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Outbound Sales: Renewal, Upsell, and Cross-Sell Discussions

Outbound Sales: Renewal, Upsell, and Cross-Sell Discussions

You’ve reached your first revenue milestone once a customer makes the initial purchase. But your sales opportunity doesn’t end here — it’s just beginning. While products sold are a great way to measure revenue, there’s so much more potential beyond this initial transaction. 

By putting in place cross-selling, upselling, and renewal processes, you’ll be able to improve customer lifetime value and grow your bottom line even more.

Let’s define each process first.

What is Cross-Selling?

What is Cross-Selling?

Cross-selling is a term that gets thrown around a lot in business, but do you know exactly what it means to cross-sell?

Cross-selling is the concept of encouraging a customer to purchase additional products in conjunction with the primary product. This is critical and very powerful in the subscription business model, where recurring revenue is the goal. 

What is Upselling?

What is Upselling?

Millions of dollars are wasted every year because of the inability of salespeople and other customer-facing staff to upsell effectively. A lack of precise questioning on the value of a product often leads to costly, low-quality purchases that never even get used.

Upselling is a strategy focused on encouraging these purchases through improved and enhanced products, but it can be challenging to pursue. Your first business sale was only part of the way towards financial growth; you must now do everything possible to ensure that customers will return for upgrades and add-ons. Here is where upselling comes into play.

But take note – The idea behind an effective upsell is to build rapport with clients and show your expertise so that they understand you’re suitable for their needs.

What is a Renewal?

What is a Renewal?

A renewal sale, or a repurchase conversation (“repurchase” only if it is the same product/service), occurs when a customer has a question, concern, or issue needing resolution. 

The challenge is that customers will likely not come directly to you with a renewal question unless they have some form of complaint, issue, or problem. A renewal discussion often occurs at the right time. There are five primary categories of renewals — based on the date when the existing contract expires –, and each can be handled differently based on the company policy and sales strategy.

For anything you sell (SaaS, recurring billing, etc.), renewal conversations constitute a significant component of any sales strategy. 

One Thing in Common

Salespeople are constantly using different strategies to find leads. This can be limiting, though, since new sales reps may not have the tools they need to find leads. Enter outbound marketing: one of the best tactics you can use to reach leads and generate new business. Using this method, you’ll be able to get prospects and stay on their radar intelligently.

The best salespeople always reach out to their leads and existing customers to stay connected and make sure they’re both happy with the deal they’ve struck. The more they build that relationship, the easier it’ll be to find that next opportunity together – an upgrade, an expansion of services, or a renewal.

Conclusion

Sales, like any other profession, is a game of numbers. Hopefully, you already have your sales machine in place and are starting to see sales trickle in for your product or service. The next step is to build a stronger team to handle these incoming sales and help you reach even higher numbers. Renewals, upsells, and cross-sells are highly effective at achieving this goal.

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How to Effectively Manage Objections in Sales Conversations

how to effectively manage objections in sales conversations

Almost every prospect you speak with has sales objections or reasons for not buying your product. If they didn’t have qualms about the price, value, applicability to their situation, or purchasing ability, they would have bought it already.

While dealing with objections is an inevitable aspect of the sales process, it may be a significant stumbling block for moving prospects through the pipeline. Accepting the complaints and sending a breakup email right away may be tempting. If you’re going to be successful, you’ll need to learn how to find and overcome these concerns.

What is a Sales Objection?

Any concern a prospect expresses about a barrier impeding their ability to buy from you is a sales objection — an unambiguous indication that you’ll need to handle more areas of the buying process than you thought.

According to Brett Trainor in an Expert Talk, customer objections are a sign that they don’t grasp your value or your ability to solve their problem. When customers raise objections to a purchase, it’s a sign that they’re interested in what you’re offering. They enquire, demand more information, and express their worries.

Instead of being afraid of sales objections, learn to see them as chances to move your sales process forward.

how to deal with sales objections

How to Deal with Sales Objections

While objections are one of the hardest and more unpleasant aspects of sales, they are not necessarily dead ends. Let’s look at how you can get around these potential stumbling blocks.

Taking care of objections 

Dealing with objections is an inevitable and frustrating part of the sales process. The process entails specific actions and skills that every salesperson should be familiar with. Situational awareness, gathering background knowledge, leading with empathy, and asking intelligent, open-ended questions are just a few.

assessing the situation

Being aware of the situation

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to managing objections that will address all of a prospect’s concerns. You’ll need a good sense of where you are in the sales cycle, the kind of the deal you’re chasing, and your prospect’s demands and interests, among other things.

Understanding the conditions that shape a prospect’s objections is critical to effectively addressing them. As a result, you must retain situational awareness as your talks with a prospect proceed.

Getting a lot of background information

This argument follows the previous one: comprehensive background information informs effective, actionable situational awareness. Investigate your prospect’s company and, to some extent, the prospect themselves.

What are the company’s current challenges? What problems do the prospect’s industry peers regularly have? If you’ve previously worked with similar-sized firms, try to recollect their concerns.

And, in the event of your contact, be aware of their responsibilities. What authority do they have to make decisions? Daily, what areas of the company’s operations do they deal with? What are the most common issues that someone in their job faces?

If you know all of this and more, you’ll be in an excellent position to answer objections gracefully.

sales leadership skills

Empathy in leadership 

Objections are a normal part of the sales process, and they often — if not always — reflect legitimate concerns. When your prospects push back a little, you must avoid being visibly upset and impatient with them.

Every great sales effort starts with empathy. You shouldn’t sell to a prospect solely to make money; you should sell to them because your product or service is the best fit for their problems. As a result, you must always keep their wants and interests in mind.

You may set yourself up to anticipate and effectively answer their objections if you stay on top of their problems and circumstances and approach them with compassion and understanding.

Posing open-ended, thoughtful questions 

Every other element on this list can be bolstered by the capacity to ask meaningful, open-ended questions. If you want to comprehend and effectively resolve the objections raised by your prospects, you need to go to the bottom of their problems.

Asking them meaningful, courteous questions and providing the opportunity to address them thoroughly is an excellent place to start. Avoid queries that can only be answered with a single word, “yes or no,” and don’t be afraid to use silence to your advantage.

There could be more underlying objections that the prospect hasn’t expressed or has merely hinted at. Before you can react successfully, you’ll need to ask open-ended questions to assist you in uncovering all of the objections.

Allow your customers to express themselves. Determine their issues – and put yourself in a position to anticipate their objections.

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11 Ways on How to Show Appreciation to Your Sales Team

Show Appreciation to Your Sales Team

While most salespeople are self-motivated, it is nevertheless crucial to recognize their efforts. Proper appreciation is frequently what motivates your sales force to go far beyond. Apart from that, it’s just a lovely thing to do. It also contributes to the creation of a pleasant work atmosphere.

Different Ways to Motivate and Appreciate Your Sellers

Here are some excellent methods to thank or inspire your sales crew.

Give your sellers the necessary tools to succeed.

Sales professionals are frequently looking for tools to help them thrive independently. This can eat up critical sales time and resources. Providing sales teams with tools to help them succeed in sales, such as acquiring sales leads, is a beautiful method to inspire them.

Ways to Motivate and Appreciate Your Sellers

Encourage a level playing field.

What if the same member of the sales team continues receiving the rewards? This is a possibility, particularly with smaller businesses. It’s a good idea to establish a tiered reward system that supports varied skill levels to avoid any concerns. Junior sellers, for example, maybe in one subgroup and senior execs in another.

Congratulate your sales team for making successful sales.

Certainly, applaud your sales representatives on successful sales. It may be a long process with many peaks and troughs. Take the time to praise them on all sales, particularly tiny ones. While most of your B2B company’s revenue will most likely come from a few significant clients, modest transactions have worth and relevance. Small sales are a natural source of incentive. A seller will be motivated if they make a little transaction. They will feel appreciated and even driven to do it again if you congratulate them on short sales.

Ways to Motivate and Appreciate Your Sellers

Lunch on the house.

Who doesn’t enjoy getting free food? Food is always appreciated, whether you take your team out to lunch or order delivery. Snacks or sweets can be substituted for a complete meal if you don’t want to eat a full meal. If your company is now utilizing a remote setup owing to the epidemic, you might occasionally send free meals or even delightful sweets to your team members on their birthdays.

Organize an event for your team.

An event is a pleasant way to recognize your team’s accomplishments when they’ve been working very hard for you. It’s also a fantastic approach to foster teamwork. You may have a party at your workplace, a neighborhood restaurant, your house, or a rented venue.

Provide a flexible work schedule.

Don’t impose a rigorous timetable on your sellers as a sales rep. Instead, offer them the option of choosing their hours. Offering workers a flexible work schedule will drive them to achieve. They will value your confidence in them as their sales rep and go to great lengths to guarantee their success.

Allow for more vacation time.

While most businesses are unable to do so regularly, consider if you can offer members of your staff an additional day-off on occasion. Allow them to leave early on Fridays. Aside from feeling valued, an unexpected break is a great way to refresh and return to work feeling energized.

Motivate them with inspirational quotes.

Consider hanging banners or pictures with motivating slogans in the workplace of your B2B business. You don’t have to put them up on every single wall. Instead, post encouraging quotations in common areas of your office, such as the breakroom or meeting room. When your sales staff see these quotes, they’ll know you’re coming from a good place. This will assist them in remaining optimistic and maintaining a positive attitude in both good and bad situations.

Ways to Motivate and Appreciate Your Sellers

Incentivize.

Incentives are designed to encourage your team to achieve their objectives, including completing transactions and meeting sales targets. An incentive program may significantly improve their sales performance and bottom line, whether the incentive is cash, an expensive item, or a weekend trip.

Request feedback from your team.

Get feedback from your sellers to acquire insight into any issues or obstacles they face. A sales rep’s motivation may be harmed if they have met a difficulty they don’t disclose. You may fix and avoid problems by asking your sellers for input constantly, resulting in a highly driven sales force.

Show leadership.

Being a leader is perhaps the most crucial strategy for motivating your sales team. Sales staff can’t expect to succeed on their own. Instead, you must provide an example for others to follow for them to succeed. Put another way, demonstrate to your sales team what you demand of them by completing the same responsibilities.

It’s vital to have faith in yourself and your ability, too.  As the leader, your job is to hire, develop, teach, assist, and inspire sellers to perform better than you did in sales. Surround yourself with clever, driven sales reps if you want to be a great boss.

Conclusion

Boosting motivation and revenue is only the beginning. Successful motivational or appreciation programs may boost employee retention and recruit top talent. After all, they’re the ones in the trenches, answering phones, responding to internet inquiries, converting leads to sales, and assisting your business in achieving its goals. Showing your sales team some love and gratitude daily may go a long way toward keeping them motivated and on track to accomplish their sales goals.

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‘Try It And Believe In It’: Getting Over The Fear Of Starting A New Sales Strategy

Continue reading “‘Try It And Believe In It’: Getting Over The Fear Of Starting A New Sales Strategy”