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5 Ways to Improve Your Sales Process

July 17, 2019 | 5 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.

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 5-step sales process:

Prospecting
Connecting
Researching
Presenting
Closing

The 5-steps work, but 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.

5 Ways to Streamline Your Sales Process for Growth

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 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. 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.