Selling products or services isn't a new concept, but the way we sell these products or services to prospective customers, or sales strategy, is always changing in modern times. Sales strategies that used to work don't always work or are applicable in today's landscape.
As a business owner, if you see that your sales aren't where you want them to be or have declined, switching up your sales strategy and adding innovative ideas can be what you need to get back on track. Innovative sales techniques aren't always something that no one has ever thought of. At the root of innovation is the concept of progress.
Whatever techniques you're using, you can use innovative ideas to help progress those sales strategies forward. The world is ever-changing, so using innovation within your sales strategy can help your business stay relevant.
Perform Competitive Research to Redefine Sales Strategy
Before you begin reworking your sales strategy for next year, you need to have a solid understanding of your innovation landscape. The innovation landscape is where you stand compared to your competitors, industry trends, and how your customers see your business.
Doing competitor research is vital to being able to stand out amongst them. Look at the sales strategies they're implementing. What kind of tech stack are they leveraging? Do their sales strategies seem to work? Where could you improve upon them?
In addition to competitor research, ensuring your business is up to date on all industry trends can help you better implement innovation into your sales strategy. You'll want to rely on your customers a lot to understand your landscape.
Customers provide vital information about how well your business is doing. You'll want to run an analysis to better understand your sales strategy strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities for growth. Performing the SWOT analysis is a great way to do this.
Setting Goals For Your Innovative Sales Strategy
No sales strategy will work like it should without clear and defined goals. The main questions you need to answer during goal setting are what you're trying to achieve with innovative strategies and how they align with your company's overall goal and mission.
When setting business goals, making them measurable, relevant, and achievable will help set you up for success. Implementing innovative strategies just to do so won't be as beneficial as using them with set goals and objectives you're trying to reach.
You can use tools like OKR, SMART, or a scorecard to help you outline your innovation goals. The goals you set can be about several factors in your business. Whether you're looking to increase your financial earnings, customer satisfaction, or something else, clearly outlined goals are vital before adjusting your sales strategy.
Ways to Add Innovation to Your 2023/2024 Sales Strategy
Many of the innovative strategies out there are things you might already be doing. Innovation doesn't mean a brand new idea every time, but finding ways to improve on strategies you're already using.
Whether you're eager to change up your sales strategy or improve on one that you're already using, these are the best ways to add innovation to your 2023/2024 sales strategy.
Utilize Social Media as a Part of Your Sales Strategy
Social media is one of the most prominent innovative sales channels of the century; yet it is often underutilized by modern organizations. There are over four billion people using social media worldwide, and almost 50% of people buy a product or service thanks to a targeted ad they saw on a social media platform.
Cold calling and other forms of traditional outreach average at around a 2% effectiveness rate while social media outreach can be significantly higher. There are several social media channels that your sales team can utilize to help sell products and services to potential customers. In addition to reaching a new customer base, the sales team can use social media to retain customers and build relationships with them.
Even if your business has social media accounts, having someone who can remain active on them regularly is how to make this sales strategy work for you. From regularly posting about products and services, interacting with customers and potential customers, and offering special promotions, social media can be invaluable.
Social media is great for taking leads and translating them into sales. Customers who can see a company actively responding, posting, and engaging with other people will trust you more and convert to sales.
Channels that could work for your business include LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and others. The best thing to do is explore social selling and content creation or get an expert partner like Salesbox to help you with creating an effective sales strategy.
Use Customer-Centric Techniques
Your business would be nothing without customers, so utilizing customer-centric techniques in your sales strategy is a great way to ensure you are reaching business and sales goals. Customer-centric techniques are all about having a deep understanding of your customers and potential customers.
While you've already discovered the pain points, needs, and goals of your customers so you can market and sell to them, things change over time. Reevaluating everything you think you know about your customers is an innovative way to revamp your sales strategy.
Gaining insights about your customers can be done through a variety of channels. Data analytics is a great start, but being able to conduct interviews and surveys is the best way to get a deeper understanding of what your customers are satisfied and unsatisfied with.
Once you have this information, you can reevaluate the user experience and tailor your sales strategy to address the main pain point that they're experiencing. When you take this customer-centric approach and solve the customer problem at hand, you'll likely see an increase in sales and customer retention.
Focus on Customer Retention
Customer retention is essential for any business. Repeat business shows that you're doing something right and that your customers value your business. There are several ways that you can focus on customer retention.
Many of the techniques here can assist you and your sales team with customer retention. When you have a better understanding of your customers, engage with them on social media platforms, and use unique selling propositions, you are more likely to see repeat business.
Some other sales strategies you can use to help with customer retention include offering a customer loyalty program, offering specific discounts for purchasing or using a product within a specified time, or anything similar that will entice the customer to return.
While you can offer discounts and loyalty programs all you want, the root of customer retention is relationship-building with your customers and potential customers.
Focus on Your Unique Selling Propositions (USPs)
Unique selling propositions or unique selling points (USPs) are how you'll differentiate your product or service from your competitors. Depending on the product or service you're selling, you might have a lot of competitors, so what makes yours stand out among the rest?
Even if you have a lot of competitors with similar products to yours on the market, there is at least one thing that makes yours better. You want to think about the essence of your product or service and focus on that.
Whatever your USPs are, you'll want to ensure that you're focusing on that when marketing to customers and potential customers. Some examples of unique selling propositions are the quality of materials you use to create the product, the price you offer compared to your competitors, and your customer service.
You might offer discounts for bulk orders, loyalty discounts, easy returns, or anything that falls into the above categories. Ensuring that you're putting emphasis on your USPs will help you create a more innovative sales strategy.
Consider Rebranding
Rebranding can be a costly venture but sometimes a necessary one, especially if your conversion rates are relatively low. Rebranding can be a small or large-scale process. You might need to adjust your marketing language to better suit your product or service or completely change the color scheme, name, and marketing materials.
This innovation isn't necessary for every business, but it can be beneficial when your sales team isn't seeing success in marketing and converting leads to sales with your current one. With a smart rebranding strategy, you can better stand out among your competitors and, therefore, see an increase in sales.
You might need to consider rebranding if you don't have a strong enough brand story that resonates with your potential customer pool.
Taking into consideration your mission and values in addition to the problem you're trying to solve for the customer with your product or service can help you with a successful rebrand.
Utilize Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
You might believe you know how well or poorly your business is doing, but unless you're using key performance indicators (KPIs), you might not actually know. KPIs are excellent tools that will put the success of your organization into measurable numbers.
When you can see the data, you can assess where your strengths and weaknesses are within your sales strategy and then improve on it. For example, if your KPIs show that customer satisfaction is lowered due to slow shipping times, you can offer discounted or free expedited shipping to increase customer satisfaction and sales.
KPIs are one of the best tools to build a successful sales strategy. There are a lot of platforms and tools available that can help you run KPIs for your business.
A few that are worth looking into are Geckoboard, Asana, and Grow. Regardless of how you want to use KPIs and the platform you choose, you need to make sure they're measuring the data that will benefit your business the most.
Design Educational Content
Offering your customers and potential customers educational content about your product or service is another innovation to add to your sales strategy. Your product or service might be easy to understand to you or to many customers, but not everyone.
Ensuring that you have enough educational content on your website and social media accounts can make customers feel more confident when they purchase them. When they know how to use the product without needing to call customer service, your business can see an increase in sales.
Educational content can be used to encourage customers to buy the product, too, not just for how to use it once they purchase it. You can use content like this to help customers make informed decisions regarding your product or service.
When you offer educational content, it puts your sales team in the prime position for customers and potential customers to trust you and your company. People buy products and services from people they trust.
Focus on the Customer Experience
Understanding your customer's pain points and their experience with the product or service are intertwined but different. Focusing on the customer experience is for customers who've already purchased and used your product or service.
Taking surveys and collecting data about how they feel when they use the product or service allows you to make more informed sales decisions.
If you see a weakness in the customer experience, reworking your sales strategy to solve this issue can be a huge innovation that you need.
Work With a Qualified, Outside Sales Team
Internal sales teams are typical for many businesses, but sometimes, utilizing help from professional sales teams can be the best thing you've done for your business.
External sales teams like Salesbox are dedicated to understanding your sales and business goals and work tirelessly to ensure that they come up with and implement a sales strategy to match.
An outside sales team's only goal is to help with sales of your products or services. This means you and the rest of your employees can focus on other parts of the business while you have a dedicated team to handle everything surrounding selling and marketing your products or services.
When you work with a qualified outside sales team, you'll be able to work with individuals who know about innovation strategies and how to develop personalized sales strategies that work.
Conclusion
Utilizing innovation in your sales strategy is the best way to reach your business and sales goals. From building upon strategies that you've already implemented to trying new techniques altogether, sales innovation is the way to take your business to the next level.
Putting a focus on your customers, utilizing social media, and offering educational content for your customers is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to innovative methods you can add to your sales strategy. If you're ready to reach your business and sales goals, adding innovation is the best way to do it for your 2023/2024 sales strategy.
Salesbox can help you innovate your 2024 sales strategy and execute it as well, in conjunction with your own sales team or as your very own dedicated team. Contact Salesbox today to learn more about our sales strategy, planning, innovation and campaign services for B2B firms.
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