A desirable compensation plan not only attracts new high performers but also maximizes the efforts of your current sales representatives. To drive higher sales, bigger deals, and employee retention, follow these four tips.
Focus on Fairness
When your reps feel that your expectations are motivating rather than defeating and your goals are achievable with just enough challenge woven in — they’ll be incentivized to grow.
Keep it Clear
Quality compensation planning is simple, consistent, and creates momentum towards company goals. Avoid complexity and don’t make changes too often — complexity only leads to confusion, not closing.
Give Ample Bonus Opportunities
Sales representatives are often money-motivated individuals who appreciate keeping things interesting. Bonus opportunities should be tied directly to sales behavior and results that your representatives can control so their path to success is straightforward.
Lock In Your Base and Liberate Commissions
70% of top-performing salespeople are more satisfied with compensation packages that emphasize base pay. That said, they also want to increase their earnings without limits. In your compensation planning, consider both to give your sales reps security with your company while keeping them hungry for the next sale.
Attract your next hire with a strategic commission plan — and our help. Contact us today.
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Top sales leaders know there’s a difference between achieving one sales win and winning sales over time. The first can be a matter of making enough offers and, by chance, closing a deal. The second is always a matter of strategy, commitment to a winning sales process, and investing in continual improvement.
The twelve steps to winning sales you’ll find in this blog are a repeatable process we have gathered and refined from our work with thousands of companies.
Whether you’re a seasoned sales pro looking to up your game or a budding salesperson eager to master the art of persuasion, this roadmap is for you.
12 Steps to Winning Sales
Step 1: Set and Monitor Goals In Your Sales Pipeline
Tracking your sales conversion rate alone won’t motivate you to build a winning sales record. Before you start selling, set clear and tangible goals for yourself at various stages in your sales pipeline. Set goals and track metrics like how many calls you make daily, how many demos you give per week, and how many contracts you propose monthly.
The easier it is to see that you’re making progress, the more likely you will feel inspired to continue.
Step 2: Know Your Competitors
Equip yourself with thorough industry knowledge to maintain a competitive edge. Go beyond knowing that your competitors sell a similar product and learn how they are marketing, what selling techniques they use, how accessible their sales team is, and how they deliver their services.
Observing your competitors can help you create a pool of potential leads and inspire you to fill in the gaps in your competitors’ offerings.
Step 3: Set and Monitor Goals In Your Sales Pipeline
Tracking your sales conversion rate alone won’t motivate you to build a winning sales record. Before you start selling, set clear and tangible goals for yourself at various stages in your sales pipeline. Set goals and track metrics like how many calls you make daily, how many demos you give per week, and how many contracts you propose monthly.
The easier it is to see that you’re making progress, the more likely you will feel inspired to continue.
Step 4: Study The Solution You’re Selling
Intimate knowledge of the solution you’re selling, whether it is a product or service, can become your sales superpower. Study your product extensively so that you can answer any question a prospect may have.
A few key things to study about your solution are:
The core benefits it provides to your prospects. To avoid over-selling your company or the solution features, stay focused on the results your customers can get by using your product or service.
How it compares to competitors’ solutions. Your solution likely has advantages and disadvantages. Know how to position your strengths to outweigh your weaknesses and make your solution the better choice.
The flaws of your solution. Ignoring the flaws of your solution is a mistake. Inevitably, a prospect will point them out or ask about them. Be prepared to offer clear and compelling information about your flaws. Consider how you can positively frame them while remaining honest about your solution’s limitations.
The features of your solution. This is crucial for demos and deeper product discussions with prospects. Keep in mind that you don’t want to lead with features, though. Prospects will be more impressed with what your offer can do for them than what your offer is.
Step 5: Show You Care About Your Customer
When you pay attention to your prospect, you can understand them better and build a strong customer relationship. Ask questions, get to know your prospect’s needs, and don’t interrupt them when they’re speaking. Seek clarity and always affirm what your prospect is sharing with you. Pay attention to cues that signal discomfort in the process, as you never want your prospect to feel pressured into sharing with you.
Aim to make your prospect feel heard by deeply listening and reflecting back to them the problem they are trying to solve until you understand their needs and challenges better than they do. Remember to focus on what makes each customer unique; don’t feed them a generic script.
Step 6: Be Prepared to Overcome Common Objections and Obstacles
Overcoming objections should never be about forcing customers into a purchase they don’t want to make. Instead, overcoming objections should be an extension of step 5 in our winning sales process — caring about your customers.
Most objections you’ll encounter in your sales cycle are questions disguised as negative statements about your product, excuses that put off decision-making, or reasons the prospect can’t buy at all or buy right now. As long as you’ve determined that the prospect is a qualified fit for your product or service, skillfully answering these objections should result in increased trust and, of course, a closed sale.
Take time to think through the objections you commonly hear and build a stockpile of proven responses to sell more efficiently.
Step 7: Keep Your Promises for Long-Term Sales Success
A common mistake of inexperienced salespeople is making promises to close a sale but then being unable to follow through. While this can create a sales win in the moment, it won’t lead to winning sales over time. Broken promises erode customer confidence and lead to a damaged brand reputation.
The best strategy for keeping promises is to underpromise so you can easily over-deliver. For instance, if you promise a customer five-day delivery but deliver in two days, they’ll be pleasantly surprised and delighted. If delivery takes five days, they’ll still be perfectly happy with your service because you’ve set and met their expectations.
Know your limits and work within them.
Step 8: Ask For Referrals
Even with heaps of technology, cutting-edge marketing strategies, and the best cold calls you can possibly imagine — nothing creates sales wins like a referral. Prospects will be much more engaged in the sales process if they come to you through a recommendation made by a trusted contact in their network.
For this reason, it is imperative that you ask for referrals after every positive sales interaction. Positive sales interactions may or may not end in sale, but they all end in a favorable relationship being established between the salesperson and the prospect. Referrals might come from within another division of a prospect’s company or from their external network, and it can be helpful to remind your prospect of these various referral sources when you ask for them.
Step 9: Ask For Feedback on Your Sales Performance
At the end of each sale, have prepared questions you can ask your customers to evoke feedback. People respond best to direct questions rooted in curiosity — i.e., when there’s no ‘right’ answer or adverse consequences to their response. Depending on the client and your current goals, you could ask about your initial outreach, demo, or final sales proposal. Gathering honest feedback is one of the best ways to refine your understanding of your target market, product, and sales strengths.
Positive feedback will reinforce your sales skills, while negative feedback will shed light on where you can improve — any good sales representative welcomes both.
Step 10: Improve Your Next Sale
Richard Branson said, “Failure is only the end if you decide to stop.” This is certainly true in sales. Review each sale — whether it was a win or a loss. Notice where in the sales process you could have been more prepared, proactive, and present with your prospect.
Check back in with the goals you set for yourself in step three. Which goals were you able to achieve? Which goals were challenging to meet?
As you collect data from each sale, make notes on your goals so you can adjust them to represent realistic achievements that challenge you enough to keep you motivated yet aren’t so out of reach that every sale feels like a failure. Take what you’ve learned and apply it to your next sale.
Step 11: Know Your Customer Before Making Contact
Your ideal customer will usually have a social presence. Spend some time getting to know their online profile before making a call or sending an outreach email. Knowing your prospect beyond their name and title will allow you to have more personalized engagements.
Step 12: Expand Your Sales Network
Having a large network of sales professionals can help you win more sales and create meaningful relationships. Having a large network increases your exposure to the market. Whether you’re looking for prospects or to connect with expertise on a certain topic, individuals in your sales network will be able to help.
Having the right sales representatives on your team ensures that your company and customers get the dedication they deserve. We’re here to help you on your journey toward sales success so you can win more sales with top industry talent. Contact us today to discuss your hiring needs.
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In recent years, employee engagement has dropped for the first time in a decade. In 2020, 36% of workers were engaged at work; that number fell to 34% in 2021 and 32% in 2022, according to a Gallup Poll. This means workers, especially women and young people, feel less enthusiastic about their jobs and less purposeful about their work lives.
Considering the mass layoffs, hiring freezes and remote-work battles of the past two years, it is no surprise that employees are feeling the pinch at work. Not to mention, that as of October, there have been 335 strikes and labor protests this year – most notably the United Auto Workers strike – up from 209 during the same period in 2021.
With so much dust yet to settle as the economy rebounds from the pandemic, business leaders have an opportunity to gain an advantage over their competitors by adapting to modern worker needs to hire the best people. At the same time, workers still have an opportunity to seek higher wages, more purpose, and a better work life balance.
To determine the best and worst states for workers, Peak Sales Recruiting analyzed the most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Census Bureau, the Tax Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
We factored in eight metrics, including job and GDP growth, union representation, weekly hours worked, commute times, remote work, and earnings ratio, which measures the living wage needed to support a family against the median wage.
Key Findings:
Oregon Is the Best State for Workers: Driven by its strong union representation (16.9%), short work week (an average of 37.8 hours) and solid growth rates for jobs (2.2%) and GDP (3.8%).
Top States Are Spread Across the U.S.: No geographical region dominates the top 10 states for workers. Three are in the Northwest (Oregon, Washington and Montana), while three are on the East Coast (New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Delaware) and four are Midwestern (North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Minnesota).
Poorly Ranked States Still Shine in Some Categories: No. 40 Texas, for example, has a job growth rate of 3.2%, stronger than any state except No. 18 Nevada. And in No. 33 New York, 22.1% of workers are represented by a union, the second-highest rate after No. 20 Hawaii.
Fastest Growing Jobs by 2032: Wind turbine technicians and nurse practitioners are tied for No. 1 with both projecting a 45% increase. Five of the top 10 are in healthcare.
Best states
Oregon landed as the best state for workers because it has one of the country’s shortest work weeks (37.8 hours on average), plus a high rate of union representation (16.9%). The Beaver State also has steady job and GDP growth (2.2% and 3.8%, respectively).
Meanwhile, runner-up New Hampshire has no sales tax and an earnings ratio of 1.85, the second-highest rate in the U.S. after the District of Columbia. That means the median income (converted to an hourly wage) for a family of four is $71 – 1.85 times greater than $38.34, which is the hourly living wage needed to support a family of four with one earner.
No. 3 Massachusetts also scored particularly well with an earnings ratio of 1.71, while No. 4 Montana has an average commute time of only 19 minutes and and No. 5 Delaware has no state or local sales tax and steady job growth (2.5%). No. 6 Washington was buoyed by its high rate of remote workers (20.5%), behind only the District of Columbia and Colorado, as well as strong union representation (19.1%), trailing Hawaii and New York.
Rounding out the top 10 are North Dakota, Nebraska and South Dakota, which have some of the shortest commutes and the highest GDP growth rates in the country. In fact, No. 8 North Dakota’s 12.4% GDP growth is more than double the rate of No. 4 Montana, which saw 6% growth. Yet Montana beat out the Dakotas and Nebraska overall due to its stronger union representation, higher share of remote workers and lower taxes.
Worst states
While the best states for workers aren’t geographically concentrated, the worst states are located mainly in the South. Mississippi ranked last, followed by No. 50 Arkansas, No. 49 Alabama and No. 48 Louisiana. Mississippi has the U.S.’s second-lowest job growth rate, at 0.5% (after Rhode Island, which lost jobs at a rate of 0.7%), and people there work an average of 39.7 hours per week, on par with Arkansas and Louisiana for some of the longest weeks in the country.
Louisiana, Arkansas and No. 44 Tennessee also have the highest state and local taxes, while workers in No. 43 Georgia have longer commutes, at 28.2 minutes on average. The worst-ranked states also tend to have poor GDP growth – for example, 0.1% in Alabama and 0.2% in No. 45 West Virginia – as well as lower rates of union representation. In No. 46 South Carolina and No. 41 North Carolina, a respective 2% and 3.9% of workers are covered by unions, the lowest rates in the U.S.
Notably, some of the worst-ranked states have bright points, as well. In No. 48 Louisiana, jobs have grown at a rate of 2.4%, for example, while workers in No. 50 Arkansas and No. 47 Oklahoma have commutes of under 23 minutes, better than in most other states.
By the Metrics
Job Growth
A higher job growth rate suggests that a state has better employment prospects for both unemployed people and workers looking to make a change. At the state level, Nevada ranks No. 1 with 3.4% job growth, followed by Texas and Idaho. Rhode Island ranks last, with a 0.7% decline over the past year.
GDP Growth
GDP growth offers insight into the broader economic conditions in a state, which have implications for the labor market and work conditions. North Dakota ranks No. 1 with 12.4% GDP growth, followed by Nevada and South Dakota. Rhode Island ranks last, with 0.1% GDP growth between the last quarter of 2022 and first quarter of 2023.
Union Representation
While the impact of unions depends on their strength and state labor laws, good union representation can make a big difference for workers in the form of higher wages, better conditions and more job security. Hawaii ranks No. 1 with 23.4% of workers represented by a union, followed by New York and Washington. South Carolina ranks last, with just 2% of workers represented by a union in 2022.
Work Weeks
Having a shorter work week can improve work-life balance and well-being for workers, while a longer week can lead to more stress and less free time. Utah ranks No. 1 with an average work week of 37.1 hours, followed by Vermont and Rhode Island. Alaska ranks last, with workers putting in an average of 42.2 hours per week.
Commute Time
Similarly, shorter commutes mean people spend less time traveling to and from work and can reclaim more of their days. Wyoming ranks No. 1 with an average commute of just 18 minutes, followed by South Dakota and North Dakota. New York ranks last, with an average commute of 33 minutes in 2022.
Remote Work
A greater share of remote workers in a state means that more employees have flexibility in their work arrangements, which can enhance job satisfaction. A lower share may mean that fewer jobs can be done remotely, or that they have a traditional office-based work structure. The District of Columbia ranks No. 1 with 33.8% of employees working from home, followed by Colorado and Washington. Mississippi ranks last, with 5.5% of workers being remote in 2022.
State and Local Taxes
Workers in states with lower tax rates may have more disposable income and the ability to improve their standard of living, though the impact depends on the overall tax structure and their financial position. There’s a four-way tie for first place, given Montana, Delaware, New Hampshire and Oregon all don’t have state or local sales taxes. Louisiana and Tennessee rank last, with state and average local taxes adding up to 9.6% in 2023.
Earnings Ratio
The earnings ratio tracks the median wage against the living wage for a family of four, offering insight into the affordability of a state. Workers in states with higher earnings ratios may have more disposable income. The District of Columbia is No. 1 with an earnings ratio of 1.9, meaning the median wage for a family of four ($83.62) is nearly double the living wage for a family of four with one earner ($43.94). New Hampshire and New Jersey were the runners-up. New Mexico ranks last, with an earnings ratio of 1.02 (median hourly wage of $38.60, and living wage of $37.82).
10 Fastest Growing Jobs in America
Another factor for workers to consider is which types of jobs are likely to increase in the years to come. This gives them an opportunity to position themselves for the jobs of the future. Due to a combination of various macroeconomic factors such as technology and an aging population means that the jobs of tomorrow may look different than the most common jobs over the past several decades.
According to BLS, by 2032, wind turbine technicians and nurse practitioners are tied for No. 1, both projected to see jobs increase by 45%. Five of the 10 fastest growing jobs will be in healthcare, while jobs related to data and software are also well represented.
Recruiting Tips
It can be difficult for companies to identify the right candidate for a job, and for job-seekers to decide if a workplace is a fit. These tips can help create a more successful and rewarding recruitment process for employers and workers alike.
3 tips for workers to get hired
Be prepared. Tailor your resume and cover letter for each job you apply to, highlighting your most relevant skills and experience. Make sure to research the company and role before an interview, and come prepared with examples of how you’ve succeeded in past roles.
Network. Attend events to meet other people in your industry, build a strong LinkedIn profile and consider creating a portfolio or personal website, depending on your field. This can help give potential employers a sense of your skills and previous work. Visit the Peak Sales Recruiting website to join our network.
Keep learning. Invest in your professional development by getting new certifications and joining trainings that help keep you up-to-date in your industry. In interviews, emphasize skills like communication and adaptability to show employers that you will fit well in their company culture.
3 tips for employers to hire the best workers:
Be efficient in the hiring process: Communicate clearly with candidates during each stage of recruitment, set expectations about the process and aim for a reasonable timeline. Peak’s recruitment process is focused on fulfilling your hiring needs in a timely manner. Visit our website to start your recruitment process.
Invest in employee development: Do research to ensure your salaries are competitive and your benefits package is in line with industry standards. Offer a clear pathway for career progression, such as training, continuous learning and skills development.
Highlight company culture and values: Many job-seekers want to work for companies that align with their personal values and offer a good work-life balance. Consider offering remote work or other flexible work options, reward high-performing employees and emphasize your organization’s culture, values and mission.
Conclusion
Overall, the best and worst states for workers depend on an employer and employees’ individual priorities, but this report can help them understand the web of factors that shape working conditions across the nation. States that prioritize workers’ rights, provide remote work opportunities and maintain their cost of living tend to be more worker-friendly, allowing employees to lead more balanced lives and contribute to economic growth and stability.
On the other hand, the worst states for workers typically suffer due to high taxes, long work weeks, limited union representation and sluggish job and GDP growth, which combined, can make it challenging for families to make ends meet. This report underscores the importance of policies to support workers, as well as insights for employers looking to set up shop or expand their businesses in states that make it easier for workers to thrive.
Methodology
We analyzed eight metrics to determine the best and worst states for workers, pulling data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Census Bureau, the Tax Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We used a Z-score distribution to scale each metric relative to the mean across all 50 states and Washington, D.C., and capped outliers at 3. We multiplied Z-scores by -1 if a higher score was negatively associated with being above the national average, including tax rates, commute times and weekly hours worked. A state’s overall ranking was calculated using its average Z-score across the eight metrics. Here’s a closer look at the metrics we used:
Earnings ratio, calculated as the median wage for a family of four divided by the living wage needed to support a family of four with one earner (MIT’s Living Wage Calculation and Census Bureau, 2022)
An average B2B sales rep lasts two years in their position, but almost half of that time is spent in the hiring and onboarding process. Creating a bench of sales talent gives sales leaders consistent and quick access to top talent when they are growing and need it most. Essentially, a bench of sales talent becomes your ‘sales funnel’ for employees.
First, Identify A Players for Your Bench of Sales Talent
Once you’ve formed an ideal candidate profile, tap into the networks of your top representatives to find your ‘warm leads.’ Additional sources of sales representatives could be professional associations, trade shows, or your own organically grown talent community.
Tap Into the Power of a CRM to Track Your Bench
Maintaining and nurturing your bench of sales talent takes time and intention. Having your candidates tracked in a CRM will allow you to monitor your interactions and know who your best-fit candidates are at a glance.
Keep Your Process High-Touch
A marketing lead requires multiple touchpoints before a sale. Your hiring leads do, too. Outreach and targeted content that builds a candidate’s relationship with your brand is ideal.
Before Peak, Brent worked in sales and sales-leadership positions for 18 years. He has considerable experience building and running high-performance teams, which consistently won awards and exceeded sales targets. He was Vice President of Sales for a financial management consulting company, and served with Borland Software as a Regional Sales Manager.
Every sales team operates on a set of core values — whether written, spoken, or simply implied by the company’s culture. Getting intentional with your internal values can help you make aligned hires who find it simple and satisfying to contribute to your broader goals.
Step 1: Identify Your Company’s Values
We recommend narrowing your company values list down to three to five core values. These values should represent how your teams actually work together and with clients. They should also be easy to remember. Some common values for hiring include:
Autonomy
Collaboration
Customer Success
Diversity
Follow-through
Innovation
Sustainability
Trust
Step 2: Screen Candidates for Values Hiring
When you assess candidates, use your values as a filter. Sales representatives who personally subscribe to your company values will have an easier time settling into your work culture and contributing to your team.
Step 3: Hire Like-Minded Individuals
Sales teams thrive when their members have a sense that they are all moving in the same direction together. This is very different from a sales team that is a monolith. Individuals with diverse backgrounds, life experiences, and expertise can all prioritize respect, honesty, personal accountability, and other professional values that foster teamwork and allow their differences to shine.
Take the next step in your hiring process — reach out to our team and get access to our extensive network of top talent.
Does your industry require on-the-go sales representatives who can make a powerful impression in person to close significant deals? Outside sales might be the team structure you need to hire for.
What is an Outside Salesperson?
While inside salespeople perform their roles via tech and telephone, outside salespeople perform theirs with clients face-to-face. Outside salespeople typically travel and meet clients in their own offices.
Hire Outside Salespeople With These 3 Qualities
#1 The Ability to Close Deals in a Timely Manner
Many companies with long sales cycles use outside salespeople. However, that only further emphasizes the importance of efficient sales. Look for outside salespeople who can keep the sales process moving to close deals swiftly.
#2 A History of Closing Large Deals
Outside sales bring in the big wins that are achieved over time. Given the investment required to close these deals, it is vital that representatives can close large deals to fuel revenue.
#3 Competence in Conducting Sales Face-to-Face
Demos and other in-person sales tactics are unique to the role of outside salespeople. When hiring, ensure that your candidates have experience and a level of comfort meeting with people, educating prospects, and engaging people in real-time conversations.
Take the next step in your hiring process — reach out to our team and get access to our extensive network of top talent.
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Are your sales priorities velocity, volume, and lower costs? Inside sales might be the team structure you need to hire for.
What is an Inside Sales Person?
Inside salespeople are an excellent fit for teams that rely heavily on sales techniques such as cold calling, email marketing, social media platforms, and web conferences. This style of sales doesn’t require travel and can be done from a remote location or corporate office.
Look for These 3 Qualities When Hiring Inside Salespeople
#1 Strong Communication Skills
Inside salespeople need to quickly establish a rapport that contributes to long-term client relationships. They need to be able to do this over the phone or via virtual communication since inside salespeople don’t travel to meet on-site with leads. Cutting-edge communication skills are an inside sales non-negotiable.
#2 A Proven Track Record of Growing Accounts
If you’re looking for a way to establish a consistent flow of revenue, your inside salespeople are the ticket. A history of account growth ensures your inside sales candidates will make the most of every opportunity.
#3 CRM and Virtual Tool Savvy
Navigating modern inside sales means tapping into the power of tech. Your inside salespeople should master tracking customers’ journeys through your sales funnel, use various platforms with ease, and even be able to integrate sales chatbots into their work.
Contact us today to get started building your inside sales team from our global network of top sales professionals.
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Sales chatbots are a form of software that engages customers with human-like conversation. These chats can take place in a pop-up window on a company’s website, in text messaging platforms, and on other digital and social channels where customers seek out products and services to purchase. Chatbots are powered by a combination of artificial intelligence, integrated human intelligence, and natural language processing.
11 Best Sales Chatbots in 2024
We’ve rounded up the top ten best sales chatbots for companies to consider using in 2024. Each one has unique pros and cons, varied pricing, and specific uses. Let your chatbot goals and customer needs guide your chatbot pick!
15 Ways to Use a Sales Chatbot to Increase Leads, Conversions, and Customer Satisfaction
Over the last several years, chatbots have proven they’re more than just annoying pop-up robots. Their popularity, constantly growing accuracy, adaptability, and artificial intelligence contribute to their reputation as a preferred method of communication amongst many customer sectors.
These fifteen ways you can use chatbots are aimed at helping you implement, enhance, and optimize them in your sales process so that customers are guided seamlessly through your sales funnel. Try these strategies to boost sales — and spend less time selling.
#1 Thoughtfully Engage Customers
Greet your website visitors and let them know that you’re there to help. Proactively welcoming your customers and giving them a clear path to find what they need — before they’ve even clicked around your site — creates a customized journey that is more likely to lead to a sale.
#2 Qualify Leads
Leverage your chatbot by using qualifying questions to understand the nuanced reason someone has arrived at your site. Determining whether the visitor is a potential lead through your chatbot before passing them along to a representative saves your team time.
#3 Make Product Recommendations
Use the information you collect to have your sales bot recommend products or services that align with the visitor’s needs. Then, have your sales bot take visitors through a conversational chat to find out what complementary upsell and cross-sell opportunities may exist.
#4 Answer Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Most chatbots use machine learning, various AI platforms, and gather information directly from your existing customer support materials. Program your chatbot to provide instant responses to common customer queries. Fast chat response times with accurate information build trust and keep customers on your site — rather than wandering to a competitor’s.
#5 Provide Guidance
When customers are making a purchase or booking with you, use chatbots to provide step-by-step guidance, help filling out forms, and support with checking out. Chatbots can address common objections and questions that typically arise for your customers before buying.
#6 Collect Contact Information
Sales bots, rather than email list signups, can collect contact information in a more personal way for specific follow-up. Based on the information you collect, you might offer a discount, exclusive offer, or free informational product (i.e., an ebook, guide, or digital tool) in exchange for contact information.
#7 Provide 24/7 Availability
Having a robust chatbot available 24/7 shows your commitment to customer service and allows customers to resolve queries when your team isn’t on the clock. Highlight your chatbot availability, particularly during ‘off’ hours.
#8 Personalize Responses
Addressing customers by name is just the tip of the iceberg regarding chatbot personalization. You can also tailor interactions, recommendations, and responses to a visitor’s history and preferences.
#9 Gather Feedback and Improvement
Collect feedback from customers about their chatbot interactions and ensure that your team regularly reviews this feedback to continually improve the chatbot’s effectiveness and the user experience it provides.
#10 Integrate with CRM and Sales Tools
Connect your chatbot to an existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, or choose a chatbot platform that provides a CRM. Doing this ensures your chatbot can seamlessly transfer each lead’s information to your sales team in an organized system.
#11 Analyze Your Performance
Identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) most relevant to your goals with chatbots. These will likely be your conversion rates, average order value, and new leads acquired. Track and measure these stats to determine the impact your chatbot has on performance.
#12 Test and Optimize
Chatbots should be an ever-evolving part of your sales team. We recommend conducting A/B tests to optimize your dialogues, CTAs, and recommendations to continuously improve your chatbot.
#13 Train Your Chatbot
Treat your chatbot like a new employee you’re onboarding. In addition to testing and optimizing, continue to grow your chatbot by implementing ongoing training and updates. Your chatbot should intimately understand your product or service as well as relevant industry trends that customers may inquire about.
#14 Merge with Human Support
Chatbots are a great first point of contact, but in cases of high-ticket sales or industries with a longer sales cycle, like SaaS sales, customers will likely need to be handed off to a human at some point in the chat. Complex queries and those that are highly specific will also need to be handled by human sales representatives.
#15 Continuously Adapt
As you test, review performance, and train your chatbot, consider how your customer needs, market, and industry are changing too. The scripts or playbooks your chatbot uses, and responses your chatbot generates should adapt to make the most of every interaction.
By implementing these strategies and continuously optimizing your sales bots, you can provide a more personalized and efficient customer experience, which, in turn, can lead to increased sales and improved customer satisfaction.
Could chatbots multiply your sales efforts on autopilot? We help sales leaders find tech-savvy sales representatives for their teams every day. Maybe your team is due for an upgrade, too. Click here to contact us today about your hiring needs.
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Urgency is your nemesis when it comes to the hiring process. Before you make any moves, ask yourself these five questions and start your hiring strategy with focus and intention.
#1 What are our revenue targets?
Consider how you want your new hires to contribute to your revenue goals. What kind of salespeople will you need to do that? Farmers, hunters, or challengers? Inside or outside salespeople?
#2 What customer type are we targeting?
Your sales strategy should identify strengths and skills that make a candidate stand out. Hire those who have what it takes to connect with your customers authentically.
#3 What culture do we want to create in our sales team?
Whether you need an aggressive and competitive team or a collaborative and relationship-oriented one, knowing the culture you’re creating is key to a successful sales hiring strategy.
#4 What does sales success mean to us?
Define to align. Explore your explanation of sales success so that when your candidates share theirs, you can easily check for motivational alignment.
#5 What does our sales organizational structure look like?
Consider team fit and the role you need to hire to maximize your current team and expand your sales results.
A clear hiring strategy will keep you from rushing into a hire that isn’t a great fit for your goals. We’d love to help you create and stick to yours. Contact us today to get started.
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What’s the easiest way to lose half a million dollars by the time you’re 60? By never proactively negotiating your salary as a sales professional.
Decide on a salary negotiation strategy as soon as you begin your job search.
Avoiding negotiations could keep you working about eight years longer to make the same amount as your counterparts who do negotiate. So why wait?
Most winning salary negotiations happen through a competing or collaborating strategy. In a study from Harvard Business Review, those who chose to negotiate their salary using these methods — rather than accepting the offer on the table — increased their starting pay by an average of $5,000.
Be ready to articulate exactly why you deserve a higher salary.
Do your research and understand what other professionals in the same position you seek are making. Think through what you bring to the table that other professionals in your industry don’t, then practice how you’ll address your salary and initiate the conversation in the interview process. Know when and how to counter, and be prepared to walk away if the final offer doesn’t represent your value.
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Before Peak, Brent worked in sales and sales-leadership positions for 18 years. He has considerable experience building and running high-performance teams, which consistently won awards and exceeded sales targets. He was Vice President of Sales for a financial management consulting company, and served with Borland Software as a Regional Sales Manager.
