5 Quick Tips To Improve Your Sales Process

When you think about sales, you likely think about external conversations. But your team’s internal processes are just as crucial to closing deals as your approach to lead interaction.

Here’s how to build a bulletproof sales process that’ll help you win more deals and close them faster.

1. Clean Up Data

First and foremost, you need to ensure you’re going after the right people. A clean CRM is essential. It’s your single source of contact details, lead status and communication history. When you invest in a smart platform that can automatically sync your contact lists across various email accounts, you don’t have to spend time maintaining your address book and can focus on winning more sales.

If you go with an integrated CRM built for service businesses, accurate contact details, notes and sale history will be accessible across all departments. 

2. Categorize Leads

Once you’ve done your housekeeping, you’ll need to assign each contact a status — Active or Lost, for example. You can choose to assign anything from a star rating to a dollar value to identify your warmest leads and best points of contact at any given moment. 

Clear categorization also prevents other team members from unintentionally reaching out to a person whose status has already changed. In Accelo, changing an opportunity’s status can trigger custom automations to generate task assignments for the next steps, such as quote creation.

3. Assign Follow-Up

Even if you know follow-up is important, it’s common to get distracted in a busy sales environment. And you’re not alone: 48% of salespeople don’t even follow up once. But that’s an expensive mistake. If a high-priority project pops up and you neglect your usual pattern of outreach, you could be losing potential revenue. 

Sometimes, you just need a reminder. Other times, it might be best to pass a lead off to a coworker. Assigning leads based on availability can improve your sales process by helping your team keep up and setting a strong precedent for long-term customer relationships.

READ MORE: How To Market and Sell Your Services Like a Human

4. Sync Communication History

Frequently communicating is a sales best practice, but doing so successfully means keeping close track of your interactions with many people at once. You need all communications — to and from anyone on your team — to be accessible in one place, without the hassle of manual entry.  

Accelo makes digging through endless email threads a thing of the past. A user favorite, the Activity Stream syncs all emails sent to a given contact or company in one convenient feed. 

READ NEXT: 5 Hacks for Effortlessly Selling Your Services

5. Automate Workflows

Now that you’ve won the sale and started to clean up your internal processes, it’s time to identify and automate the repetitive steps. This will require deciding on a type of workflow that fits your business model and sales approach, then finding the right technology to help you execute each stage automatically.

Not only does automation save time, but it minimizes the risk of errors and oversight. Tighten up your sales process by replacing the mundane.

Get Familiar With Scripts To Improve Your Sales Process

Regardless of the size or experience level of your sales team, alignment is critical. One easy way to develop your own sales process is to take inspiration from those that have already been proven to work. However, some approaches to sales are more suited for a product-based business. We've compiled three recommended sales scripts that work when you're selling a service. Try them out and track results to adapt them over time!

About the Author

Chelsea Williams is Senior Copywriter at Accelo, where she shares unique insights with service professionals and tells user stories via blogs, eBooks, industry reports and more. She has over 15 years of B2B and B2C writing experience — primarily in tech, sales, education and healthcare. Chelsea is an AWAI-certified Master Copywriter trained in brand storytelling and microcopy.