How to increase sales volume is something that just about every business owner, sales manager, and sales professional cares deeply about. And while it might seem that sometimes you have to be more lucky than good for everything to work, the reality is that there are clear things that can be done to improve sales volume.
Clearly Identify the Target Prospect
One step that often does not get enough attention in developing a sales strategy or even during execution is spending a decent amount of time on identifying what your target and ideal prospect look like. While you can likely sell your products to a large audience and many different types of prospects, in order to get your sales strategy and execution in hyper-drive, stop to think about the prospects that fit best and then have a laser focus on that segment.
When trying to identify the ideal prospect to go after, consider characteristics like industry, size, geography, title, attitude, income, current processes and systems, etc. Once have these characteristics mapped out, try to maximize your time with prospects that match up well with these.
Increase Interactions with Prospects
One of the most important ways to improve how to increase sales volume is to increase interactions and communications with prospects. At the end of the day, you can have the best product at the best price and if the prospects do not know about you, you cannot expect any revenue to come from them.
Increasing interactions with prospects can be driven by your sales and marketing strategies. From the sales perspective, proactive tactics like cold calling and professional networking are effective strategies to increase interactions and scheduling appointments with prospects. On the marketing side, tactics like search engine optimization and use of social media can increase the inbound flow of leads and help to impact how to increase sales volume.
Effectively Qualify Prospects
Time is one of your most valuable resources and you must protect this resource by only spending time with prospects that have a high probability of purchasing when working on how to increase sales volume. Just as prospects will be looking at you to determine how good you fit with them, you should spend time qualifying them to see how well they fit with you.
When working to qualify prospects, ask them questions about their needs, their ability to purchase, and their decision making authority to measure how much of a probability exists that they are going to purchase from you. If their questions are not what you want to hear, you may need to either move on or make the decision to not spend a tremendous amount of time trying sell to them.
Find Pain
At then end of the day, prospects mainly make changes and purchases to resolve a pain. If there is no pain, there is not a great need to change and this can make selling to them difficult. You still can sell to a prospect that does not have pain but these are the types of prospect that can stand to sit on the fence and disappear when it is time to pull the trigger.
To improve revenue, focus on trying to find pain that the prospect is experiencing in the areas where your products and services impact and focus on this throughout the sales cycle. If there is no pain, there may be a decision to move on to improve how to increase sales volume.