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How to Improve Your Sales Process: The Complete Guide

July 17, 2019 | 9 minute read

Since you’re bringing innovation to the market with your new business, why not bring some innovation to your sales process as well. Imagine if your website content could do double duty: prospecting for new clients and investors as well as showcasing your products.

Want to See Growth? Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams

i. Align Sales And Marketing Departments To Increase Company Sales

ii. How To Improve Sales and Marketing: A Better Sales Process

iii. Is the 7 Step Sales Process a Thing of the Past?

iv. Explore 5 Sales Results You Could Achieve with Inbound

v. How to Make Sales Prospecting Enjoyable: HubSpot Prospecting Tools
Optimizing Sales Processes and Pipelines

ii. How to Use Marketing Automation for Sales Growth

ii. Having a Solid Content Creation Strategy Can Increase Sales

iii. Does Your B2B Sales Team Have A Set, Repeatable Sales Process?

iv. Tailor Your Sales Process to Get Your Business Start Up Funding

v. Avoid the 3 Most Common Mistakes in a Typical Sales Process
Modernize Your Sales Process: Tips, Advice and Case Studies

i. Change Your Sales Process to Improve Sales Performance

ii. A Sales Pipeline Is the Way of the Future for Your Sales Process

Want to See Growth? Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams

Wondering how to improve your sales process? With inbound marketing, your sales process can connect you to your audience on social media and help deliver new leads.

But you’ll need a process to save your sales team time, prevent the duplication of tasks, and ensure consistency across the company.

You’re familiar with the traditional 7-step sales process:

Prospecting
Preparing
Approaching
Presenting
Objections
Closing
Follow-up

The 7-steps work, but there's a better alternative: the sales flywheel that keeps the customer as the central focus all the way through the cycle. Once you’ve optimized your sales process, your team will be able to consistently attract, engage, and delight your customers and investors. Those who have found success use these 5 ways to improve sales processes and

streamline sales growth with inbound marketing tactics.

Tips to Optimize Your Sales Processes and Pipelines

1. Automate Prospecting through Lead Nurturing

Following the sales process used to mean someone had to actively put every step into motion. Now, softwares like Hubspot can automate a few of those tasks. This improves your sales process by making prospecting easier, giving you more time to focus on building relationships and getting better sales results.

In Hubspot, lead tracking and nurturing can be automated with a set of pre-written emails full of relevant content that goes out on a predetermined schedule – a great start in building a repeatable sales process. The emails help potential customers progress through the buyer’s journey. Once your new leads get through the emails, they’ll be ready for contact from your sales team.

2. Develop a Content Strategy to Connect with Leads

To deliver quality content on a regular basis you need to have a plan in place. A well executed content creation strategy will impact your sales growth and deliver new leads on a consistent basis. Writing 11-16 blog posts per month is the recommended volume. To produce that quantity of content you’ll either need a full time staff member dedicated to writing blogs or you can outsource to an inbound marketing agency.

Once you’re regularly producing quality content, start taking advantage of your new library of information by repurposing it. Existing content can quickly be modified to suit a variety of social media platforms, which means your team can spend more time engaging directly with potential leads or investors on the platforms they prefer. Reusing and optimizing your content helps improve HubSpot's SEO strategy for your business, allowing you to get reoccurring and lasting value from older content. Posting the repurposed content, with links to the original information, also drives more traffic to your website.

Quality content on your company blog or social media will bring qualified leads and investors to you, doing a good share of the usual prospecting work. The content also speaks to the potential customer and helps them solve problems, establishing trust in your company and creating connections when your sales team engages with them on social media or email.

3. Develop Target Personas to Research Prospects Earlier

Personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers or investors. If your marketing, sales, and content creation teams know exactly who they’re targeting they can create better content and experiences for your customers. If all teams are targeting the same personas it allows for synergies and collaboration across teams, and it creates a consistent level of service which is crucial in developing your audience’s trust.

The traditional sales process researched customers after connecting with them, but with inbound marketing tactics the research is done upfront. Knowing your ideal customer, the problems they face, and their priorities when interacting with your business will allow you to create content that attracts warmer leads and shortens your sales process considerably.

4. Optimize Your Online Content for Maximum Reach

Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential for ranking high on Google and getting your content in front of your ideal customer. Softwares like Hubspot also offers keyword research services that help you develop an SEO strategy, utilizing pillar articles, core topics, and related sub-topic keywords.

Using the customer personas you developed, you can determine the SEO keywords you will write content around to attract the persona's to your site. SEO does the leg work for your sales team, bringing in leads that are drawn to your blog, social media, or website.

5. Measure Your Success to Improve Close Rates

Measure Your Success to Improve Close Rates Analytics gives you a measuring stick for your marketing and sales efforts. Hubspot provides you with a variety of analytics that help you to figure out what’s working and where you could try something new.

Traffic metrics show how many people have visited your site, how many are new visitors, and how many visited on a mobile device. You can track the growth and reach of your site using these analytics.

Engagement metrics show you how your visitors are engaging with your content. This can help you figure out which types of content are getting the most interaction.

Session sources tells you where your visitors are coming from, whether it's social media, advertising, email campaigns or organic search. This can help you determine where your efforts are succeeding and where you could improve, directing your sales team to higher close rates.

6. Attract Investors with Inbound Marketing

When you're just starting out, it's a long journey into figuring out how to fund your business, both through investors and by generating sales quickly. It all depends on your business: what's your industry, where are you located? Luckily, there are plenty of avenues to secure funding and sales for a start up – so choose options that work for you and your business.

7. Avoid Common Sales Process Mistakes

Even if you think your sales process is the best it can be, you might still be falling into some common mistakes in the typical sales process. The fact is, the customer's buying process have changed – it's more important than ever to connect, listen, and engage. Customers want to feel connected and to know that they are being heard – don't scare them away with these mistakes.

Modernize Your Sales Process: Tips, Advice and Case Studies

Driving sales success is quite simple, really: you just need to refine some key sales strategies. Modern techniques like a well-structured sales pipeline and targeted sales process changes, can transform your sales outcomes. Here's how.

Sales Process Tweaks for Better Sales Performance

Using inbound marketing strategies can help you attract, connect with and retain quality leads – all to build steady sales growth. Inbound marketing strategies are all about providing value, creating results, and making a positive impact. Here's what you need to do to get the ball rolling.

A Sales Pipeline: The Way of the Future

Your sales pipeline is a set of stages a prospect moves through during the sales process, with a focus on the value and quantity of all deals in each stage. Blogging, a good CRM, and embracing new technology are all part of the deal when it comes to optimizing your sales pipeline.