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2020 was a year full of events that greatly influenced both buyers and business owners. The customers became more selective, carefully analyzing their costs, while the businesses had to react to these changes, inventing new, more flexible ways to promote their sales and recalling old but effective methods of improving sales.
This is how new effective techniques, methods, and strategies are born, and this is how they turn into trends, so let’s talk about the top 6 sales trends of 2021, that you can follow to stay at the top of the game!
1. Provide sales tools when they’re in need
Using sales productivity tools is not just a trend, but a necessity: implementing them into your business environment helps you to gain a significant competitive advantage.
Sales tools are vital to maximize your team’s productivity and make their job much easier:
- reps get the ability to track important information on accounts and deals, keeping the pipeline moving, organizing important data, measuring their progress, automating tedious tasks, etc.;
- as for sales leaders, they get the opportunity to track the progress of each rep with clients, or leads, or time spent selling, or closed deals, etc., step in the process when necessary, and improve the sales team’s performance metrics.
If you want to make the most of progressive sales tools, you should choose the right ones that allow you to address specific issues of your business. Today, there are quite a lot of different categories of such solutions out there: CRM, sales/market intelligence, lead handling and processing, analytics and reporting, sales training, and sales automation and integration.
Until you fully test a tool, you will not be able to say something for sure about it. And instead of testing, for example, sales analytics and reporting tools like Clari, HubSpot Sales Hub, People.ai, Aviso, InsightSquared, and others to find the solution that suits you best, you can save your time and effort and use a single all-in-one platform.
One of such solutions is Revenue Grid, 1st fully dedicated guided selling platform that nudges sales teams with step-by-step guidance towards actions that bring the best results, shows deals at risk and prioritizes tactics with the greatest impact. This AI-powered, Salesforce native all-in-one platform offers multiple features and advanced Salesforce integrations for analyzing, executing, and leading your growth strategy.
It can successfully replace many aforementioned tools, providing more comprehensive and advanced tools for risk-based sales forecasting, contextual revenue signals, and conversational intelligence.
Also, Revenue Grid offers advanced Salesforce integrations, such as Revenue Inbox, that can successfully replace Salesforce Inbox. Revenue Inbox allows you to automatically capture data according to your needs, view and update Salesforce data directly from Inbox, get the right insights on every email, best-in-class calendar synchronization, delegated calendar, recurring event support, and many more.
2. Get creative
It may sound a bit strange or not important, but…As markets are getting more crowded and competition, as we all know, breeds innovation, the ability to be different from others is the key to success in 2021.
It doesn’t matter how hard you work to keep your business afloat and motivate your sales reps to meet their quotas. If you use the same methods as your competitors, sooner or later there will be someone who will innovate and leave everyone else behind. So work smarter, not harder!
As a salesperson, you should do things that will dramatically distinguish you from the others. If it makes sense in a particular situation, pay attention to what others do and do exactly the opposite! That’s how you will leave a lasting impression.
Most salespeople simply copy each other’s behavior, or even worse — they use tips and strategies they’ve found on the Web without changing them even a bit! So, even the tiniest bit of personality and character in your sales strategy can help you stand out from the crowd.
3. Use value-based selling strategies
About 25-50% of deals get stalled or lead to nothing. And the longer the prospect gets stuck at a certain stage in the pipeline, the less likely the deal will ever be closed.
This may sound strange, but you should stop trying to sell if you want to sell more. To get things moving, try to add value to your sales conversation with the most relevant content and right insights. Sales enablement software can help you successfully cope with this task by offering content and messaging based on the particular sales situation.
Value-based selling strategies will help you to tailor the benefits of your product to your prospects’ needs.
4. Dive into social selling
Social selling is a new approach to the sales process that allows you to stay on the same wavelength with your customers for a long time. If you do everything right, the relationship between you and your customers transforms into something more than just “buying and selling”, since they involve trust and deeper mutual understanding.
For reps that do invest in SM, 64% of them hit their team quota, compared to only 49% of reps hitting their team quota that don’t use social media.
Try using the hottest social selling techniques:
- social listening through monitoring posts;
- posting fascinating relevant content;
- LinkedIn groups activity.
5. Embrace AI to stay afloat
Analyzing your actions helps you understand what you are doing well and what needs to be changed. Based on data, salespeople can understand which strategies work best, make smarter decisions, and achieve greater success.
With the introduction of AI, sales analytics has become more accurate, simpler, and faster. AI forecasting boasts a high-precision that helps to save businesses from failure.
Today, you can successfully use AI in improving the following sales tasks:
- collecting and interpreting buying trends data;
- making offers based on recent purchases;
- forecasting buying and selling trends.
6. One video is worth a thousand words.
In 2021, it’s time to move away from long treatises and give your potential clients 24 frames per second of useful information!
88% of video marketers are satisfied with the ROI of their efforts on SM. And, as a well-established marketing trend, the video is believed to make its breakthrough in the world of sales.
Read the following lines carefully:
- the effectiveness of video outreach is astounding: if a subject line contains the word “video”, the viewers are 8 times more likely to check it out;
- besides emails, videos can be incorporated into any platform;
- video helps to strengthen your value-based offer;
- video tracking allows you to clearly understand what content your users have watched and what parts of the video they skipped;
- video can help you make your follow-ups stand out!
