There’s something every entrepreneur is eager to discover: how to drive revenue growth. In today’s challenging business landscape, where finding top talent is a struggle, in-person traffic from new clients is down, marketing budgets are shrinking, and cost pressures are relentless, the pursuit of growth seems like an uphill battle.
In simplified terms, the answer lies in upselling existing opportunities and attracting new customers or, ideally, a combination of both.
Keys to driving sales team revenue growth
- Know what your customers want and then go much further
Start with this: make your customers feel welcome; show genuine enthusiasm for your work; be attentive; exhibit empathy, care, and enthusiasm; possess expert knowledge; and make them feel great. Remember, it’s about them, not you.
But here’s the challenge: giving customers a voice to tell you the truth about what they really need. You need a daily measure of how your team accomplishes this from your customer’s perspective.
When asking customers about their experience, separate “service” behaviors from “sales” behaviors. Identify how your teams apply their product knowledge and recommendation solutions to solve problems.
The best team members are patient in understanding needs, seem to anticipate everything customers might need, and always recommend the complete solution. They explain the “why” and have the client’s best interests at heart. You should invite customers to tell you what happened in their own words and not in a tick-and-flick survey. It frustrates clients when they can’t tell you in their own words what happened, why they felt that way, and what happened next.
- Never take shortcuts in the demo step of the sale
While there are industry-specific factors, high performers are adept at the demonstration stage. Data reveals that customer expectations are high regarding wanting to receive a complete and comprehensive demonstration of your product or service. Team members who assume customers “already know, so I won’t bother” are losing sales. Customers do their research well: they want their problems and needs to be understood and for you to build trust and rapport, but they expect to be shown the complete solution.
Review the training provided so that this step is never compromised. Team members need skills to do this with different types of customers (for example, short on time or with short attention spans). Ensure they know how to add value and explain to customers the value of choosing your company over your competitors. Go beyond the features/benefits of the training. Customers should feel like they are dealing with an expert.
- Focus on any problems through customer feedback
If you present people with a list of 10 things to focus on, most will struggle to excel at any of them. The starting point is to identify the number one priority for each person. Here’s something you can do: Invite customers to provide feedback about their experience with the specific team member. From those results, it identifies behavioral patterns and provides in-the-moment skills training. Suppose a team member serves 10 clients but skips a subtle but crucial part of the process (for example, takes shortcuts in the demo stage). In that case, team-based reporting wastes time at the end of the week or month. Time. The secret is to have a “laser focus” on what happened, eliminate wasted effort, and start focusing on one thing per person per quarter.
As team members become better focused, they realize they can accomplish more with less effort. It’s about developing new habits to improve customer experiences.
- Focus on commitment
We often see sales employees rewarded for their CX scores but clearly lacking engagement with the frontline team members responsible for delivering customer experiences. Customers don’t care about ratings either. They want to be heard and get great experiences that they can share on social media.
Here are some suggestions: When you attend meetings, notice the first thing discussed. Being operational, sales figures, customer complaints, etc.? Great teams go directly to a customer’s recent success story. They amplify the behaviors we want to see more of and hold people accountable for action plans to address performance gaps.
You should reinforce these points: What are you working on to improve? What barriers do you need to overcome? What skill gaps do you have? Who can help you? Now, review your plan.
Also Read: Difference Between B2B Marketing and B2C Marketing
