Top 5 Sales Optimization Strategies To Help Your Sales Team Win More Deals

The sales team is the backbone and revenue-generating team in a company. 

The best way for sales to achieve their targets is to streamline and improve their current sales processes. Sales reps need to be empowered with the right sales and productivity tools. This is known as a sales optimization strategy.

What is a sales optimization strategy?

A B2B SaaS company's sales optimization strategy involves identifying and implementing new sales methods and tools within a sales team to maximize its performance and increase revenue generated from the sales pipeline.

How does a company usually do this? 

By analyzing the past interactions sales reps had with prospects. Based on the results, they create new strategies to provide more support and guidance and empower the sales team with valuable sales tools. 

Sales optimization strategies to help your sales team win more deals

It is no easy task to drive more sales, meet sales quotas, and increase the company’s revenue. You need to optimize your sales team's processes to achieve these!

Here are some best ways to improve your sales team’s output.

1. Measure data in the right way and accurately 

As the popular expression goes, "What gets measured gets managed." 

You need the right sales data at your access. If not, you can't measure the impact after optimizing your sales efforts. Does this mean you must make your sales team stuck to their desks measuring data? Of course, not! Focus on capturing information automatically. 

The key is to choose the right sales tool, including a CRM that captures all the sales activity and customer data. If your sales tool generates comprehensive and insightful reports from the captured data, that's a win-win! 

Pay attention to this data and the sales metric your company has defined. Tracking metrics that work toward your company's goals help you gain actionable insights and does not end up as meaningless information.

What does this sales tracking include?

• Complete sales activity - calls made, emails sent, time spent on calls, meetings booked, and demos delivered. And, don't miss those sales targets reached or exceeded per rep.
• End-to-end Sales performance optimization - response rates, call reach rates, trial sign-ups, and include pipeline value as well.
• Sales conversions - Track sales by channel, average conversion time, average deal size, retention rates, and customer lifetime value. 

This data will pinpoint areas for improvement within your teams and sales processes.

2. Experiment but simplify the sales process

Now that you have the correct data, the next step is to evaluate your current sales process so that you can build on the elements that work and gradually eliminate what doesn't work for your company. Making drastic changes is challenging. But taking small, incremental, and measurable changes over time is wise. These changes will deliver the right results and also offer your sales team the foundation for success. 

Don't try to change everything at once. It makes it harder to identify which changes led to what results. Change a single metric to start with. 

For example, begin your change with the activity at the top of the funnel. Try to determine if phone calls close more sales than emails. If you find out that this is true, replace demo follow-up emails with follow-up phone calls for the next two weeks during the upcoming stage of your sales process and revise the results. 

On the other hand, if your team is an expert in qualifying leads but finds it hard to move them further through the funnel after the demo stage, let your focus be on improving your product demos. 

Observe if your numbers are noticeably improving. If so, keep doing what works and start working on a different metric. Over time, it takes experimentation to find out what works. But don’t take the route of complete overhaul at once.

3. Make your sales team feel empowered

Setting up your sales team for success is not a one-day task though. Now that you have data, use it to evaluate each sales rep's performance individually. 

Not just to evaluate, but use the results to create a coaching schedule for each of them. Guide them through key areas for significant improvement. Create opportunities for review; this is where your whole team can learn from victories and missed opportunities. 

But this does not mean you stop only with guidance. Give your team the right sales tech stack and access to the right tools to succeed. The right resources include CRM tools that automate sales information, impactful email templates, performing sales scripts, and of course, high-impact interactive demo platforms. 

4. Build your target profile

Do you think your prospect is your ideal customer profile? When you don't focus on the right profiles, you will probably end up with prospects who do not understand your product. Or worse, it will take up the time of your support team to find ways to fit the product to the wrong prospects' needs and might end up potentially damaging your firm's reputation. 

Before reaching out to potential customers, build your ideal customer profile or buyer persona. You can start by listing the ideal demographic and emotional characteristics you want your customers to possess to experience the complete potential of your business. 

To get started, you can include these as criteria

• Likes and dislikes
• Challenges, and pain points that motivate them to purchase products or services
• Feelings and emotions they are experiencing to nudge them towards the final sales stage
• Common objectives 
• Buying behavior patterns
• Financial planning and budgets 
  

When you consider demographics, include age, gender, location, and education level. 
Following these will help you identify the buyer persona for your product and the people who would want, need, and enjoy your product. 

5. Upgrade your product demo game 

Here, we come to the most important strategies that can get your prospects to convert quickly - a product demo. It either convinces the prospects to convert or not to. So, how do you ace at your product demo?

The answer is interactive product demos! These are engaging, crash-proof, personalized, and informative. You can customize the interactive demo to show your prospects want they would want to see in a way that connects with them. For more information about using interactive product demos to your advantage, click here!

Win deals faster

Sales optimization is not a stand-alone process but an ongoing one. It's crucial to keep a tab on sales data and make necessary improvements.

But one of the easiest and best ways to check if you're on the right track is to analyze if your prospects are enjoying your sales experience. Get answers to questions such as

Is my sales cycle getting shorter?

Is my prospect able to quickly understand my product and its benefits?

Is my prospect engaging with the sales asset that I am sending them?

That's why proactive sales teams have started using interactive product demos throughout their sales process. The sooner the prospects see the product, the more likely they will sign up quicker. 

With an interactive product demo software like Storylane, sales teams can create personalized interactive demos for individual prospects in no time. It's easier to showcase specific features of your product that solve their unique pain points. All of this without any engineering efforts or coding skills! With an interactive demo creation platform in your arsenal, your sales team can start winning more deals faster.