How To Improve Your Sales - 10 X Proven Tips

How To Improve Your Sales – 10 X Proven Tips

Jan 29, 2020

In this article, we’ll explore ten actionable steps that’ll teach you how to improve your sales.

Prior to going into and learning the content – we do have to stress an important point.

If you want to improve your sales – more important than just learning the content, is taking action on what you learn.

In this guide, you’ll learn what to focus on to help you improve your sales, close more clients, and serve more people.

Improve Your Sales With These 10 Tips

Improve Your Sales Tip #1 – Target The Right Audience

The first thing to focus on when learning how to improve your sales, is targeting people with your product or service that will greatly benefit from what it is you’re selling.

If your targeting is too broad, you may reach a lot of people – but those people may have absolutely no use for your product or service.

There’s a term called cold canvassing in sales that is quite widely used; which means you go door to door or target a large range of people with the intent of selling something.

Although this may work in some industries; most of the time it probably isn’t the best use of your time.

By doing a thorough marketing plan and focusing on a sales targeting strategy, you can work out who will best reap the rewards of your product or service, and then target them accordingly.

Related article: Sales Targeting Strategy – Your Complete Guide

Improve Your Sales Tip #2 – Know Why You’re Doing What You Do

The second important step to focus on when learning how to improve your sales, is having a clear understanding of why you’re selling in the first place.

Why are you in the industry that you’re in? is it just for another pay check, or do you care about serving the people you serve with what you sell?

The reason this is important, is because we’re just human. And because we’re just human, we will at the best of times become unmotivated.

It’s easier to stay motivated when you have a purpose or have clarity on what you do what you do.

This doesn’t necessarily have to be tied to your product or service either.

You may be in sales to fuel or fund something a lot bigger – such as providing an excellent life for your family, setting yourself up for future investing, or a better lifestyle.

Get clarity on your goals, and more importantly, why you want to reach them. This can be a game changer to keep you motivated and will help you improve your sales.

Related article: How To Set Goals The Right Way

Tip #3 – Know What Your Potential Client Is Buying

Contrary to what a lot of people think – your potential clients are not buying your products or services.

Instead – they are buying what it will mean once they own what you sell.

This is a crucial tip to help you improve your sales, because once you understand what it is they actually want to buy, you can communicate this message in your branding, sales interviews and conversations, and much more.

People don’t buy features and benefits.

They will what it will mean from a pleasure point of view, once they reap the rewards of what it is you’re selling.

As the famous quote goes, “People don’t buy a drill – they buy a hole in the wall”.

Related article: Why People Buy

Tip #4 – Use A Sales Process

One of the biggest tips that’ll be an absolute game changer for you and dramatically improve your sales, is to stop winging it with your sales conversations – and instead, use a sales process.

A sales process is a step by step system and structure to use that’ll give your sales consistency and guide your clients on a positive journey.

The sales process gets rid of the ‘what should I ask next’ approach and guides you on exactly what to focus on to win more sales.

Our flagship sales process termed The 5% Sales Blueprint; comprises of the following crucial steps.

These include:

Building rapport
Setting pre-frames
Asking the right questions
Deep diving and finding their why
Finding pain
Leaning about pleasure and their desires
Handling money
Presenting
Elegantly handling objections
Asking for the sale in a non-pushy way

Using these steps will help you improve your sales, because it’ll not only give you certainty – but it’ll position you as a specialist as well.

Further reading: The Sales Process – A Step By Step Guide

Improve Your Sales Tip #5 – Dress To Impress

First impressions do in fact count and dressing for the right occasion can help you improve your sales.

Depending on what you’re selling; people want to be served by a professional who looks like they know what they’re doing and takes pride in their craft.

If you don’t pay attention to your own detail and dress code – how can you expect them to trust that you’ll pay attention when it’s time to deliver on what they buy?

When dressing for sales, don’t overdo it either. We recommend dressing to build and enhance rapport, as this is your intended outcome.

Related article: How To Dress For Sales Success

Improve Your Sales Tip #6 – Qualify Early

If you want to improve your sales, then it is absolutely crucial to ensure you’re meeting with people who qualify for your product or service.

So many Sales Professionals have conversations and interviews with people who either wouldn’t benefit from your product or service or have no funding or intention of actually buying.

When qualifying potential clients, we recommend that you do it early, and that you use an acronym and system called BANT.

BANT stands for:

Budget
Authority
Need
Time frame

You can learn more about using BANT successfully by reading the article below.

Further reading: BANT In Sales – How Does It Work?

Improve Your Sales Tip #7 – Don’t Present Too Early

A common mistake made by Sales Professionals, is that they present their offer way too early.

As per our article in Entrepreneur; premature presentation can dramatically hurt your sales, because it positions you as a commodity (and just another salesperson).

Instead – we recommend approaching your sales with a consultative approach; meaning you learn about what it is they’re trying to achieve, what pain they want to escape, and then bringing the gap to that outcome with your product or service.

Doing so will help you improve your sales because you’ll be positioning yourself from a place of empathy, and as someone who truly cares for what it is they want to achieve.

Too many people pitch too early; which overall positions them in a way that looks like they want to make a quick sale – which hurts their sales efforts instead.

Be patient and guide them to where they need to be by asking the right questions.

Improve Your Sales Tip #8 – Find Pain

If you want to improve your sales consistently, you’ll need to become a master at finding pain points and what it is they’re moving away from.

Humans are emotional – and we buy for emotional reasons.

We then justify our emotional buying decisions with logic.

People buy to move away from pain and move towards pleasure.

What pain points do your product or service alleviate?

Furthermore – it’s crucial to ask questions that uncover pain, so you can later present how your product or service solves each of those pain points.

Learning how to do so will definitely help you improve your sales conversations and closing rate.

Related article: Pain Points & Sales – Your Ultimate Guide

Tip #9 – Handle Objections With A Structure

As per another one of our articles in Entrepreneur; many Sales Professionals try to use cheesy sales scripts to handle objections.

This old school sell me this pen or always be closing mentality hurts your sales, because your potential client can see it being used a mile away.

It breaks trust – and positions you as someone trying to manipulate them into the sale.

Instead – we recommend using a structure instead. By using a structure, you can easily remember to overcome any sales objection, and do so without sounding like you’re using some outdated script.

By using a structure, it also means you can slightly tweak it depending on who you’re speaking with.

Doing so will ensure your conversation remains natural, and that you won’t break rapport.

Improve Your Sales Tip #10 – Present Correctly

As we’ve already touched on slightly in this article, to improve your sales – you do need to present your product or service correctly.

Many people pitch their product or service with the hope that something sticks, and that that perhaps they’ll be interested and buy.

If we were in the hope business – we’d better off playing roulette.

Instead – use carefully guided sales probing questions that’ll help you build rapport, learn pain, learn their desires, and even handle objections.

By doing this, you can find out how they want to be presented too early – and then you can present your product or service in a way that solves each of their individual needs.

By bridging the gap of what they want to achieve to your product or service, you’ll improve your sales because you’ll be speaking to their pain points, and overall outcomes and desire.

Further reading: 10 x Effective Sales Presentation Tips You Need To Use