Three Habits of the Successful Social Salesperson
For those of us on the road and occupied with a significant number of daily client activities, it is almost impossible to keep track of our key success indicators in real time. Here are three of the best practices that I managed to master throughout the years and have proven to be very effective.
1. Take the time to understand the true stage of the opportunity
Track your average sales cycle and the time you spent in each opportunity stage. Know the stages of your opportunities and their respective target close dates. Are they moving forward or slowing down. Is the time spent at any given stage increasing or decreasing? Use this knowledge to focus efforts and company resources to keep process on track. If the average sales cycle for new business is decreasing, either your sales and marketing efforts are becoming more effective and efficient and/or your marketplace is heating up. The sales professional that effectively tracks stages is the sales professional who will be able to adjust their activities before seeing that they have “hit a wall”.
Learn how SFVision tracks all the stages for your opportunities
2. Identify the players, influencers, detractors, and plan your sales approach
Every sales professional knows they need to understand the political “lay of the land”, and yes, this could be considered trivial for the sales professional educated on Target Account Selling methodology. You know the need to understand who the key players are before developing an action plan to execute. You may be drawing org charts in PowerPoint, but odds are you are not keeping track of this in your Salesforce CRM. Is it difficult to keep these annotations in places that help make sense, or are you just trusting your memory as the main repository of key influencers, dynamics and sentiments. You need a system to easily track all dynamics related to an account and have the information readily available.
Learn how SFVision helps you visualize in an Org view all key players in an account or opportunity
3. Know how to leverage company resources to quickly address objections
Communication is key. Enterprise social communication is becoming crucial to win supporters within your organization that can help you accelerate your sales cycle. The Salesforce environment Chatter, if utilize correctly, can be a great vehicle to use to communicate key knowledge in a team sale, or your progress to a win, and gain influence to your cause. Just make sure you establish the right way to fully leverage the power of Chatter and bring the right resources to your accounts and opportunities.
Learn how SFVision Chatter Everywhere helps you to fully leverage the power of Chatter.