How to Work Smarter, Not Harder in Sales

Selling smart is the ultimate hack when it comes to achieving higher conversions and making more profits as a salesperson. To set yourself up for success, you must work smarter in sales. Establish goals that will motivate you to work harder but, more importantly, push you to adopt smarter strategies than the average sales rep.

It may so happen that you are working hard and sticking to timelines, yet the sales numbers are average. This is when you should work smarter in sales and assess quality versus quantity. Just find a smarter way to approach prospective customers.

It is equally important to work smarter in sales as it is to work harder. The best way is to combine both and use a dynamic strategy that can adapt to the market and its requirement.

In this article, we are going to look at the following areas to improve our sales:

- Metrics to Work Smarter in Sales
- Work Smarter in Sales, Not Harder
- Know Your USP and Stick to It
- Establish a Genuine Connection with Your Customers
- Highlight Your Brand's Vision to Work Smarter in Sales
- Focus More on the Experience

How to Work Smarter in Sales to Achieve Higher Conversions

Cut Out Additional Tasks to Work Smarter in Sales
Reduce Cold Calls and Ask for References
Highlight Results, Not Features
Make Bigger Deals to Work Smarter in Sales
Give Prospects More Options
Communicate Through Insights to Work Smarter in Sales
Address Questions and Concerns
Have Multiple Plans to Work Smarter in Sales
Dive in with All Your Heart
Combine Organization, Analysis, and Drive

Metrics to Work Smarter in Sales

Better sales results can be achieved if you work smarter in sales and stick to some core principles. These are simple, measurable aspects that elevate your sales pipeline and make you a high achiever without putting in hours of mindless work.

The core sales pillars or metrics are:

The number of deals you are able to crack; measured in numbers
The bigger these deals are; measured in monetary value
The higher percentage of deals you can successfully close; measured as a rate or percentage
The lesser time you take to onboard a customer; measured in time
The higher your profit or revenue generated is; again measured in monetary value

The amount of hard work you put in must be countered with your strategy to work smarter in sales. Needless to say, some of these aspects require pure hard work whereas the others require a smart approach and presentation strategy.

Work Smarter in Sales, Not Harder

Admittedly, the easiest way to fulfill targets and make a name for yourself is through hard work. And if you are new to this field, that is definitely the way to go. However, as you gain wisdom and experience, you must find easier ways to work smarter in sales.

Always remember that more deals come from hard work, but higher conversions come from smart work. A smart salesperson has the ability to set goals with the right timeline and priorities. They also know whether to work smarter in sales by going for bigger deals or making several small deals to achieve their target.

A good strategy to work smarter in sales is to benchmark your progress by industry standards, competitors’ performances, and revenue earned. There are a few key aspects of working smarter in sales, not harder.

Know Your USP and Stick to It

Identify the Unique Selling Point of your product and highlight it while making a sales pitch. This will help you to work smarter in sales and underline how your offering is beneficial to the customer, rather than giving a generic description of its features.

Establish a Genuine Connection with Your Customers

Your customers will trust you more if what you say and do is genuine. This will lead to more positive reviews, good recommendations, a widening customer base, and thus more sales. Salespeople who understand this always work smarter in sales and succeed in building a relationship with the customer, rather than hurrying along to close the deal faster.

Highlight Your Brand’s Vision to Work Smarter in Sales

The key value of your brand must never be compromised in a bid to make more sales. There is a reason your existing customers have stuck to your brand for an extended period of time. And if you ignore the brand’s vision just to lure customers, chances are you will end up losing more business instead. That is not how you work smarter in sales.

Focus More on the Experience

Your aim should be to sell an experience, not a product. It is an old strategy to stick to the product’s features or functions while talking to the customer. To work smarter in sales, you must extend the conversation to the customer’s needs and explain how your offering can solve their issues.

Collaborative selling is a great example of this aspect, where you work smarter in sales by asking questions to the prospect, discussing solutions, and arriving at a suitable resolution mutually.

All these aspects help you to skip mindless slogging, work smarter in sales, and make higher conversions. However, there are no definite ways to predict whether a particular strategy will work for everyone.

Ways to work smarter in sales differ with the industry, targets, and selling approach. Thus, you must always be on your feet and analyze your strategy and its results.

That being said, there are a few tips that help to work smarter in sales, regardless of what you are selling.

How to Work Smarter in Sales to Achieve Higher Conversions

There are better ways to work smarter in sales and approach sales targets other than making numerous cold calls and sending multiple emails. The right content can start conversations and generate leads that may eventually lead to conversions.

One of the best ways to work smarter in sales is to portray yourself as an advisor or educator, rather than a salesperson. This helps you to close deals in less time and reach buyers more easily.

Another foolproof way to work smarter in sales is to increase your closing ratio through various techniques. A closing ratio is the number of sales you successfully close compared to the number of opportunities offered. You can also work towards closing bigger deals so that the average size of each sale contributes more effectively to achieving your target.

All these strategies can be combined to work smarter in sales. You can arrive at the personal solution, based on your product or company. Additionally, you must keep certain tips and tricks in mind while creating a smart plan for your sales pitch.

Cut Out Additional Tasks to Work Smarter in Sales

The primary goal of a salesperson is to sell products or services. But if you spend a lot of time on additional tasks such as data collection, organizing, maintaining records, etc., you take valuable time away from your main focus.

The right balance can be achieved by delegating these tasks to someone else and focusing all your time on pursuing leads and building strategies to increase conversions. This way, you can work smarter in sales and also have the perfect work-life balance without stressing too much about your targets or missing out on important life events.

Getting adequate downtime is crucial to increase productivity and work smarter in sales. And when you are at your job, work towards it wholeheartedly. Take time with customers, communicate and understand their pain points to work smarter in sales.

Reduce Cold Calls and Ask for References

Making random cold calls seldom leads to a sale. Instead of making numerous cold calls every day, work smarter in sales by asking for introductions or references to increase business. Set a goal for asking a certain number of references regularly, like one each week, five a month, or so. No matter how easy or tough your goal is, work towards it consistently.

To work smarter in sales, you must have a clear picture of the steps required in the entire process. There is a difference between suspects and prospects. Instead of blindly calling suspects, focus on gathering prospects and following up with the right leads to work smarter in sales. Set up criteria and check against them to analyze whether a lead is worth spending time on.

Highlight Results, Not Features

The traditional approach towards sales tells you to list the features and functionalities of your offering. However, that approach has stopped working in recent times. Although it is important to inform your buyers about the details of your product, your goal must be to work smarter in sales and create an experience that will leave an impression.

Instead of highlighting features, highlight the results you can create for clients. This increases the value and builds confidence in your brand. When you work smarter in sales, take the buyer’s priorities into account, and base your pitch accordingly, it is bound to close sales faster.

Make Bigger Deals to Work Smarter in Sales

Bigger sales help you achieve targets with less hustle. For instance, if you have a target of $100,000, you can either make 5 deals of $20,000 or 20 deals of $5,000. In the first case, if you put genuine efforts into finalizing 5 deals, you can achieve your target easily. It is statistically more difficult to make 20 successful deals in a short time.

Both these approaches result in equal revenue, but the former needs less effort, time, and work. If you have the opportunity, try to work smarter in sales and target bigger deals, rather than trying to sell more products.

Give Prospects More Options

Your sales pitch should not aim to sell one specific product to customers. If so, it limits the customer and immediately turns them off if they are not interested in that product. Instead, provide multiple options and highlight the benefits of each to work smarter in sales.

For instance, one product can be moderately good and within budget, one can be just right, and another can be higher in price but with better features. The high-end option will create value, the low-budget one would be a convenient choice, and the most suitable one would provide a benchmark to judge the others.

This way, the buyer gets context and can compare them to arrive at a conclusion. You can work smarter in sales this way, get more conversions by offering multiple options, and also stop customers from moving to your competitors to look for similar products.

Communicate Through Insights to Work Smarter in Sales

Through informed insights, you have the opportunity to educate buyers and help them to make better decisions. Especially if the purchase is enterprise-level, insights can sway the deal in your favor. To work smarter in sales, present the disadvantages of not taking action and tell them how they can lose time and money by not closing the deal.

The aim should be to outweigh the risks or burden of buying your product when compared to the losses of not buying it. Also, emphasize the benefits of buying your offering over your competitors.

The content sources that can provide insights to work smarter in sales are:

White papers
Statistics
Research
Case studies
Proven benefits from users
Data trends

To work smarter in sales, these insights can be shared in person, on social media, via email, or in presentations or proposals.

Address Questions and Concerns

The most popular way to work smarter in sales is through collaborative selling. It teaches you to listen to customer queries, address their concerns, and find a suitable solution in collaboration with the prospective buyer. This is a great strategy to work smarter in sales and gain maximum profits.

Before addressing a prospect, it is advisable to make a list of FAQs and think of answers to them. This makes it easy for the sales team to prepare a bank of information that can be accessed as and when needed. Content forms like these help you to work smarter in sales, like product information sheets, brochures, talk tracks, videos, etc.

This content helps you to offer insight, provide personalized customer support, and align your goals with the needs of the prospect. If the customer feels satisfied with your answers, they are more likely to close the deal quickly and return to you for further purchases.

Have Multiple Plans to Work Smarter in Sales

Since sales involve dealing with real people, the outcome can be very subjective. Thus, you must have multiple plans to fall back on, if Plan A does not work. To work smarter in sales, think about possible scenarios and have Plan B, C, and so on, to pitch to the customer if they do not connect with your primary pitch.

Working diligently at one deal at a time can lead to more conversions, rather than pursuing multiple leads at once, with a generic approach towards each. A smart worker always researches and makes a sustainable plan to close a deal, that they can apply in other cases as well, to ensure a positive outcome.

Dive in with All Your Heart

As said earlier, the chances of closing deals become higher when you focus on one deal wholeheartedly, instead of running multiple threads together and not focusing fully on any of them. Do not just skim over basic information while preparing for a presentation. Instead, work smarter in sales by diving deep and becoming an expert at what you are selling.

Knowing more about your product inspires faith in customers. When they observe that you can answer all their questions convincingly, they will feel surer about choosing you over your competitors. Don’t hurry along to close a deal; work smarter in sales by building a relationship with your customer that can be leveraged later.

Combine Organization, Analysis, and Drive

A smart salesperson is organized, analyzes his past deals to find patterns, and is driven towards their goal. Keeping data and content organized saves you precious time in searching for information every time you make a presentation and helps you to work smarter in sales.

Similarly, keeping track of past sales to analyze what went right and what can be improved helps you to evolve your strategy, achieve a better closing ratio, and work smarter in sales. You should be aware of your strengths and weaknesses while chasing a lead.

Another crucial aspect is a drive towards success. If you are not driven enough, you cannot achieve great things. This drive will sustain you for the long term and push you to work smarter in sales by updating strategies to make them better and more refined.

How Deskera Can Assist You?

Whether you are a sales manager or running your own business, there are tons of duties and responsibilities that you have to fulfill. Using the Deskera CRM system, you can manage your contacts, leads and sales deals. You can use the CRM system to manage all customer data and manage your leads, sales negotiations and deals.

Doing so will help you to save the time taken in transferring customer data between the different systems. Having a good CRM system will help you manage your financial and sales reports and be prepared to kick-off your meetings.

Deskera can also assist you with real-time updates about your business like cash flow status, customer satisfaction, inventory management, sales, purchases, purchase orders, customer tickets, customer satisfaction, managing leads, revenues, profit, and loss statements, and balance sheets.

Moreover, it would also help in integrating sales methodology across different platforms onto one system so that you have a consolidated list for email campaigns, leads management, and sales pipeline to mention a few.

It will also help you to sync between your orders, payments, taxes, refunds, product variants, sending out invoices and reminders, facilitating invoice management, and even undertaking follow-ups and advertisement campaigns.

Such a consolidated platform will help you to improve your sales through building effective sales compensation plans and also facilitate faster and well-informed decision-making. It will help you in strengthening your opportunities and being braced for the threats.

Deskera books and Deskera CRM will also be able to ensure the highest customer satisfaction and thereby an increase in net revenues and net profits.

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Final Thoughts

Sales is a dynamic industry that requires constant attention and high motivation to succeed. In such a scenario, if you put all your efforts into working hard, chances are you will burn out sooner and fail to excel in performance. Instead, adopt these smart strategies to work smarter in sales, alongside taking care of your physical and mental well-being.

Key Takeaways

While working hard is a good approach in any field, the sales arena requires smart work, along with hard work, to achieve higher conversions and more profits as a salesperson. The right way to succeed is to work smarter in sales and set attainable goals and smart strategies to reach them.

Doing this will ensure you bring in high sales numbers without slogging yourself to exhaustion. You can work smarter in sales to fetch great results, even in scenarios where hard work cannot guarantee high numbers.

The metrics to work smarter in sales, which measure success and elevate your sales pipeline are:

The number of deals you are able to crack; measured in numbers
The bigger these deals are; measured in monetary value
The higher percentage of deals you can successfully close; measured as a rate or percentage
The lesser time you take to onboard a customer; measured in time
The higher your profit or revenue generated is; again measured in monetary value

Balancing hard work with smart strategies can help you bring in better results in all the above metrics and set you apart from your competitors while working half as hard as them.

You must work smarter in sales with the help of the following aspects: