Executing stellar sales campaigns relies on meticulous pre-sales planning. Ensuring that your teams have sufficient operational support is crucial for long-term growth. It’s not only about closing sales. This is why it’s so important to have a solid sales operations plan.
You set the foundation for your future sales during the pre-sales planning stage. Before you send your team to the field, you need to prepare them with a winning strategy that delivers results.
What is pre-sales?
Pre-sales lays the foundation for sales teams to succeed. It refers to all of the efforts that take place before the close of a sale.
The pre-sales process encompasses prospecting, qualifying leads, researching, identifying the correct positioning for customers and renewing deals.
Pre-sales is an important part of of your digital sales enablement strategy, facilitating the closing of more sales over time.
Pre-sales tasks can include:
- Prospecting
- Making discovery calls
- Performing product demos
- Qualifying leads
- Drafting proposals
What you need is to remove unnecessary and problematic occurrences from the sales pipeline. Therefore ensuring that pre-sales support will manage the prospecting and qualifying, and that sales closers only work with opportunities who are sales ready, is a key part.
5 tips for planning your pre-sales strategy
Here are five tips to help ensure that your sales team starts off on the right foot to achieve optimal results.
1. Adapt an advanced mobiles sales enablement solution
Today’s business is done by tech-savvy employees in a climate that is more mobile than ever before. It is essential to arm your team with a leading mobile sales enablement solution that distributes the most relevant content to your sales force in real time, giving them a competitive edge. Mobility gives your field reps access to pertinent customer data from your CRM and other back end systems that play an important role in engaging prospects and customers—never leaving your reps or your prospects and customers without answers.
How are you able to access all of this information in real time? When you have a leading mobile sales enablement solution, it is cloud-based, supports multiple devices and easily integrates into daily sales and marketing operations. This means less ramp-up time, less maintenance, yet more on-demand access and time to sell.
2. Know your target customer
A successful marketer doesn’t just attract anyone; it is crucial to attract the right people. While marketers collecting copious conversions is the aim, if those conversions do not fit a specific customer profile, they often yield few qualified results. Successful product launches take a scientific approach during product development, and continue that disciplined approach in real-time as targets shift and change.
Once you have laid the infrastructure for tracking and analytics, maximize your efficiency by going a step further to integrate real-time feedback from the field from the sales and marketing teams on the ground.
This helps marketers gain even more insights into what is working and what is not. To make that a reality, ensure your mobile sales enablement platform is integrated in real-time for improved data accuracy and availability. This helps improve bidirectional communications to give the marketing team the full understanding and messaging for your target prospects. In turn, marketing can arm your sales team with the right content that impacts your bottom line.
3. Know everything there is to know about your prospects before the first meeting
Prospective customers expect that a field sales rep will have answers to their initial questions and access to relevant content and data at their fingertips. Your account managers should have the answers and marketing assets to engage targets. That information should be relayed to your sales reps, preferably with a sales enablement solution. Integration into relevant back-end systems allows that information to be delivered to the device on-demand, and empowers the field rep to react and engage on the fly.
4. Immerse yourself in the industries you serve
If most of your customers are concentrated in a few, specific industries, make sure that your marketers are focused on making your sales teams experts in those fields.
Engage your current and target customers outside of formal sales presentations and meetings. Join industry associations and attend networking events. If you make an effort to be part of an industry’s community, you will create solid professional and personal connections. Being an active participant in professional communities adds to your credibility as well as your expertise. Before you know it, you will do much of your pre-sales planning without realizing.
5. Practice and nail down your sales pitch
Don’t take any shortcuts. Your sales presentations during meetings tell customers everything they need to know about you and the way you do business. The first interactions with prospective sales targets must demonstrate how you do business and how you solve your customers’ problems. Don’t let their eyes glaze over with a dated, mind-numbing PowerPoint that will leave your customer with a negative impression.
While using a sales enablement solution that provides interactive presentation tools is absolutely necessary, you need more to engage your audience. Plan everything that you’re going to discuss down to the smallest detail. Get a sample audience to throw questions your way. Remember, the only way to get to Carnegie Hall is to practice, practice, practice. You want to have a presentation that will require your customer to explicitly request engagement at various points during the presentation.
Engage your prospect. Remember, if you are bored giving a pitch, your audience probably will be, too.
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