Your team has a lot of sales experience. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, it’s all part of the sales game. But, the real question is, do you learn from the past in order to improve in the future? This is sales optimization, a tactic that is critical for any sales team looking to have better performance in the future (who isn’t?).
In this blog, we’ll understand what sales optimization is, what the main steps are to successfully tackling the process, best practices, and how monday sales CRM makes the process easy by giving access to all of the information you need to boost sales moving forward.
What is sales optimization?
Sales optimization is the process of optimizing or maximizing your performance, based on past processes and successes or failures.
This process then uses this information to train salespeople to sell in the most effective way possible moving forward.
The goal of any sales optimization process is to boost sales conversions in a company to increase both profits and efficiency.
The benefits of sales optimization
Competition is fierce out there for many companies. And that’s why their sales processes must be top-notch. By using sales optimization strategies, your sales team will see the following benefits:
- Financial: By learning from sales processes in the past and implementing new strategies, sales teams will see a boost in sales, leading to a clear financial benefit.
- Better lead management: Part of the sales optimization process is understanding the sales process better and what can be improved. This will naturally lead to better customer relationships by identifying what can be improved in the sales process as well as a better sales funnel.
- Boosted efficiency: No one wants to waste time on leads that go nowhere. Sales optimization helps sales teams become more efficient, making each lead more significant and giving your team a morale boost.
What is included in the sales optimization process?
Do you know that it’s time to start optimizing your sales process, but not sure where to get started? Follow these top steps for sales optimization:
Define your customer/client journey and build personas
In this step, you’ll need to sit down and really analyze your customers and the sales pipeline that they go down until they turn into paying customers. This depends on your specific field, what you’re selling, if it’s a high or low-value product, the average number of touch points before a sale, and more. Understanding these questions is a critical part of understanding the customer journey which can lead you to more effective sales processes.
Once you’re done building the customer journey, try to get to know your customers better by creating marketing personas. This will help you get a better understanding of who you’re selling to.
Understand bottlenecks along the pipeline
Take a step back and look at your sales pipeline. Where are leads getting stuck? This can help you understand pipeline bottlenecks. The solution to these bottlenecks depends on the specific situation but often has to do with creating better lead-generation campaigns. This means making sure that the most relevant and appropriate leads are entering your pipeline in the first place, that have the highest chance of becoming paying customers.
Integrate technology
Technological tools can be a great support for sales teams today. For example, by using automation tools, sales teams can save time and energy by sending out emails as part of a funnel, creating dashboards for opportunities to see the entire sales process, providing information about next steps in the sales process, and so much more.
Keep your sales and marketing teams in sync
It’s no secret that sales and marketing teams don’t always play nicely together. But, in order for sales optimization to go smoothly, this step is critical. Create shared goals, funnels, and planning, in order to increase both sides accomplishments and help one another. This means that marketing will bring in the right, qualified leads that give the sales team the chance to convert more leads into paying customers.
Stay on top of your numbers and KPIs
Sales optimization isn’t just a one-time review and you’re done. It’s important to constantly review sales teams’ performance and to evaluate if sales reps are meeting their relevant KPIs along the way. If not, it’s time to make changes to the sales pipeline and process to continue optimizing.
Using a CRM to optimize sales
Now that we’ve reviewed the top steps and tricks for sales optimization, let’s understand how a CRM can help boost this process and make it easier.
A CRM naturally helps optimize your sales process by helping you become more efficient and to gain a birdseye view of your sales pipeline. This means that by using your CRM software properly, you can gain access to all of the top pieces of information that you need to sell better in the future.
Create and execute a successful sales optimization strategy with monday sales CRM
With visibility into your entire sales pipeline, you can get a deeper understanding of your sales process by adding different stages, managing various timelines, and more. You’ll have access to information about each lead as well as overall data, in order to have the opportunity to analyze your process and make it even better moving forward.
Frequently asked questions
How to optimize a sales funnel?
One of the best ways to optimize your sales funnel is by examining your sales strategy and pipeline in the past. By doing this, you’ll be able to understand what has worked, and what hasn’t, for your sales team with different types of clients. Then, you can build a sales optimization strategy to make sure that you’re always hitting your sales goals and meeting your KPIs.
What is sales optimization?
Sales optimization is the process of improving your sales funnel and pipeline by learning from what has worked and hasn’t worked in the past. Sales optimization includes training salespeople accordingly in order to boost efficiency and profitability.
Learn from the past and boost sales today with monday.com
There’s no point in sending your sales team into the field when they’re unprepared. That’s what you’re doing when you don’t learn from past sales data and mistakes.
That’s where monday.com can change the way you sell. Our CRM gives you access to the data you need to learn from the past and succeed in the future.