Are You Guilty of These 5 Outdated Sales Tactics?

74% of business buyers conduct more than half of their research online before engaging in a sales process offline. What does this tell you? It says that your prospects are well informed. They are no longer reliant on your sales team to inform them about the product or services you offer.

So, if you haven’t already updated your lead generation and sales process, it’s time you did. In this article, we’re going to highlight a few sales tactics that are outdated and why. And if you are still guilty of incorporating them into your business, it needs to stop.

Let’s get started!

Cold calling –

If you are still investing in cold calling to get leads. Stop Selling! Cold calling is hard, a waste of time, and can leave a negative impression about your brand. Cold calling will usually catch your prospects off-guard and that can be quite annoying.

Now the solution isn’t in giving up cold calling, because you can’t entirely give up on calling. What do you do instead? Consider doing some research before your call. This tactic is also known as warm calling.

Warm calling is when you have done your research and identified a good fit for a prospective customer and have made some form of initial contact. It involves starting a conversation before you get on a call. Read our blog on Warm calling Tips to know how you can include this tactic into your sales plan.

Overselling your product or service

As we emphasized in the beginning, your prospective customer is well-informed. With access to so much research material on the internet, your prospects have enough information to develop a solid baseline understanding of your product or service on their own. Don’t waste time harping to them about your product features, they already know about.

Indeed you can tailor your sales pitch to address their particular questions and concerns. Sell them the value and overall benefits your product or service will provide to enrich their lives

Selling to everyone

Selling to unqualified leads is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Selling to everyone leads to hours of unnecessary conversations and valuable time spent on people who don’t convert.

Instead of talking to everyone, focus on who’s the right fit for your product. This can be achieved by aligning your sales team with your marketing team to define the characteristics of a sales qualified lead (SQL). Once you have this in place both teams can work towards driving qualified leads who convert.

Having a universal sales pitch

If you’re still selling the same way to all your prospects, you’re doing it wrong. For decades, companies perfect a single pitch, and consciously use it to save productivity time. Times have changed now and the one-size-fits-all sales pitch is no longer sufficient.

How do you fix this? You make your sales pitch more personalized because that’s what customers want. They want a sales pitch that’s tailored to their needs and addressed their concern. And knowing your user person will help you create a sales pitch that seems personalized.

Manual work

If your sales team is still doing manual work such as data entry, scheduling calls and emailing, they only spend about a third of their time talking to prospects. That’s a lot of time spent on unproductive work. In the past some of these tasks could have been unavoidable, but not anymore.

Your solution is automation. If you haven’t already automated your sales, you are lagging behind. Today, sales enablement tools and general task automation can help you reduce the time spent on unproductive tasks. Call widgets such as Callspree can help automate calls, offer some background information about your lead and avoid distractions, giving your sales team more time to talk to customers.

Key Takeaway

There are so many tactics sales professionals use to get the job done, we’re not saying that you have to let go of all your tactics and embrace new ones, like the saying goes, “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.”

However, if you are seeing a drop in your sales numbers or you are struggling with stagnancy then you may want to consider changing or letting go of these few outdated methods because they may not be working for you anymore.

Since we’re on the subject of sales, here’s a tip that can help you get more qualified leads on the phone and connect them with your sales team directly. Customizable lead forms that you can embed into your website and nudge your website visitors to take action. Take a look at the Callspree, Lead to Call form widget to learn more about how this can work for your business.

Additionally, if you need help with lead generation, get in touch with our team of experts at Mobistreak.com. We understand that winning at sales in a market space that is so demanding is difficult but we have the right tools, data, and techniques to help you win at sales and lead generation.