Sales and Fulfillment
Implementing Sales Solutions as Best Practices for Success
A solid sales strategy is the foundation driving revenue and enabling success. It goes beyond simply pushing your products or services, needing a more comprehensive outlook to ensure sales performance optimisation. From understanding your ideal customer persona and building and training your sales team to managing the available sales technology and analysing data for sales forecasts, each step must be perfect for effective sales funnel management.
Why optimise sales funnel management?
An effective sales strategy cannot focus only on actively selling the products or services but must encompass the entire sales funnel, from awareness to action. Focusing on sales process improvement, including key pillars of strategy and execution, tools and technology, team development, content, and performance management, can help you get a well-oiled sales operations machine.
Optimising your sales funnel management with such a thorough outlook can help you achieve:
- Enhanced decision-making effectiveness with data-driven insights
- Improved team performance
- Enhanced targeting effectiveness and conversion rates
- Optimised resource allocation and budgeting
- Increased customer retention
- Improved inter- and intra-team collaboration
Eight best practices for sales process improvement
Improving your sales process and optimising the sales funnel management can help you optimise your performance and drive revenue as you ensure a consistent brand experience for your target customers. Here are eight best practices that can help you prioritise efficiency and build a company culture that empowers sales process improvement:
Define business goals
The first thing you must do is understand the goals you want to achieve and define a mission statement. This needs collaboration between sales leaders, various business stakeholders, and the sales team to ensure everyone has a clear understanding of the business goals. Building on this, you can understand potential opportunities and pain points to establish clear policies and SOPs.
Define the “ideal buyer profile”
Buyers have to be at the centre of your sales process and strategy. Understanding your customers and knowing what they want is crucial to ensure you deliver a consistent brand experience to everyone. This starts with segmenting your target customer base and building the "ideal buyer persona". Assessing the key characteristics of your customers and understanding the differences between different customer groups can help you define this persona. Then, you can craft the customer experience you want to deliver to every customer segment and design sales funnel management strategies accordingly.
Identify KPIs and sales metrics
You cannot measure your sales performance without relevant KPIs and sales metrics, such as revenue, sales velocity, year-to-year growth, conversion rates, or customer retention rates. Your business goals and the expected customer experience will guide the selection of the relevant KPIs for sales performance monitoring and optimisation.
Champion the right sales enablement tools
Effective sales enablement – equipping and training your sales team to achieve their targets – is a critical element of sales process improvement. Selecting and investing in the right sales enablement tools is crucial to ensure visibility across the sales cycle, elevating the sales team’s performance by connecting them effectively and effortlessly with the relevant stakeholders.
Foster cross-departmental collaboration
The sales team cannot succeed as a stand-alone siloed unit. Collaboration with different departments, such as marketing and product development, can empower the sales department to work more efficiently and improve sales performance.
Customise content for each stage of the buying journey
Knowing your customers and mapping their journey can help you better connect with and help your customers. Building custom content tailored to each stage of the buying journey can help you reach the customers at the right time in the right format to not only enhance the buying experience but to improve conversion rates as well.
Offer training and development opportunities to sales teams
The advent of sales technology has changed how businesses approach sales funnel management, with modern sales services playing a key role in success. Access to training and development opportunities can help the sales team stay on top of emerging tools and industry best practices to better serve the customers and improve sales performance.
Measure and optimise your sales performance
Periodically measuring your sales performance and revisiting your sales strategy is critical for sales performance optimisation. Such regular monitoring can help you identify any gaps and opportunities for sales process improvement and empower your sales team.
How can Infosys BPM help improve sales funnel management?
Modern sales services play a critical role in facilitating success, empowering organisations to leverage next-gen technology to improve their sales strategies and performance. Infosys BPM catalog management services support the entire order-to-cash cycle with its diverse technology landscape. With specialised services encompassing master data management, order receipt and entry, order administration and fulfilment, customer invoicing and billing, and order analytics, we can help you standardise processes, deliver a uniform customer experience, enhance scalability, and optimise sales funnel management.
