Danny Wong

A high-pressure sales approach often makes leads and prospects uncomfortable. Potential clients want to be courted without feeling the pressure from a persistent sales pitch.

At a quick glance, it’s easy to make superficial assumptions about the effectiveness of your sales funnel. Without further analysis, the initial conclusions you draw from the data may be misleading because a broad overview of your sales performance is not a true indicator of sales potential. Once you audit your sales behaviors and dissect the data, you may discover smart ways to improve your overall results.

Many salespeople front-load their interactions with prospects. Hundreds of cold calls convert into dozens of meetings and then a handful of sales proposals. Believing they have already crossed the finish line, sales reps send pre-made proposals out with the expectation that they have already secured the prospect's business. Instead, clients lose interest when they receive an impersonal document that simply states cost and deliverables.

To craft the perfect sales proposal, we’ve listed nine features that help salespeople keep prospects engaged, excited, and eager to move forward.

In eCommerce, one of the most crucial yet underappreciated hurdles to sales is driving visitors to click and view products. Unfortunately, the data reveals that, on average, eCommerce stores have a 33.9% bounce rate. This suggests that approximately a third of all of the visitors that hit your homepage abandon the site without ever browsing through your inventory of products. On the bright side though, once a shopper clicks to view a product, you increase the likelihood of closing the sale.

Email marketing is one of the most affordable and effective ways to consistently engage customers and prospects. For every dollar spent on email marketing, brands generate nearly $41 in sales, which outperforms mobile marketing ($10.51 per dollar spent), social media ($12.71), display advertising ($19.72), and search engine marketing ($22.24).

But to ensure their message is read and distributed, brands need to focus on improving three important metrics: open rates, click-through rates, and forwards. Below, we define each metric, highlight its importance, and describe strategies to improve your current stats.

When used to its greatest advantage, content marketing can create a relationship between a company and its customers. With content, salespeople can add value to each client interaction, creating memorable touchpoints that help prospects successfully progress through each stage of the sales cycle. Using case studies, data, gated content, guest blogging, and other forms of content, sales teams gain more control over their sales funnel, and sales can carefully guide customers toward a favourable purchasing decision.

Salespeople serve on your business’s front line. In their active, client-facing role, what they learn from current and potential customers can help make a company better. They often hear brilliant business ideas from the customers they aim to serve. Using their knowledge, sales teams can help their employers build better, more profitable, and popular products.

In its 2015 report, SAP addressed the question, “What’s the Future of Sales?” Among 1,220 global business buyers, the survey found, “The dynamics between buyers and sellers have changed. Whereas once sellers were seen as an unparalleled source of information, the digital revolution has shifted the balance of power, equipping buyers with much of the information they need to make purchase decisions and fundamentally altering how and where sellers are able to add value to this process.” Indeed, the information age has birthed sophisticated enterprise customers. And sales teams everywhere have learned to adapt.

To stay relevant in an increasingly competitive landscape, companies open offices in new markets, hire talent who work remotely, form partnerships with other businesses and vendors, and converse regularly with customers.

But communicating with everyone can be a challenge.

Lean businesses have an advantage over their larger counterparts: They can move fast and innovate, which affords them a competitive edge in negotiations. With a clever approach to sales and thrifty marketing strategies, they’re empowered to do more with less. Furthermore, with the smarts and willpower to build incredible products on a budget or offer high-impact services with merely a handful of experts, small businesses and startups can be strategic vendors for enterprise clients.

In the highly competitive world of sales, a company’s sales team members can feel disposable, as though all they do is identify leads and close deals. The best sales departments collaborate to create long-term job security and value. When salespeople work together, they more easily identify and share best practices for making a sale. In a system of mutual teaching and learning, every salesperson is an active, integral part of the department.

Managers face a challenge: How do they effectively lead and inspire their sales teams?

Customers don't want to be pushed to make a purchase. They want to be guided into their own decision-making process.

The loudest content medium out there has finally learned how to be quiet with minimalist designs.

Video is taking the world by storm: Cisco predicts that “[global] consumer internet video traffic will be 80 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2019, up from 64 percent in 2014.” Businesses that have not yet invested in video need to start now to increase brand awareness and engage consumers.

Marketers agree about digital video’s potential: 41 percent of agencies believe online video is as effective as TV. 31 percent are even more confident and feel online video ads perform better than broadcast commercials.

In 2016, eMarketer and Forrester predict U.S. eCommerce companies will sell between $355 and $393 billion worth of product. Their estimates also suggest American eCommerce revenues will reach upwards to $500 billion by 2018. For brands to stay relevant and get a slice of the pie, it will be important that they update their existing business, marketing and merchandising strategies to adapt to the needs of the modern day consumer. Changes in buying behaviors and technology have significantly affected how people shop; companies that embrace rather than resist those changes will find themselves easily currying favor with customers.