Top 3 New Sales Tips for 2014

Most readers of this blog are seasoned sales professionals, managers, and executives with some degree of training and success in the B2B sales world. They have moved beyond the first clumsy phases of a selling career and are now looking to take their skills to a truly professional level and gain an edge.

To that end, here are three new sales tips for 2014 which are directed precisely for those who know what they are doing and need an edge. Follow these tips, and I can practically guarantee you will make more money this year.

Here we go:

1. Play the Follow-Up Game Heavily

Once a prospect is acquired, resist the urge to drop them after a few non-productive calls. You have an identity, might as well work it. Instead of setting the prospect aside, focus on developing a system for following up at least TWELVE TIMES. Yes, that is a lot of contacts, but I assure you, this is almost a magic number for getting the sale if you do it right.

As explained in Inc, this is made easier by the fact that the means to contact prospects has vastly expanded to include social media and webinars, among others. Technology makes this easy when you incorporate your CRM software.

Suggestions:

• Posts on Facebook timelines
• Mentions and retweets on Twitter
• Interaction on LinkedIn
• E-greeting on birthdays (you think its obvious, but very few people do this), Better yet, send a handwritten card
• Free white papers and e-books
• Connect them with a prospect for their business
• A “touching base” phone call or voice message
• An email with an informative news article in the body
• Lunch
• Golf

The secret is to keep them interested in you as a person — then they will engage with you as a brand.

2. Target Buyers Socially

The second of our new sales tips for 2014 involves, unsurprisingly, social media — due to its increasing value as a sales tool in B2B.  As cited here, Oracle’s Jill Rowley  recommends socially surrounding your buyers and their sphere of influence (analysts, thought leaders, experts, peers, and colleagues) through social media. This is sound advice, and basically involves becoming involved with conversations happening around the prospect, so that you become associated with the experts the prospects trusts.

This is not the same as the follow-up game described in the first point, as these are not direct contacts. Instead, you are providing information to the sources your buyers trust, and that means become a trusted source yourself.  Remember that the buyer’s funnel is no longer a standard one, and you have to be present very early and in many spaces in order to capture the business.

Caution: your information and interaction must be useful, valuable, and honest, or you will be outed as an insincere opportunist and shunned in social media.

3. Do Something with Mobile

Mobile is where everything is heading. Actually, seeing any tween or teen, you know it is already here, and will play an increasingly important role in the B2B sales world.

More and more people use their mobile devices first to access the Internet, email, and social sites,with desktops and laptops starting to fall behind. If your website is still not optimized for mobile devices, you need to jump on this. Better yet, build an app, so you can live on the mobile devices of your prospects and customers.

Sources to build your own app, some of which are free and require little or no coding:

• Infinitimonkeys
• Appmakr
• Yapp
• Appsvolcano
• Shoutem
• iGenApps
• Or check out the list here at Entrepreneur or here at Mashable

Here’s to a great year, make it so with the above new sales tips for 2014 and by contacting us here.