walk you through five sales management strategies.
Why is sales management important?
An effective sales management process is a must-have for any company. It helps reach your sales objectives, control sales processes, close deals faster, boost your sales performance, and thrive in a highlycompetitive environment. It also plays a significant role in the optimization of lead qualification. With planning, coordination, and control, a salesperson can ensure the quality of their selling process and make a company scale.
With sales management, companies reduce costs on the distribution of their products and receive great profits. The process enables business owners to improve communication among their team members, build relationships with prospectsand customers, effectively introduce new products, and increase the production of goods that are in great demand among consumers.
Now that you know why sales management is important, let’s proceed to the next section with sales management objectives.
Sales Management Objectives
Each company sets business aims it wants to achieve within a certain time. Although all businesses develop in their own way and, in theory, set different goals, most of them are often very similar.
The objectives can be divided into short and long-term. In the group of short-term goals, we can single out retaining and capturing the market share and defining sales volume to make a business profitable. Objectives that need to be implemented over a long time include retaining a certain percentage of customers, assisting in training sales representatives, supporting sales teams with technical advice, and tracking, collecting, and analyzing any sales information.
As you see, the sales objectives of all businesses are pretty similar. Now that you are acquainted with them, let’s walk you through their functions.
Functions of Sales Management
Sales management isn’t only about managing sales and ensuring that customers are satisfied with the process. In general, it implies making sure that sales reps do a great job, planning and setting targets, and monitoring the efficiency of the sales process. Let’s take a look at its functions in more detail.
Setting targets.Establishing unrealistic goals can have a negative influence on your company. That’s why to reap benefits from your business, you need to select the right and realistic targets to reach. Use the reports of your sales team to identify the target it’s possible to achieve. However, remember that the previous performance doesn’t necessarily predict the future actions of your customers.
Identifying quality leads. At any time, there might be many potential customers who need information about your product. Your task is to make sure that salespeople can find a unique approach to each of them and act quickly. Make sure that your sales team can identify quality leads and make them convert.
Improving the efficiency of your sales process. Identifying good leads is one of the ways to optimize your sales process. However, you should also be ready to improve the efficiency and speed of your sales process. You can use a software solution to be able to assign tasks to people who understand a particular process better. Say, if users land on your site and show interest in your product, it’s better to assign them to a sales representative who has a profound knowledge of your product, starting from the most basic information. By sending email campaigns to your leads and clients, you can build trusting relationships with them. You can consider using LIKE.TGto automate your email send-out.
Monitoring the performance of your salespeople. To see the progress in your team’s work, you need to track your salespeople’sperformance and the value they bring. It’s a good idea to encourage your team members with rewards for a well-done job. For underperformers, you can prepare some additional training to master their skills.
Analyzing the reports. Reports are necessary to collect information and make decisions. Consider the received data when assigning tasks and defining short-term objectives for sales teams. Moreover, look for things that hinder attaining your company’s goals.
Now that you are aware of the functions, we need to explore the fundamentals of sales management.
Key Principles of Sales Management
Sales managers act according to the targets entrepreneurs set. To achieve these goals, your sales team should comply with the following principles.
Consistency. The success of the sales process relies on several factors, and one of the most important of them is consistency. Although it’s difficult to achieve, it’s worth your time and effort. Consistency allows you to close deals faster, build better relationships with customers, and improve sales. Make sure to provide your salespeople with clear instructions about each stage of thesales funnel, teach them how to behave with consumers, and ask for reports to monitor the progress.
A degree of independence. For sure, a sales manager can’t do everything alone. You can give your team a chance to do some tasks independently and track the results. As an option, consider giving some extra tasks to your top performers and rewarding them for closing the deals. This way, you will show trust in their work and encourage your team to bring good results.
Equality among the members of your team. Remember to treat every member of your team equally and show respect. There is no need to put some salespeople above others or give preferential treatment. You should adjust your sales targets and expected standards instead.
Conviction.Being a sales representative isn’t easy. It implies understanding customers from the way they communicate and finding arguments to make them buy your products. Salespeople often face criticism, counterarguments, and some negative feedback. If you aim tohandle clients’ objections better and improve customer retention, your sales team needs to enhance their communication skills, be more confident, and have good product knowledge.
The principles are clear, so let’s jump into sales management strategies.
5Sales Management Strategies
Set realistic targets
Find the right people for your team
Educate your salespeople and give feedback
Reward your top performers
Measure the progress of your team
An effective strategy that involves modern techniques and a professional sales team can work wonders for your company’s ROI. Read on if you are interested in making your business grow and prosper.
Set realistic targets. Sometimes sales managers focus on the numbers a company strives to achieve without considering the capabilities of its salespeople. After trying to reach the goal, sales teams often fail because of unrealistic objectives. As a result, you run the risk of demotivating your salespeople and missing your projections. Use your average sales reps’ performance to set achievable goals.
Find the right people for your team. To continue to scale, you need to attract the right talents to join your sales team. With suitable candidates, you can build a successful sales team that will support your company’s growth. First of all, before creating a job description and interviewing your candidates, define your company’s specific needs. Different categories of salespeople are needed for different purposes. Explore the reasons why you need a new employee. Secondly, create a step-by-step interview process to select suitable applicants. Thirdly, consider involving your colleagues in the process to identify the kind of person they need.
Educate your salespeople and give feedback. As a sales manager, you need to always be in touch with your sales team. Your new hires should work under your guidance to absorb the sales process, learn how to handle objections, and understand where to find prospective customers. With time, your new employees will be able to handle the necessary tools and obtain experience and knowledge in sales, sales tricks, and strategies. Ensure to provide an effective training process to turn people with potential into top performers. Remember to give feedback after your salespeople complete certain tasks.
Reward your top performers. Salespeople who do their job perfectly want to receive cash incentives from the company and get praise. That’s why it’s worth creating a plan that involves specific targets and monetary compensations for them. As a sales manager, you need to ensure thatyoudo everything possible toretain customersand lure new ones.
Measure the progress of your team. It’s critical to monitor and evaluate the progress of your team. You need to determine whether your company succeeds in growing or if there is something that slows down this process. Identify the reasons and try to eliminate them by reviewing the work of your sales team and improving your strategies. Besides, you should ask your sales representatives to create manual lists and reports, so consider designing a reporting process in your CRMto simplify your work. With LIKE.TG, you can guide your sales process in one CRM.
Congrats, now you’ve acquired knowledge of the objectives, functions, and principles of sales management. With all this comprehensive information, you can develop an effective strategy for your business.
Sales networking
Sales networking is a marketing technique that enables you to establish new connections with prospects and encourage interactions with existing clients. The approach focuses on finding people who meet your ideal customer profile or those who can recommend your brand to potential customers. Sales networking allows you to generate quality leads.
In this article, we’ll uncover why networking is essential in sales and how to create it.
Why is networking important in sales?
Sales networking focuses on establishing trusting relationships with prospects by conveying information about your company and encouraging potential clients to become customers. Good relationships with prospective customers enable you to provide and receive benefits from this communication. Besides constant interactions with leads, you also pay attention to your current consumers as well. To improve relationships with existing consumers, brands launch referral programs. They bring attractive offers to your clients and encourage them to recommend your company to friends. As a result, your customer base expands.
There are even more pros you can expect from sales networking. Let’s review three benefits you can reap after building networking in sales.
Sales networking helps improve connections. Sales networking is about building new relationships and strengthening existing ones. You don't necessarily have to reach dozens of potential clients every day to expand your customer base. Consider maintaining contact with the right people through events, webinars, meetups, and email campaigns. If your current customers are satisfied with your product and the value you provide, they can recommend your brand to their friends. This is how sales networking and word-of-mouth marketing work. By improving connections, you contribute to the increase of clients in your customer base.
Sales networking encourages referrals. As we’ve mentioned previously, events, webinars, and meetups enable you to generate leads and win new consumers. Company owners can get new ideas for business expansion and areas where they can improve. By sharing, you can identify the gaps you still have in your business and eliminate them.
Sales networking enables sharing and receiving valuable insights. When you join meetings to discuss your business experience and knowledge, you can share your valuable insights and listen to information from business owners in the same niche. It allows you to get information on expanding your business, going international, or improving the strategy to generate prospects.
Now that you know the importance of networking in sales, it’s time to learn how to build a sales network. It will help you do it for your brand and reach specific business goals.
How to build a sales network?
Since establishing a customer base is essential for every business, there’s a huge necessity to find out how to create a sales network. In this section, we’ll tell you how to do it step by step.
Search for ways and mediums to reach potential clients. Before creating an account on Instagram, conduct research. You need to identify the platforms your customers and prospects usually use. Look through your ideal customer profile to figure this out. Once you identify the social network, develop a marketing strategy. When reaching specific individuals on social media, you need to analyze their accounts first. For instance, you want to reach a company’s manager via LinkedIn. Before sending an email or reaching right through the platform, find out whether this person is active on this social network. It will help you make sure that this manager will see your invitation or message and react to it. This will be the perfect moment to start a conversation and discuss your product.
Join events. Accepting invitations to various events is essential to attain new customers, increase sales, and improve revenue. Besides joining trade shows, exhibitions, sharing sessions, webinars, and presentations related to sales, consider visiting spontaneous events. These events should be related to your industry. Although they can’t guarantee a deal, these meetings can still bring you to people who will contribute to your business' success. These can be business partners, future customers, or influencers. These people can help you boost future sales and improve your sales strategy's effectiveness.
Share your expertise on social media. Since social media occupies most people’s free time, you should take care of your account. Making it visible to your customers and prospects increases your chances of bringing in new clients and sales. To gain exposure, you need to be active on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or TikTok. Your chosen channel depends on your target audience's preferences and age group. Share your expertise with followers through stories, photos, and video posts. If you want to gain extra exposure, consider buying paid ads. This way, you’ll be able to communicate the message to people who search for similar products.
Nurture your new leads. After getting new prospects, nurture them with various forms of interaction. You can send event follow-up emails, contact them via chatbots, or make phone calls based on their preferences. Some people like to be updated on new arrivals, discounts, and promos via email, while others prefer chatbots.
Congrats, now you know the advantages of a sales network and how to build one for your business. With LIKE.TG’s bulk email service, you can effectively reach prospects through email campaigns to send invitations, establish trusting relationships, or inform about referral programs.
Sales funnel
A sales funnel — also known as a marketing funnel, conversion funnel, or purchase funnel — is a marketing model that shows the journey that a prospective customertakes to purchase a product or service.
In this video, Anya explains how sales funnels can benefit your business. Check it out!
Any business that is in existence, regardless of how new it is, has a sales funnel. Marketing funnels vary depending on the company in question. Some are quite simple, while others have several phases based on a business’ sales model. The earliest model, which has since been modified by marketers to suit modern-day customers, included these steps: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. As simple as that sounds, a great well-defined, and closely monitored sales funnel can turn your business from being virtually unknown to a successful multi-million-dollar company in a relatively short period. Below is a simple illustration of a sales funnel.
Why do You Need a Sales Funnel?
As an online entrepreneur, you can understand how frustrating and painful it is to miss a sale. It is especially disappointing when you have dedicated your time, resources, and effort to convince the customer, and they do not make a purchase. You may find yourself in this situation when you do not have the right purchase funnel. The more established e-commerce companies spend a lot of time and resources on developing effective sales funnels. If you want to increase your revenue, you must also take the time to understand and develop a proper sales funnel for your business.
Why is a Sales Funnel Important?
The importance of a sales funnel cannot be understated. Among other things, it will assist you to:
Attract and convert new customers
Know the total number of opportunities or leads amassed
Identify where you need to change your strategy
Follow up on visitors who do not convert
Predict future sales outcomes
Turn a customer into a repeat purchaser
Reduce your marketing costs
How to Make Your Sales Funnel Work
Create subscription forms
Send drip campaigns
Segment your subscribers
Monitor your subscribers’ ratings
If your sales are yet to pick up, do not despair. There are several ways you can improve your sales funnel using LIKE.TG email service.
Create subscription forms. By using LIKE.TG, you can create sign up forms quickly and place them on any page of your website to attract subscribers. You can choose a template and customize it to your preference. With these forms, you can collect users’ personal information then use it to boost customer engagement.
Send drip campaigns. Also known as automated email campaigns, this is a form of targeted marketing that entails sending out scheduled promotional emails to your mailing list. Register with LIKE.TG for result-driven and targeted marketing campaigns using the Automation 360 feature.
Segment your subscribers. Knowing your subscribers will help you send them more personalized marketing emails, create offers that are relevant to their needs and wants, and identify the ideal time to send them emails. By using LIKE.TG to develop your sales funnel, you can easily segment your users by age, gender, geographical area, new/active subscribers, and so forth.
Monitor your subscribers’ ratings. Use LIKE.TG to analyze your subscribers’ activity and customize your marketing content. Get statistics such as open and click rates through graphs and reports. With this feature, you can see subscribers’ reception of your emails, sent and delivered marketing emails, and any spam complaints from recipients.
How to Create an Effective Sales Funnel Using LIKE.TG?
Create a registration form for your site
Automate your emails using Automation 360
Use a CRM system
Upsell or cross-sell to buyers who convert
Create a registration form for your site. A signup form is used to gather users’ personal information, such as name and contact details. They essentially help you reach your users more easily to initiate conversations. By using LIKE.TG’s pre-designed forms or creating your own, you can add any fields that you like, upload images, and add text to your preference. Choose among embedded, floating, pop-up, or fixed forms. Make sure to add a lead magnet to encourage people to subscribe.
Automate your emails using Automation 360. Use the email automation feature to create automated welcome emails for new subscribers, weekly newsletters with subtle promotions, “thank you” email after purchases, and reminders for customers who are yet to complete a purchase. Plus, you can specify the frequency of sending out these emails.
Use a CRM system. LIKE.TG offers a free CRM to automate sales and communication with customers through multiple channels. It allows you to control dealswith clients and track progress at each stage with the help of statuses. Kanban-board makes it possible to visualize interactions with each client. The deal card stores information about the clientand their purchasing history. Also,you can contact your customers via email or chatbot. This way, you have a complete picture of working with each customer, which allows you to personalize your sales strategy and close deals faster. You canfind out more in our Knowledge Base.
Upsell or cross-sell to buyers who convert.Once a subscriber makes a purchase, you can try to upsell or cross-sell to them. Or keep them updated through regular promotional emails or automated web push notifications.
Check out the following flowchart to understand these concepts better:
How to optimize your sales funnel for better conversion?
Conduct A/B testing
Make use of triggered emails
Add new content to your website regularly
Listen to your users
Create different CTAs
Install online chat and customize smart widgets
Having a sales funnel in place is not enough. You must optimize its functionality to reap maximum benefits. To accomplish this, you should do several things.
Conduct A/B testing. With the help of LIKE.TG, do A/B testing to figure out which marketing strategies work best for your business or brand.
Make use of triggered emails. Take advantage of triggered emails to increase customer engagement and retention. Send the right messages at the right time as your customers’ actions predefine them. This way, you can reach out to your audience via email, SMS, web push; send different messages, and monitor conversions on each stage.
Add new content to your website regularly. Good content in and of itself drives traffic to your site. Therefore, add fresh and relevant content as often as you can.
Listen to your users. Take into account your visitors’ or customers’ questions, concerns, or suggestions while creating content and promoting your service.
Create different CTAs. One call to action is not enough. They depend on the sales funnel stage your lead is currently on. Make your offers client-oriented.
Install a live chat and customize smart widgets. Install an online chat and customize smart widgets based on customer actions or behavior. With LIKE.TG, you can create a professional live chat for your website for free. Start proactive dialogues with users online, promptly respond to incoming requests, or send automatic messages in response to user actions or behavior to reduce objections, help them place an order or find an answer to your question. All the teamwork options are also available with our big free plan: saving answers and notes from chats, transferring a chat to a colleague, quickly analyzing user activity, and setting web push and sound alerts.
Make them visible at all stages of the buyer’s journeyto encourage conversion.
Best Sales Funnel Examples
Below is a more comprehensive illustration of a typical sales funnel:
And now, here are two real-life examples of successful sales funnels in use:
Groupon
Traffic: visitors come in from ads, affiliates, referrals, organic and so forth
Homepage: visitors are given incentives to sign up
Internal website: users are led to a more specific web page
Purchase form: the user converts by filling out the form
Grasshopper
Traffic: from blogs, ads, and PR
Homepage: short invitation video as well as text explaining the services
How it works: an in-depth look at how the services work
Pricing page: has info about the different packages offered
Sign up: a form for registering
Bottom Line: Pay Attention to Sales Funnel Principles
The first principle of creating a sales funnel is deciding on who your target audience is. Remember, once your sales funnel up and running, much of your effort will be directed at making people purchase your product or service. Get it right, and your business succeeds. On the other hand, if you get it wrong, you will waste time trying to sell to people who will not buy what you are offering.
Sales methodology
A sales methodology is how a sales representative communicates with a prospect to win a deal. Salespeople apply a set of sales techniques to approach a lead and do everything possible to reach company targets on sales and revenue. It helps sellers stick to a plan that works with customers during each customer journey stage.
This article will uncover the 5 best sales methodologies and show how to select the right sales methodology for your company.
Why should you use a sales methodology?
Sales methodology determines a set of techniques and approaches sales reps should use to increase win rates. It defines what a sales team should and shouldn’t do to attain business goals regarding the number of new customers, closed deals, and revenues. In a highly competitive climate, every brand should have an effective framework that works and helps reach prospects.
Since leads can switch to a competitor for purchase anytime, this set of methods should be effective and working. Businesses need more time to test various approaches and wait until it works. A consistent methodology brings advantages to both companies and sales teams since it enables them to
use successful strategies;
assess sales opportunities and challenges;
implement best practices that lead to success;
teach sales representatives how to reach prospects.
Now that you know the reasons to outline a sales methodology, it’s time to explore the 5 best sales methodologies. The following section will help you identify the most suitable frameworks for your business.
5 Best Sales Methodologies
We invite you to discover the best sales methodologies if you are still considering where to start. They will help you decide which of the frameworks you need for your business.
SPIN selling. SPIN stands for situation, problem, implication, and need payoff. These concepts help salespeople identify customers’ problems and challenges. Sales reps can successfully establish trust and rapport with potential consumers by focusing on these subjects. To understand clients' needs clearly, salespeople should ask questions about customers' current situation and identify the most urgent problem. They need to examine the effects when the issue isn’t solved and encourage customers to think about the results after solving the problem. SPIN selling implies guiding clients to the solution rather than discussing the product's value.
N.E.A.T selling. N.E.A.T. stands for core needs, economic impact, access to authority, and timeline. The framework avoids using some general phrases about the product, its value, benefits, and features. N.E.A.T selling encourages salespeople to analyze customers’ challenges to understand what they really need. The economic impact is one of the points that are essential for this methodology. Your sales team should show consumers the current financial impact and compare it with the impact they will make after implementing the solution. This difference should be visible for customers to understand what they lose. Finally, your sales reps should encourage clients to purchase as soon as possible. It will help your business obtain new customers.
Sandler selling. Mutual interaction between a customer and a sales rep is the foundation of Sandler selling. In this case, a deal will be based on established mutual trust. In Sandler's selling, a salesperson avoids acting as a typical sales rep. This process excludes various ways to convince the buyer to make a purchase. A sales rep is an advisor who asks questions to adjust to client's needs and desires. This person listens to customers’ pain points and searches for a perfect solution. Reps trained based on Sander's selling methodology identify pricing expectations and time restrictions during the qualification process. This way, a sales team prevents a company from spending time and effort on leads who don’t fit the criteria of your buyer persona.
SNAP selling. Sales representatives try to put themselves in the buyer's shoes when using SNAP selling. Implementation of this technique requires sellers to keep everything simple, be valuable, align with customers' needs and requirements, and focus on priorities. If salespeople manage to combine these principles during the selling process, they can succeed in establishing connections with prospects, communicating the main message, and making the buying process simple and enjoyable.
Solution selling. This methodology focuses on customers’ specific challenges and pain points and tries to find the best solution. When using solution selling, salespeople strive to provide customers with products that will definitely solve their problems and bring benefits. Solution selling is about a customized offer. The company’s team can provide this client with a personalized mix of products to help this brand.
Now that you know the best methodologies, it’s time to explore how to implement them. In the next section, we’ll cover the process step by step.
How to choose the right sales methodology for your business?
Outline the structure of your sales process. To reach your sales targets, build a detailed layout of your sales process. Approaching leads and winning sales requires an accurate plan. You should develop a sales strategy for each stage of the buyer journey. Besides, you should identify the goals and the people responsible.
Figure out the needs of your consumers. After outlining every stage of your sales process, you need to determine your buyers’ needs. It will help you align customers’ motivations with your product. Use qualitative and quantitative research to do it. Consider implementing surveys, one-to-one communication, and focus groups to understand buyers’ needs clearly. During the research, you need to determine your consumers’ technical, financial, and personal needs. When surveying customers, pay attention to motivations since they can be related to pricing or emotional connection with your brand.
Incorporate frameworks for different stages of the buyer journey. Each customer journey stage is crucial since it leads a person toward a purchase. Depending on the value of a product, the sales rep’s presentation, and the sales approach, the prospect decides whether to buy a product. That’s why you need to develop a framework for every stage that moves a lead closer to the deal. You can choose among two options: incorporate existing methodologies or build your methodology based on observation and research.
Develop training for your sales team. Once you choose a perfect fit for your business, it’s time to create guidelines, lessons, and master classes for your sales team. It will help you make sure that all your sales reps reach potential clients in an appropriate way. This way, you’ll establish a universal approach and sales rules for everyone. Consider developing guides to educate your sales team and help them obtain the necessary skills.
Congrats, now you know what a sales methodology is and why it’s essential. Hope that our guide and methods will help you develop an effective sales approach for your company.
Sales coaching
Sales coaching is continuous, one-to-one training provided to sales representatives aimed at improving their sales performance. Sales leaders share a sales coaching program with salespeople to help them improve their strategies and increase sales. They listen to sales reps to uncover and solve the issues they face every day when communicating with customers.
In this article, we’ll unveil the importance of sales coaching and the way it works. We’ll also review sales coaching techniques and some effective tips.
Why is sales coaching important?
Unlike salespeople’s onboarding, sales coaching is a continuous process sales teams need. With its help, sales representatives can receive new knowledge and improve their skills. During this time, coaches listen to their students to identify the main problems rather than talk all the time. It makes sales coaching different from onboarding.
By communicating with salespeople face-to-face, sales experts can identify the problems of each sales rep and help them solve trouble areas to ensure successful deals. Inconsistent messaging, underqualified agents, the wrong tone of voice, and ineffective approaches can become obstacles to preventing the sales team from reaching a company’s revenue goals. Sales coaching allows businesses to raise these issues and find solutions.
After effectively interacting with an experienced mentor, sales representatives find out their problems, eliminate them, and improve their sales performance. As a result, three parties reap the benefits of this process. They are sales managers, sales reps, and customers. Salespeople manage to increase their competencies and identify the gaps during their communication with buyers. They can plunge into self-discovery and self-improvement and eventually increase sales. Sales managers can see better performance of teams and reach the target. Consumers get proper communication with sales representatives, receive better engagement, and obtain all the necessary information.
Now that you know the importance of sales coaching, it’s time to proceed to the next section. We’ll review the main duties of sales coaches who provide proper training.
What does a sales coach do?
Sales coaches differ a lot from people who onboard new sales representatives and tell them what to do. This training is specialized, meaning each coach approaches each sales rep individually. However, sales leaders don’t say what to do and don’t give accurate instructions on how to handle calls or communicate with clients because every customer is unique and needs a tailored approach. Mentors provide salespeople with some specific piece of advice that can help solve a specific problem or reach a certain goal.
To understand how to help increase sales, sales coaches try to figure out the motivators, strengths, and weaknesses of every sales rep. It enables them to find a personalized approach and improve sales performance.
Let’s unveil some of the responsibilities of sales coaches that empower salespeople to gain better performance and reach their sales targets. Sales mentors manage the following tasks:
share insider tips and practices related to sales;
conduct sales training;
review a specific sales rep’s call to figure out what was fine and bad;
show some helpful tools and selling techniques;
discuss problematic areas which require special attention;
rehearse a call with a potential client and analyze it;
analyze conversations with prospects and customers through emails and messengers;
identify strengths and weaknesses during communication with clients and provide advice for improvement.
Sales coaches don’t provide sales reps with accurate instructions but set specific goals. They work with sales representatives to develop a plan to attain these targets.
Now that you know the main duties of sales mentors, it’s time to explore the best sales coaching techniques. After reviewing the next section, you’ll be able to identify the most suitable approaches to achieve sales goals for your company.
4 Sales Coaching Techniques
Although sales coaches should be ready to comply with a specific business culture, there are still several versatile techniques that any company can use. Let’s review them individually so that you can take advantage of these approaches.
Trying various coaching styles. Since sales have many approaches to success and styles to apply, sales coaching has them too. To determine the right style, you should figure out the needs of your team first. You can test several to finally find the right one for your salespeople. For instance, if your sales team needs detailed suggestions about specific sales situations with prospects or customers, consider implementing tactical coaching. It will help you unveil all the details regarding a certain issue with customers. Strategic coaching enables sales reps to obtain a general picture of the situation and its solution. When a sales representative needs to analyze and improve specific sales skills, it’s advisable to implement specific skill coaching.
Letting sales reps contribute to the process. Since salespeople work independently based on their strategies, it’s sometimes difficult to change their opinion about the process and modify it. It can be complicated for them to accept standing instructions. That’s why there’s no need to be pushy or over-instructive. Better let your salespeople analyze their performance rather than tell them how to act and what to do. People are critical regarding their work, so give them space for suggestions and insights. They will figure out the solution to their problems with your little assistance and helpful advice.
Choosing average salespeople. Sales coaching enables the improvement of performance not only of one individual but the entire sales department. Each team has salespeople with different levels of performance. Some of them we call top performers, and some of them are low performers. When picking up salespeople for sales coaching, choose wisely. Since top and low performers can’t bring your company a significant difference in sales and revenue, selecting sales reps in the middle is better. This is because top performers already bring the highest profits, and low performers still need to improve many aspects of their work to achieve better results (it can take a lot of time). Average salespeople always have some space for improvement and a desire to perform better than others. These reps can bring you a real impact and help you reach your company sales targets within a shorter period.
Paying attention to sales data. If you decide to implement coaching, ensure to use all available data, tools, and approaches to make a difference. Consider using sales data sales managers can provide. This way, you’ll be able to identify the problem and figure out how to solve it. For example, if a salesperson has many prospects but only a few deals, you need to address this problem. However, take everything step-by-step by splitting up the sales funnel based on the problem area.
Now that you know the most effective techniques, it’s time to jump into great tips that will allow you to make the best of sales coaching and turn your average salespeople into top performers.
6 Effective Sales Coaching Tips
In this section, we’ll share 6 sales coaching tips for you to consider. They will help find out how to encourage salespeople and improve their sales strategy.
Unveil salespeople’s motivators. If you strive to develop a personalized approach for every individual and reach specific goals, you need to identify their drivers first. Besides making money goals, sales reps have some other targets for sure. You need to figure them out. This step is essential for choosing the right coaching style and ways to engage these individuals. Consider asking your salespeople about their vision for the future of their personal and professional lives. As a result, you’ll be able to identify what motivates them.
Implement contests and incentives. When implementing sales coaching, you can encourage salespeople with various incentives that help them achieve their targets. However, rewarding the first sales rep who makes a deal isn’t effective. Your bonus should focus on the action.
Provide a personal bonus. To improve the performance of specific salespeople, consider rewarding them. Tie your bonuses to specific goals. Choose your rewards wisely based on the available list of salespeople’s motivators. It will help you drastically change the performance of your sales team and help them attain their goals.
Let your top performers help. Top performers with vast experience and a history of successful deals can be examples during your sales coaching. Consider asking your best sales representatives to conduct a master class on how to interest prospects, lead them successfully down the sales funnel, and close deals. Best sales representatives can make some calls or demonstrate the recording of their successful calls. Afterward, all participants can discuss the call, its pros and cons, and make improvement suggestions.
Role-play some of the difficult scenarios. Sales agents need to be good communicators and psychologists to find the right tone of voice, the direction of the conversation, customer needs, and so on. You should be confident about your speech when dealing with rejections. It requires a lot of work and stability. To make everything perfect, your sales representatives need to practice their conversations and work with possible rejections. When coaching, make sure to exercise uncomfortable scenarios and hard conversations. Provide salespeople with some most common objections to work on. Listen to their responses to find out whether they are ready for real calls. As a result, they won’t feel awkward when hearing objections during the actual calls.
Ensure positive feedback as encouragement. When you criticize the work of your sales team, make sure to support your statements with some positive feedback. With its help, you’ll be able to point out areas of improvement and acknowledge the work of your sales representatives. Negative feedback often discourages salespeople from working and striving for better results. So, appreciating their work is essential. It also helps sales reps find out what they do right and where they still need to improve.
Congrats, now you know what sales coaching is and why it’s essential to implement. Hope that our best techniques and tips will come in handy when you decide to conduct training for your sales reps.
References:
This article defines the term.
In this article, you’ll find the benefits and duties of a sales coach.
Retention marketing
Retention marketing is a set of strategies implemented to keep clients engaged, satisfied, and willing to buy. Such practices are usually associated with offering relevant and catchy content to consumers to raise the company's lifetime value and profitability.
Why is retention marketing important?
According to BIA Advisory Services, repeat customers spend 67% more than new clients who purchase for the first time. This is one of the main reasons why businesses focus on retaining existing customers and avoid spending costs on acquiring new customers who can buy once and go. Below, you can find even more reasons to consider retention marketing for your company.
Repeat clients save money
It is more expensive to attract new clients than to motivate the existing ones to return for more deals. To expand the customer base, a business has to come up with innovations, and they are never cheap. No strategy guarantees success, so that you may waste your money. The returning users offer higher conversion rates.
Overall, the chance of selling a product or service to an existing client is up to 70%, while for a newbie, this mark fluctuates between 5% and 20%. These statistics from the bookMarketing Metrics indicate that existing customers make better purchases and increase profits for your business.
Besides, it requires less cost to engage a customer who has already tried your offers. To minimize acquisition costs, a business should focus on returning clients. Finally, competition is lower if you can rely on repeat customers.
Brand loyalty guaranteed
Returning customers tend to show more loyalty to the brand. They would rarely prefer to switch to another company unless something goes wrong and the quality of your product or service goes down. The buyers usually choose 2-3 shops from each category they are interested in, and they attend only those places for purchases.
Most importantly, loyal clients will bring you new customers. Word-of-mouth has always been a free and robust approach; sources like McKinsey prove that. Thus, if you need a new cool ad for your product line, try to satisfy the existing clients, and they will do their best to promote your business to their relatives and friends.
No extra information is required
Returning customers need little to no information on your product or service. At the same time, new users require plenty of time to compare your offers to competitors’ ones. Repeat customers save both your time and money that you could have spent on additional promo materials.
Now that you know the benefits you can reap after implementing a customer retention strategy, it’s time to explore the retention rate and how it influences your business.
What is the retention rate?
Also known as CRR, this is a critical metric that shows whether your marketing and client care efforts are fortifying your company and bringing in the expected revenues. This indicator indicates the right time to make crucial changes or switch gears to hit the company targets.
These are the steps you need to take to get your customer retention rate at hand:
identify the timeframe you want to estimate your retention rate for (month, quarter, or year);
find out how many customers you had when this period just started;
calculate the number of clients you had at the end of this period;
estimate the number of new customers you managed to acquire during that time;
use the customer retention formula to get the measure.
You can calculate your customer retention rate using the formula below:
Retention Rate = ((Number of customers at the end of a specific period - Number of new customers acquired during a specific period) / Number of customers at the beginning of a specific period)* 100
To understand all the calculations right, you need an example using numbers. That’s why let’s say that you have:
500 customers at the beginning of the month;
700 customers at the end of the same month;
300 new customers acquired during this period.
It’s time to proceed to the calculation of your retention rate:
Retention rate = ((700 - 300) / 500)*100 = 80%
Your retention rate for that specific month will be 80%.
When company owners calculate retention rate, they might wonder why not just acquire new customers rather than try to increase the rate in various ways. In the next section, we’ll unveil the main difference between acquisition and retention and focus on the best strategy in terms of your budget.
Customer Acquisition vs Retention
The two terms are closely related to customers, yet the first one focuses on bringing new customers to your business, whereas customer retention strives to keep existing clients for various reasons, including customer acquisition costs, purchase value, loyalty, etc. We’ll discuss these and more below.
Customer acquisition is the process of attracting leads and bringing new customers to your company. It focuses on expanding your customer base, increasing market share, and boosting the short-term profitability of your business. To acquire new customers, companies spend additional costs on advertising, content marketing, and social media to establish awareness and recognition. They offer free trials, discounts on first purchases, and various incentives to encourage more buys. Since more and more people use social media to explore new products, businesses often collaborate with influencers, create sponsored content, and run various ads on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok to attract new prospects.
Customer retention is the process of keeping existing customers happy, loyal, and engaged so that they stay with your brand for a long time. When businesses focus on customer retention, they have various goals, including higher customer lifetime value, customer loyalty, and constant profitability. To improve customer retention, companies improve customer support, implement loyalty programs, leverage personalized approaches to every customer, use email campaigns and proactive chatbots, and collect client feedback.
Customer retention is cost-effective and ensures consistent revenue streams. When customers are happy with a brand, they can become free advocates of your company, recommending products to their friends and colleagues.
When the differences and benefits of retention for your business are clear, you might want to explore some effective strategies to keep your existing customers and encourage them to perform repeat purchases.
Retention Marketing Strategies
Numerous retention marketing strategies encourage you to focus on various areas of your business that require close attention. We’ll explore the most effective of them to help you retain your existing customers and entice them to repeat their purchases.
Learn more about your customers
Dedicate some time to collecting personal information about your clients. We do not mean their contacts only – try to surf their social media accounts like Facebook or Instagram to know more about how they spend their free time, what kind of places they attend, their favorite food and colors, etc. You should also find out which holidays they celebrate to know when to send another promotion.
Look below to learn how LIKE.TG allows you to use customers' data. Create as many variables as you need and use them to send personalized offers.
Dedicate more attention to email campaigns
After gathering the required information about your existing clients, consider how to design messages based on that information. Consider a personalized approach for each category of users.
Look at Fiton's email. The brand uses its birthday to increase loyalty and sales.
Offer loyalty programs and discounts
Everyone loves discounts. However, you should not offer them around the year as the customers may lose interest. Update the coupons with the promo codes once a month or six months. Make them 15-20% off. Inform clients about your discounts via emails that you can create with the help of LIKE.TG.
Below is how the pet supplies store promotes its loyalty program via email.
Provide user-friendly customer support
A client care service is the face of any company. You should hire enough experts to work by shifts to make this team available 24/7. The reps of this service should know the product in-depth to solve any problems ASAP. Even repeat customers hate waiting in lines!
HubSpot uses live chat to support its users 24/7. They can receive answers in seconds for frequently asked questions and use human handoff to solve complex issues with human agents.
Offer to become a member of your community
It is simple to turn subscribers into clients. Clubs and premium memberships make customers feel special. Being a VIP is always attractive because you get more than others. If you sell goods to different parts of the world, you can offer several-day free shipping. If you own a bookstore, you may promote free books of specific categories in exchange for an annual membership fee.
HM offers exclusive discounts for members only. Big brands use this method to increase customer engagement and sales.
Run reactivation campaigns
Sooner or later, subscribers may lose interest in your products. If you want to engage them again, focus on personalization. You should divide the list of such customers and create a message for each. Also, it is critical to determine the reasons why users leave and improve these weak points.
National Geographic asks subscribers to choose the topics they’d love to know more about. That is another way to re-engage sleepy users.
These are the best practices that will perfectly suit B2C brands and help them keep customers happy and satisfied. However, if you have a B2B company, your retention marketing strategies should be slightly different. If you have such a company and target audience, you better check the B2B retention marketing strategies below.
B2B Retention Marketing Strategies
When focusing on B2B retention, you need to leverage effective strategies for successful improvements. Here’s a list of best practices you can take advantage of. Let’s check them out.
Ensure seamless customer service. Successfully retaining your existing business clients implies providing them with exceptional customer support. This includes dedicated account managers who ensure a personalized experience and build trusting relationships with these customers. Besides, 24/7 assistance should be provided so clients in different time zones can reach your support agents and get their answers instantly.
Implement a personalized approach. You should develop personalized communication. Consider tailoring your offers based on customers’ needs and problems, making them more likely to buy these products. Tailor your email campaigns, social media messages, SMS, and content to address the challenges clients face at the moment and strive to solve them.
Consider creating loyalty programs. You can keep business clients with your brand by rewarding them for repeat purchases, referrals, and long-term partnerships. Develop a loyalty program that gives customers back for staying with your company. It can include exclusive offers, discounts, or early access. This way, you can show your clients appreciation and create more reasons to stick to your business. Consider creating a referral program encouraging your clients to refer to new businesses and get some perks.
Collect customer feedback. To successfully improve your business and boost your retention rate, you need to identify issues that make business customers churn out. You can do it effectively when conducting regular surveys and polls. NPS surveys will help you assess customer loyalty and satisfaction and get insights into the problems and their improvement. Consider using client advisory boards to obtain some insights from the most loyal clients that will help you with product development and more effective strategies.
Develop a customer success program. Ensure that your onboarding strategy covers all the essential areas for successful product usage. You should also monitor key clients’ success metrics to determine whether they face problems and solve them promptly instantly.Show your appreciation. Consider conducting special events to show appreciation and improve your relationships with clients. You can also do it by sending congratulations on clients’ anniversaries with your brand through email campaigns or messages on social media and messengers.
Now that you know how to improve customer retention using our strategies, we’ll show you how to do it fast and efficiently without putting your team under a lot of workload with retention marketing automation. We’ll discuss this topic in detail in the next section.
Retention Marketing Automation
Retention marketing automation is an excellent solution for companies striving to keep existing customers by making them satisfied and loyal. Besides reducing the workload on your team, you can automate most processes and prevent human error if you implement the right strategies. You can find some of the most effective ones below.
Send customers personalized email campaigns. Consider dividing customers into segments based on specific criteria, including behavior, preferences, purchase history, location, etc. With behavior-triggered emails, you can send email campaigns with relevant offers once clients perform specific actions on your site. All these features can be found in one tool like LIKE.TG, helping you create and manage email campaigns that align with customers' needs and behavior patterns.
Collect customer feedback using chatbots. After customers buy from your brand, make sure to send them emails asking about their experience with your product. Give clients some space and time to try your product to share fair responses and then ask them for their feedback using emails or chatbots. You should also send an NPS survey allowing customers to assess their likeliness of recommending your company to their friends and colleagues. This way, you can identify your brand’s problems and find space for improvements.
Automate reminders about events. If you have an online school, informational product, events, or webinars, consider setting up automatic reminders and sending them to customers immediately. This way, you ensure that clients remember about your event and will definitely attend it. You can set up the date and time for these reminders once and have them delivered to the right recipients without manual work.
Follow up with customers to identify strengths and address challenges. Don’t lose contact with customers after they complete the order. Make sure to ask them about their experience with your product and brand in general, provide them with personalized recommendations, and send updates using email campaigns and chatbot messages. It will help your company stay on top of mind and consider your products once clients need them. When customers share some negative experiences with your product, address these issues and prevent them from happening again. It will improve loyalty and satisfaction, resulting in higher retention rates.
Run re-engagement campaigns. When your existing customers don’t show any activity for a long time, it’s time to launch re-engagement campaigns encouraging clients to action. To do it right, you need to conduct a small research, enabling you to collect all the necessary data about these clients and provide them with the right offers, products, and solutions. By exploring purchasing and browsing history, you can discover what products these customers are interested in and likely to buy. Then, send email campaigns offering discounts, special deals, and promos. Time sensitive offers will make them take the desired action faster. Also, consider reminding customers about the items in their shopping carts by sending emails and chatbot messages.
Implement A/B testing. Test different variations of your email campaigns using special tools. It will help you identify subject lines, content, and call-to-action buttons that work best with your audience. Since these elements of automated email campaigns influence customers’ decisions, you should be accurate when conducting these tests.
Besides exploring the strategies, many online schools invite marketers to take courses on customer retention and ways to do it successfully. Many of them are available online, but we’ve chosen the best for you to consider.
Retention Marketing Courses
If you google retention marketing courses, you can encounter plenty of them, yet the quality can be doubtful. We’ve listed the 3 best courses from reliable platforms to take a look at. Hope that after exploring these courses, you can develop a retention marketing strategy for your business successfully.
Institute of Data Marketing
This course is suitable for everyone who is related to customer retention. It aims to help B2C companies plan and execute effective marketing campaigns to keep customers with a brand long-term. Once enrolling in the course, participants will also receive the ‘DMA Data Guide.’ This course raises the following topics: the process of tracking customer journeys and boosting customer loyalty. Marketers will find customer retention strategies that work for different audiences and businesses.
Udemy
Udemy offers marketers a course, allowing them to increase revenues by retaining existing customers. The course focuses on how CRM, customer care, customer service, customer experience, and satisfaction contribute to the profitability and growth of your business.
Coursera
On Coursera, marketers can find plenty of courses, including those about customer retention. Students will learn about factors influencing customer retention, assess customer behavior and identify ways to improve retention strategies, discover best practices to boost customer satisfaction and analyze feedback to improve your overall strategy.
Exploring courses can be incomplete without having some examples as a hint. That’s why we’ve provided some retention marketing campaigns with examples below. Let’s take a look to grab some inspiration.
Retention Marketing Campaigns with Examples
Here are some excellent examples of the successful implementation of retention marketing campaigns. Check them out to learn how to keep your existing customers loyal to your brand and happy with it.
Innisfree — Rewards
Innisfree, a Korean skincare company, encourages customers to stay loyal by implementing a rewards program. Existing clients can purchase beauty products, receive points, and unlock exclusive perks while shopping. The brand provides clients with three points for every dollar they spend. Then, customers can redeem points and get their gifts. The company also provides clients with points when they share their feedback on products and video or photo reviews. This way, the company not only ensures perks for staying loyal but also focuses on improvements to boost customer satisfaction.
Sensatia Botanicals — Congratulation Email Campaigns
A customer’s birthday, brand anniversary, or holiday is an excellent reason to interact with your customers and provide them with special offers. In turn, these offers will help you re-activate your clients and encourage them to purchase. Sensatia Botanicals sends birthday congratulations and provides clients with gifts. The brand offers voucher codes, allowing clients to enjoy their 20% discount. They can download barcodes to buy products at the company’s retail stores and have seven days to redeem this promo code.
Uber — Referral Program
Uber uses a referral program to encourage existing drivers to bring new ones and receive perks. All these actions can be done with the help of the Uber Driver app. Existing Uber drivers need to share the invite code available within the app and then monitor their friend's progress. When a new driver completes a specific amount of trips during the mentioned time frame and meets all the requirements, the existing driver earns money. This way, the company re-engages existing drivers and encourages them to become brand advocates, bringing new people interested in this position.
Congrats! Now you know what retention marketing is and what benefits you can reap after incorporating it. Hope that our effective strategies and inspiring examples will empower you to develop retention marketing campaigns that contribute to your satisfied and loyal customers, long-term revenue streams, and company growth.
SaaS
SaaS (software as a service) is a type of software delivery thatinvolves a cloud provider, enablingend-users to access information or applications from different devices by using a browser. SaaS companies are subscription-based, and they don’t oblige users to download and install their apps or programs.
Watch thevideo belowto discover someessential facts about SaaS companies.
In this article, we’ll review the features, advantages, and disadvantages of SaaS and make the difference between SaaS and PaaS clear. We’ll also unveil some common SaaS security issues and key metrics and find out how to build a SaaS company inseven steps.
5 Features of SaaS Technology
The software distribution model can be characterized by the following features:
Reducedinstallation time. Unlike traditional app companies, SaaS apps’ configuration and installation process is simple and fast. Product owners roll out their new applications to users seamlessly dueto cloud computing. SaaS providers simplify the processes and reduce costs on software and hardware maintenance by freeing users from the need to install apps on their computers. As a result, people save time on all these processes and eliminate potential issues.
Low cost. SaaS companies are an excellent choice for entrepreneurs with limited budgets. By running this business, product owners can avoid the upfront hardware costs, costs on maintenance, and upgrades.
Flexibility. New apps, their additional features, and new clientscontribute to your SaaS flexibility. This point is critical if you want to have a competitive advantage over rivals in your industry. SaaShas it all: features, users, and customized solutions for them. If you takethese points into account, you can be sure that your company scales faster.
Integration.SinceSaaS solutions have integrations with other essential apps, customers don’t have to pay for other necessary software, and users can benefit from these integrations without paying twice.
Quick updates. Companies constantly update their apps to provide customers with innovations and cutting-edge features. Clients can always be sure that updates installation won’t take a lot of time.
Let’s review the main advantages and disadvantages of being a SaaS company.
Advantages and Disadvantages of SaaS
Nowadays, more and more SaaS companies emerge in the market. This phenomenon is caused by the potential advantages a company can bring to its owner and customers. First of all, there’s a point in mentioning its lower initial costs since the subscription-based business model has no upfront license fees. Secondly, SaaS is easy to set up and deploy, meaning that people will not experiencemany delays. Thirdly, customers can easily access SaaS appsusing only theirbrowser and internet connection.
SaaS companies always provide customers with different subscription plans to choose from. They also ensure that their clientsencounter a minimum number of complications,which is why they manage all updates by themselves.
However, justlike with any other service or company, SaaS has several drawbacks. The disadvantages include:
a limited variety of apps;
lower performance;
apossibility of losing access to data due to certain internet connection issues;
data privacy concerns.
Now that you know all the pros and cons, it’s time for you to find out the difference between SaaS and PaaS. It will help youmake an informed decisionbased onyourprimary purpose.
SaaS vs. PaaS
Software as a service is a subscription-based software delivery service that uses browsers to distribute apps to clients. Third-party providers manage the applications to deliver them to the end-users. Customers just need to open their browsers to access these apps. Examples of SaaS include Dropbox, Cisco WebEx, and Google Workspace.
Platform as a serviceprovides users with access to certain hardware and software tools availableon the internet. Then, developers use these tools to create apps. People who develop software or apps are the main target audience of PaaS. It provides them with a platform where they can design excellent software. With PaaS, developers don’t have to spend all their efforts and time on developing an application from scratch and writing codes. Examples of PaaS include Microsoft Azure, Linode, and Amazon Web Services.
Simply put, SaaS and PaaS are different ways of using the cloud to achieve your goals. SaaS is a type of ready-made subscription-based software that can be accessed using a browser, whereas PaaS is a platform that supplies hardware and software tools, allowing developers to create apps withinthisplatform.
Now that the differences between the models are clear, let’s reviewseveral issues that might occur whenrunning a SaaS company.
Most Common SaaS Security Issues
Although SaaS companies are considered very profitable and successful nowadays, there are still some drawbacks that can hold them back. Security issues are in the first row of SaaS drawbacksassociated with data and access to it. There are possibilities of data theft, limited control over users who can have access to sensitive data, inability to control your data location, limited security, and possible cyber attacks.
Nowthat you are aware of all the SaaS security problems, we need to find out how to create a SaaS company efficiently.
Howto Build a SaaS Company in 7 steps
Create a product that can solve a customer’s problem
Develop a step-by-step business plan
Ensure that your idea is valid
Legalize your company
Enhance your product
Choose the right marketing strategy
Keep an eye on your metrics
A lot of peoplestrive to run athriving and profitable company, yet not all of them succeed. To do everything right, you need to followthese steps:
Createa product that can solve a customer’s problem. You need to outline a clear problem and provide a solution addressing it. Make use of your profound knowledge and skills in the industry to offer a better solution, and show your expertise to outrank your competitors.
Develop a step-by-step business plan. There’s no need to write a lot because a one-page pitch is enough to start. The plan should coveryour strategy, tactics, business model, and schedule.Your strategy section should contain a unique value proposition, target audience, problems and solutions, and competitive advantage. Tactics should encompass sales channels and approaches. In the business model section, you need to list your revenue streams and expenditures, and the schedule should include your action plan.
Ensure that your idea is valid. To start, you need to list all of the assumptions and ideas regarding your product and the benefits it can bring. By asking questions and answering them, you can figure out whether your idea will work and bring you and your customers more value. There are several ways you can do this: havean interview with your potential customers, conduct a competitive analysis, or create atest version of your product.
Legalize your company. Although youdon’t have tocomply with regulations to createyour software,you are obliged to do so to serve the market. Look through the rules and regulations to ensure that you follow themwithout breakingthe law. Select a business structure to which your company belongs, and register it after going through all the necessary processes. To register, you also need acatchy brand name, so you might want to invest some extra time in that.
Enhance your product. Consider creating a minimum viable product (it includessome basic features customers can use to give you their feedback).MVPhelps minimize costs and collect data important for future changes in the product. Accumulate your team’s ideas to obtain the best result, and avoid outsourcing your core product development team since there’s a risk of information leaks. It’s advisable to stick to your initial team.
Choose the right marketing strategy. You can make use of a variety of marketing tools and channels to market your product, frompay-per-clickads, traditional advertising, andemail marketing to paid ads on social media platforms. It’s a good idea to use several channels to communicate your message and educate leadsabout your product. However, make sure to use the most effective channels and run an experiment to determine them.
Keep an eye on your metrics. If you want to start a company and ensure it runs smoothly, you need to monitorits key metrics. When evaluating your performance, you can obtain several useful insights about your business. This will allow you to improve your company’s well-being, solve some issues before they become a real threat to your business, make strategic decisions, etc.
Let’s review the key SaaS metrics in more detail.
How to Measure YourSaaS Performance
It’s essential to keep an eye onyour SaaS performance todetermine whether your company is growing. Let’s review thekey metrics that will help you evaluate your business well-being.
Customer churn. The rate defines the percentage of consumers who have stopped using your service. The metric is crucial for assessing customer retention and the general condition of your business. When measuringyour monthly churn rate, try to collect as muchdata as possible todetermine why customers stopped using your product. Analyzetheir buyer personas, preferences, and behavioral patterns.It will help reveal theprimary customer churn causes, eliminate them, andpreventthe increase in customer churn.
Customer lifetime value. The metric identifies the sum of money each customer spends on your products. This measurerepresents how valuable the client is and whether it’s worthretainingthem. If your SaaS strategy is doing well,this metric should be higher than the costsyour brand spends on this customer. Check out our guideto find the formula and calculate the measure for your SaaS company. By estimating your company’scustomer lifetime value, you and your investors can have a clear picture of your business health and the value it carries.
Revenue churn.Different users have different impacts on a company’s revenue since their pricing plans vary in cost. Some customers pay more for your products, and others use free plans.Consequently, losing your paying customers, especially those who buy premium subscription plans,will harm your income. If you lose clients that use free plans, it will only influence the number of your potential paying customers.
It’s time to dive into the most successful SaaS examples to get inspired by famous companies.
Top 3 Successful SaaS Examples
To become successful, SaaS companies create various software solutions that simplify their clients’ lives. They develop programs for personal use and huge enterprises. We’ve prepared themost successful SaaS company examples to help you grab some inspiration, so let’s dive in.
Slack
Slack is a billion-dollar SaaS solution company. With more than 12 million users worldwide, the brand managed to get a $2.8 billion valuation. Its excellent visual design helps grab customers’ attention in a crowded market.
Businesses prefer Slack for its seamless user experience and great UX design. The company has a favorable position because the platform is intuitive and user-friendly.There are otherbenefits thatcontribute to Slack’s success: excellent team management features, 24/7 customer support, and access to other necessary apps. The platform’s convenience enables it to compete with industry giants.
Zoom
Zoom is a famous video conferencing platform with its registered annual meeting minutes amounting to 3.3 trillion. It took the company onlyfour years to become a platform used by millions of people all over the world. This SaaS company attained success and high profitability because of its focus on product development and a customer-centered approach. Zoom managed to prosper and grow fast because of the increaseddemand for group video calls during the pandemic.
People prefer the platformto others because of its competitive advantage: it doesn’t require participants to log in, and users can open it in a browser. The company provides an easy-to-use product and high-quality video and audio compared to others.
Adobe
Adobe is a software company with more than 12 million individual and team subscriptions. Founded in 1982, the company gained great success and popularity worldwide. The series of strategic business decisions and marketing efforts created a buzz around the brand and enabled it to prosper. The company excelled in the industry because of its ability to offer valuable use cases for different users and their projects and cater to digital workspaces.
The famous SaaS company has several competitive advantages that make it an industry leader. It’s worth mentioning the company’s software’s ubiquity, extensive customer base, and international recognition.
Congrats, now you know more about the features, metrics, advantages, and disadvantages of SaaS companies. Make use of your knowledge to create a great SaaS company or promote the existing one with ourbulk email service, web push notifications, andTelegram, WhatsApp, and Facebookchatbots.
Sales email
A sales email is an email that companies send to promote products and services and increase revenue. The efficiency of a sales email depends on the value ofthe offer, thelevel of subscribers' engagement with the brand, the quality of theemail template, andemail deliverability.
Though the essential idea of email marketing is to sell, it’s not only about selling. Today, companies make efforts to develop the right promotion mix that will sell, inspire, and care about your audience’s needs — all at once.
If you sell fresh vegetables, the value is obvious — healthy food with vitamins and minerals, but that’s not enough to convince your audience to buy from you. Share the history, the life, and experience of your brand; producerelevant and exciting content, naturally knitting in the sales element.
Watch this video from Amazing Seller to discover three steps of creating a sales email that solves customers' problems and increases your revenue.
How to Write a Sales Email [with best practices]
Create an engaging subject line
Show your offer first
Provide all useful details in the email body
Create a meaningfulcall-to-action
We've highlighted four fundamental steps ofcreatingsales emails that catch recipients’ attention, make it easy to digest information and turnsubscribers into customers. Keep on reading!
Create an engaging subject line
The subject line is the first element that users focus on when they decide whether to open your email or not. Intrigue subscribers with a subject line like “You will be surprised...” or “That is almost a gift!” to stand out from the crowd of other brands. Be clear about the value you are going to provide inside the email: “15% off. Jeans on sale today.” or “2 teesfor the price of 1."
Use a preheader text to support or continue the idea of the subject line: “Summer shoes. 20% off! — And a gift to the first ten buyers!” Summing up: create a subject line emotionally equal to the products or services you promote in your sales email.
To create eye-catching subject lines, check out subject line best practices here.
Show your offer first
Once the recipient opens the email, lay your cards on the table. Name the value once again — 25% off, bonuses, gifts, whatever — and use an appealing, high-quality image of the product that you aim to sell.
If you provide services like psychological consultation, for instance, use a design that creates positive emotions associated with professional problem-solving. Calm colors and images of self-confident people should make a good impression.
Follow email design best practicesand learn how to move users down the sales funnel with ease.
Provide all useful details in the email body
As you’ve warmed up the reader’s curiosity, give them more information about the product or service featured in the sales email. For instance, explain the technical characteristics of a mobile phone, add more images to show the camera, buttons, functionality in detail. In other words,say why owning that phone is worth spending time on reading your email.
In the email body, you can also propose some more goods related to the original offer.
Create a meaningfulcall-to-action
Create a CTA that will inspire subscribers to move forward and buy, like “Try on!” or “Grab your shoes.” However, a call-to-action button shouldn't necessarily lead to a product page on your website. To avoid that too persuasive “SHOP NOW” style, use a CTAlike “Learn more.” This is a wayto suggest reading some more engaging content, which will then lead to a product page. This approach helps to gain a better reputation in the eyes of your potential customers, since you provide them with more value than competitors, being less persuasive.
Sales Email Tips
Combine sales with helpful content
Personalize your sales emails
Care about your email deliverability
Use CTAs wisely
Combine email with other marketing channels
Combine sales with helpful content. There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for sales: it all depends on a business’ niche and the tastes of your target audience. Despite these differences, nobody likes to be bombarded with deals as they create that feeling of urgency, which cannot be satisfied. Sell more naturally — smoothly mix offers with the valuable content. Explain what's so special about the kitchenware you promote, give some hacks for inspiration, and only then suggest making a purchase.
Personalize your sales emails. Personalization is a powerful method of making more relevant offers based on data about a user. If you sell sports equipment, promote women sneakers to a female audience, or Chelsea merchandise precisely to the fans of this team. To make it work, create variables in your mailing list according to personal details like age, gender, location, preferences. Collect this data during the subscription or with the help of analytical tools like Google Analytics.
Care about your email deliverability. Open, click-through, and unsubscribe rates form thedeliverability of your emails. Reliable bulk email services like LIKE.TG ensure your sales emails will show up in front of your subscribers. Check all the necessary statisticsfor every email campaign you create, to know when and how toimprove your email marketing.
Use CTAs wisely. Focus subscribers’ attention on one specific product with a single call-to-action and make sure the link on that button leads to an accordant product page. In case you propose a variety of products, it’s a good idea to create multiple individual CTAs for every item. However, make sure there’s one dominant CTA right after the main offer and image, or at the bottom of the email. Here’s a helpful blog article that covers the CTA topic.
Combine email with other marketing channels. Sales email is a powerful tool for a creative marketer, but what if you multiply your chances of being recognized and appreciated? Mix email marketing with other channels like SMS, Messenger, social media, web push notifications, etc. to increase sales and build long-lasting relationships with your subscribers.
Sales Email Examples
Madewell. This sales email offers 40% off the summer clothes at the end of the season. Recipients are asked to use a promo code to get a discount.
HP. The brand offers to save up to $710 on laptops and other goods through Saturday. They send such emails every weekend to engage in shopping activity and create an image of generosity.
Chubbies. This sales email offers up to 60% off in the course of the summer clearance sale. The company uses a humorous manner to tell that every product on their website is on sale.
