What Does “Keep Your Eye on the Ball” Mean in Sales?
In baseball, “keep your eye on the ball” means always watching the ball. In sales, it means staying focused. But that can be hard. When trying to end the quarter well, finding new customers sometimes gets forgotten because salespeople are busy finishing up deals.
But your sales team has to do both: find lots of good new customers and keep deals going. Sales leaders should teach their teams how to find new customers well every day of the quarter. Here are ways sales teams can get better at finding new customers.
Understanding a Good Prospect
Before you start looking for new customers and creating leads, you need to know what a good prospect looks like. This makes sure you don’t waste time on leads that won’t go anywhere.
A good prospect has five main things:
You can learn more about what makes a good prospect here: The 5 Characteristics of a Good Prospect
Finding new customers well is a tough but very important part of selling. Doing it wrong means wasting time and getting upset. Doing it right means you’ll have more chances to sell and do better overall.
Improving How You Find New Customers
Here are ways your sales team can find new business better before, during, and after a sales call.
Having the right sales skills and doing the same good things before sales calls will make the time you spend looking for new customers better. Here are some things to focus on.
Nowadays, getting leads comes more from naturally attracting good leads than from just hoping to find someone interested.
Your salespeople must spend time and effort on becoming experts in what they sell. You might have heard about “building your brand,” and that’s part of the goal. But it’s more important to show what you know about your industry, product, customers, and market.
When you’re known as a trustworthy expert, you become a helpful resource for potential customers who want to learn more.
You can show your expertise in many ways, depending on what suits you best. Some options include:
Using Social Media to Find New Business
Finding new customers today means sales teams look for new business in creative ways. Social media lets every salesperson build an audience of LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends, or Twitter followers and a place to share content.
For salespeople who sell to other businesses, LinkedIn is the main place for finding new business. To use LinkedIn best, your team needs to be smart about it.
Finding new customers well on LinkedIn starts with a great profile. Make sure every team member has a professional photo, sales title, and a product-focused “About” section. Think about what a prospect would want to see if they look at someone’s profile.
After that, they can start connecting with potential customers by joining groups, liking and commenting on posts that matter, and looking at connections of their connections.
Getting a customer to tell others about you is one of the best ways to find good sales leads. If a customer tells someone else about you, it helps salespeople get past the first hard part of selling—making trust.
Since 84% of people buying for businesses start with someone telling them about it, it’s smart for your sales team to try to get more customers to tell others about them as a way to find new customers.
Most customers are happy to tell others about something they like; it’s just about making sure your sales team asks for it when they follow up.
Cold calling might still be useful in some areas, but usually, cold calling (or sending cold emails) is not the best way for a salesperson to spend their time. There are many ways your team can make a lead a bit warmer before they reach out to them.
Use these ways to make a lead go from very cold to a bit warmer.
Don’t let your sales team skip the research part of looking for new customers. Planning before a call is very important.
Teach salespeople not just to connect on social media, but to use what social media and search engines offer to find things in common with their prospects.
Starting a sales talk with something you both like, where you went to school, or an interest you share makes for a warm and good relationship. Through their search, your sellers might even find someone in common who can introduce them to the prospect or other important people.
Prospects like talking to a confident salesperson more than one who doesn’t seem sure of themselves.
Teach your sales team to check how they feel before each call, and to do pre-call activities that make them more excited and confident.
Holding a strong pose for two minutes before a call has been shown to make you more confident, as does thinking positively. Listening to happy music is another way many salespeople like. Sometimes, it’s as simple as taking a few deep breaths!
Encourage salespeople to try different things and keep doing what works for them.
Handling Sales Calls Well
How a salesperson deals with a call can make or break finding new customers. Here are three ways to do better during a call.
No one likes to talk to people who are too proud, unfriendly, or look down on others. Teach your sales team to be friendly and to understand the person they’re calling.
Selling to businesses is better with a helpful selling way. This means taking time to listen and really get how the prospect feels about the problems they have.
Understanding also means knowing how your prospect likes to talk and changing to match it. Prospects who feel heard and understood are more likely to want to go to the next step.
Sales tests can help your team members learn their own styles and how to change to match what customers like.
A first sales call should almost never try to finish the sale. Its job is to warm up the prospect, show a need, and tell the next step.
But many salespeople start selling their solution before they really understand the prospect’s situation.
Teach your team to start with good questions that need more than a yes or no answer to get the prospect to talk and be part of the conversation. Great questioning ways will also give your salespeople the info they need to help the prospect to the next step.
A big mistake salespeople make when looking for new customers is to tell prospects all the features and good things about the product or service.
Instead, teach your team to answer the real needs of the prospect and to talk about how the solution will meet those needs.
What to Do After Sales Calls
It’s common for salespeople to want to go from one call to the next quickly, but this makes them miss chances. Make sure your sellers take time after every call to focus on these three things.
Teach salespeople to send an email or other message right after the call. At the least, they should say thank you for the talk.
When a prospect shows interest, this message should also go over the problem they talked about and what comes next.
Sellers should always write down this info and set a reminder for when they agreed to follow up. If they set another meeting, make sure your team is making the best email invite for the meeting.
Salespeople who always want to get better will usually do better than others. Teach your team to take a moment after each call to think about what they did well, what was hard, and how the prospect reacted.
These moments after each call will help them pay attention to how they did and see what they can do better, as well as feel good about what they’re good at.
Most sales leaders make sure salespeople do a certain number of activities to find new customers each week. But you can make performance a lot better by looking at other data too.
For example, do you know what industries each seller does best in? How big the companies are that they’re reaching? How the time spent on each call connects to their success in setting the next step? Knowing these and other things can help sales leaders teach each team member where they need to get better.
Great prospecting is the base of a good chance to sell, and like any other part of sales, it needs a consistent selling process to do well. Training on the best ways to find new customers will help your salespeople use their time best and keep their eyes on the ball.
Learn More
See how The Brooks Group’s sales skill workshops can help salespeople who are having a hard time get better at finding new customers.
There are many things that can make a sale succeed or fail. Do your sellers risk the sale by guessing what the buyer wants?
Get insights from survey results from over 300 buyers and sellers, from people just starting to CEOs, that will help your sales team get better at finding new customers.
Did you miss our previous article…
https://pardonresearch.com/?p=3444