How Top Performers Always Meet Their Quotas

Today’s sales landscape is more complex than ever. Buyers demand personalized, tailored solutions. Sales cycles have lengthened. And technology has revolutionized sales processes and data analysis. The question is: How can a sales rep come out on top? Here’s the answer.

Understanding Today’s Sales Shifts

With corporate budgets in a stranglehold and small teams carrying heavy loads, sales has never been more challenging. A sweeping analysis by Ebsta examined 4.2 million opportunities, 1 million hours of conversations, 530 companies, and $54 billion in revenue to understand the transformation across mid-size B2B companies. Unsurprisingly, deals are taking longer, while ticket sizes and the odds of closing are shrinking. In particular:

• Win rates are down 18% compared to previous years.
• Sales cycles have increased 16%.
• Deal values have decreased 21% in light of cautious spending.

The well has dried up, so to speak. Many companies used to be flush with funds for lead and customer acquisition. Operating with a “grow at all costs” mindset – investing in ads, content, PR, and other marketing and sales programs – was the norm in business. Unfortunately, companies now have to be more thoughtful and creative about where they’re investing, and most have shifted to an efficient growth mentality.

Efficacy Across the Sales Process

Being successful in sales isn’t just about your winning smile and personality. It’s about the strategies you use across every opportunity. And if you win the deal, you’ll win your customer’s trust.

The Ebsta report highlights the importance of maximizing efficiency at five key points in the sales process:

1. Pipeline Generation

Prioritizing the right opportunities improves your sales efforts’ effectiveness. Top performers who home in on their pipeline and target accounts and personas with whom they have a proven track record drive sales velocity – closing more than three times faster. The secret? Using data to guide you.

2. Qualification

Know who the key players are with any prospect, and engage them early. Successful sales reps usually follow a set methodology, rigorously qualifying prospects to improve their chances of closing opportunities at the discovery stage.

3. Handling Objections

Did you know more than three-quarters of missed opportunities featured unresolved objections raised early in the sales cycle? Reps who can anticipate and resolve issues related to budget, priorities, and competitors during qualification can build compelling business cases to address them and quickly progress through deals.

4. Relationship Management

Engaging the right persona(s) at the right time sets the stage for your long-term relationship with them. If you engage key stakeholders before the solution is presented, you’re golden. Deals that are won usually feature more activity during discovery and negotiation, whereas those that are lost have a flurry of activity early on to convince prospects – then drop off because of a lack of response.

5. Deal Management

Taking too long to qualify your leads? Those deals are more likely to slip. Guiding buyers to the right solution instead of waiting for them to decide speeds up your sales cycle. Successful reps can maintain momentum by regularly updating opportunities and defining next steps. If you want even more of an edge, build relationships inside and outside the sales process to become a preferred vendor.

Attributes of Top Sales Performers

Remember, sales isn’t static – it evolves continuously. Reps who drive the most business do so by going beyond tried-and-true sales processes. For example:

1. Use tech to pinpoint personas and deals.

CRM tools identify the most likely deals to close, helping reps drive revenue quickly. Tools from providers such as HubSpot and Ebsta can identify deals and bring others to the surface that may not have been followed up on or that have delays.

2. Incorporate a multi-threading strategy.

One point of contact isn’t always enough. With multi-threading, instead of talking to one lead, you talk to their colleague, their boss, or someone on another team – and expand the conversation. Deals using a multi-threading approach tend to close at a higher rate than deals with a single point of contact.

3. Leverage guided selling strategies.

Sometimes reps are overwhelmed by the amount of data they have to go through. Guided selling tools help top performers isolate deals to focus on, prospects to follow up with, and deals that are slipping. You can enhance your sales intelligence and forecasting and monitor performance by pulling in deal pipelines, contacts, company information, and conversational intelligence.

Guided selling provides insights such as conversion rates and how long deals have been in various stages, but it also identifies top reps so other reps can understand and replicate their behaviors and drive more deals.

4. Harness AI efficiencies.

AI is changing the landscape for sales – transforming the makeup of teams and requiring new skill sets. Those who adapt stand to gain an edge in both money and time savings. For instance, AI tools allow sales reps to perform research about companies using conversational queries to pull information together instead of investing in expensive research packages. Plus, AI can handle a lot of the minutiae of your daily processes, freeing you to focus on higher-value activities while the “smartest intern in the world” works in the background.

Find Your Sales Edge

Don’t be stifled by stalled deals. Try a new approach to amp up your sales efforts. From using technology to refine personas to shifting your engagement strategy, deploying effective tactics can help you climb to the top of the sales leaderboard.

Paul Schmidt is a director of services strategy at SmartBug Media and is based in Colorado. He oversees the product road map, partner development, and customer marketing. He previously worked at HubSpot, helping develop inbound strategies for more than 200 clients.