The secret to getting ahead: Make the most of digital sales leads with these five tips from Parker Software
27/01/2017 Parker Software
Author Mark Twain once said, "The secret to getting ahead is getting started." While he is indeed correct that you'll never get ahead at anything if you don't start, there's a little more to success when it comes to sales. After all, you can spend every waking hour making sales calls, but if you're pitching snowshoes to people in Dubai you're not going to get far!Here, Howard Williams, marketing director for Parker Software, runs down the top ways to target the right audience and increase sales.
"If I'd asked people what they had wanted they would have said, 'a faster horse,'" Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company
As Ford suggests, potential customers know they want to go faster, but that doesn't mean they're aware of the best way to achieve their goals. This means that someone may stumble across your website and begin to dig around, but they'll probably need some help choosing the right product.
Automation technology can recognise patterns in website visitor behaviour and trigger an appropriate response, such as a dynamic live chat window, to offer further assistance. This helps potential customers discover the motor car instead of relying on a horse, as well as allowing your sales team to capitalise on hot leads.
"Repetition makes reputation and reputation makes customers," Florence Nightingale Graham, Founder of Elizabeth Arden
We're all familiar with sales techniques that work in store, because they've been around for long enough to be perfected and become common knowledge for marketers. For consumers, experiencing this human touch is invaluable when it comes to making the decision to buy. Moving into the digital sphere of ecommerce doesn't mean we have to lose that weapon from our sales arsenal.
Using live chat puts you directly in front of online customers and affords the opportunity to replicate the experience found in store. Whether they're speaking to a sales assistant in a shop, chatting with customer support over the phone, or interacting with a live chat operative, customers expect a consistent experience. To deliver this, thorough employee training is essential when implementing live chat to ensure brand experience and reputation is maintained across text-based interactions.
"We think, mistakenly, that success is the result of the amount of time we put in at work, instead of the quality of time," Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post
Recently, there has been a spike in the number of businesses employing reverse IP lookup to identify leads generated by their websites. However, all too often this tactic just results in lists of company names gathering dust on the desk of a busy sales representative.
To get the most out of reverse IP lookup, businesses need to be using a service that can offer more than just company names by employing new techniques that search sources, such as social media, to create usable profiles of appropriate contacts.
"The difference between try and triumph is just a little umph," Marvin Phillips, author and public speaker
Business automation is the added bit of 'umph' that can elevate your sales efforts to the next level. As well as basic techniques, such as automated live chat pop ups and emails to customers who started, but did not complete a transaction, automation can also support sales teams in more strategic ways.
For example, our ThinkAutomation system can directly dial both a potential customer and a sales representative simultaneously, while giving the sales person a comprehensive on-screen profile of the lead. This strips away the need for sales teams to search for leads and lets them take advantage of opportunities immediately.
"It's not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change," Charles Darwin, naturalist
Perhaps the most important factor to getting ahead in the modern sales landscape is a willingness to evolve. New digital tools and automation are nothing to fear: the opposite in fact. They can give any company the edge in the competitive online world of ecommerce.
For more information, please contact:
Roxanne Abercrombie or Howard Williams
Parker Software
Victoria Business Park
Prospect Way
Knypersley
Stoke on Trent
ST8 7PL
Tel: +44 1782 822577
Email: roxanne.abercrombie@parkersoftware.com or howard.williams@parkersoftware.com
Web: www.parkersoftware.com/
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