MarketStar Blog

Do you think of sales as a sprint or as a marathon? For today’s successful business, you have to be a marathon runner. The sales model has evolved from the old-fashioned quick close to a more substantive, solution-based strategy. Today’s successful sales model is committed to ongoing customer success, so closing the deal is just step one.

Every successful business is focused on promoting customer satisfaction and optimizing customer experience. Every organization that offers a product or service needs to offer training and customer support. However, too many fall short of supporting customer success.

When you consider ways to develop a winning sales strategy, how often do you think about sales psychology as part of the plan? Getting prospects to make a buying decision is more than just offering them a better deal or even offering the perfect solution to their problem. You have to build trust and establish the right emotional connection in order to get to “yes!” That’s why more sales professionals are paying closer attention to the psychology of selling.

 
Happy customers are your best salespeople. In any SMB sales initiative, part of your mission is to build customer loyalty, not only so those customers will come back to buy more but so they will also serve as brand evangelists. If you can build customer trust and engender loyalty, then that customer will advocate for you. What’s more, keeping happy customers is one-fifth the cost of acquiring new ones.

In any business the customer comes first, which is why companies invest in customer relationship management (CRM) software. CRM platforms make it easier to take better care of customers and prospects, capturing everything you need to know about the status of any engagement and providing the insight you need to help keep the sales pipeline full. In fact, 91 percent of companies with 11 employees or more are using some form of CRM software, and as a result, revenues for CRM software sales have risen to $39.5 billion worldwide in 2017.

Technology can give companies a competitive edge. For example, consider how the web has changed the way we do business. Companies offering online services are outpacing their competitors, and those companies developing their own smartphone apps gain a different technology advantage as the world is going mobile. Technology working behind the scenes is just as important as customer-facing applications, which is why embracing sales automation should be a priority for any organization.

The poet John Donne famously wrote, “No man is an island.” Donne was talking about the human condition, but he could have been talking about sales and marketing. No organization can successfully deliver goods and services in isolation; every business requires strategic partners with whom it works as a team to close new sales and handle customer fulfillment. That’s why “the channel” was created and why effective channel management has to be a strategic aspect of any successful organization.

The primary goal of every sales executive is to maximize sales productivity. It takes time to research new prospects, make cold calls, and do sales prospecting. In today’s business climate, more leads are coming in through the internet, which means sales representatives also need to react to sales queries—whether they’re qualified or not.

Whether you’re ready to go to market or looking to extend your current capabilities, adding partner resellers can shorten and improve the process. Partners offer low upfront costs and bring established customer relationships to your organization.

By now, you’re all very much aware of channel partner marketing and its many benefits. We’ve covered it extensively on our blog. From little-known secrets that can boost sales productivity to partner management best practices that will revamp relationships, our in-depth articles cover the spectrum of this highly-skilled sales and marketing processes. While it’s certainly helpful to read detailed examinations of specific topics, sometimes, it’s the little things that count.