Sales Tactics - How to Learn/Use and Implement the Right Ones for You?

It can be easy to think that you can do everything yourself. You don’t need to stop and ask for directions, you can totally reach that jar on the top shelf, and you don’t need to use sales tactics to upgrade your sales funnel, your current process is flawless.

But when things aren’t working out time and time again, it might be time to buy a GPS, bring over a stool to reach that top shelf, and look into some tried-and-true sales tactics.

Sales tactics are any type of strategy that will increase your chances of landing a sale. This can be anything from common sense like “actively listening to your customers,” to more in-depth tactics like using data sets to predict how likely a given prospect is to say yes.

If you’re looking to use some of these tactics for your team, here are a few tips that you should keep in mind when building your sales process around them.

Give your sales tactics a test run.

Trial-and-error is one of the most important tools a sales team has at their disposal. Research and projections can give you a sense of what might happen, but you’ll never know if a sales tactic works until you put it into practice.

Try any sales tactic that pops up during your research if you think it can help. Some tactics can seem odd at first and become a mainstay in your selling strategy. Just double-check that there aren’t any glaring issues. If you find an article that says “treat your prospect like they’re the doormat you wipe your shoes on,” maybe you should leave that out of your field tests.

Don’t be afraid to test out more than one sales tactic at a time. It’s good to learn what each tactic brings to the table individually, but their strengths can show themselves when paired together. For example, if you’re testing the waters by asking for referrals, your prospects might be more likely to leave a good word for their friends if they had a personable experience.

But there’s no need to re-invent the wheel if you don’t have to.

See what your competition’s up to.

Your competitors might already have a suite of tactics that are bringing in new clients left and right. So, place yourself in your customer’s shoes for a moment.

Search different keywords or questions that your prospects are looking for and find out where they end up. When you find your competitors, see what sorts of tactics they’re using that you wouldn’t have thought of.

I’m not telling you to pull off some grand heist where you uncover powerful industry secrets by pulling from your competitors. Just take a look around their website and their landing pages to see why they’re resorting to the sales tactics they have. You might even notice that they could be doing something better with their sales funnel.

By learning strategies from your competitors, you can discover new ideas that will give your sales funnel a competitive edge. Just make sure that they make sense for your prospects.

Adapt each tactic to your target audience.

If you try to shoehorn a “winning strategy” into your sales funnel, it won’t always make sense for your prospects.

For example, most prospects that manage manufacturing facilities are on tight schedules and aren’t too concerned with learning everything your product has to offer. If your sales strategy starts by walking your prospects through the finer details of each piece of equipment, you’ll lose their interest within a matter of minutes. Solution selling would be a much better tactic to use in this case.

But, if your target audience already knows what problems they’re facing, they’ll want to know a lot more about the product in the first few stages of your sales funnel to find if it’s the right fit for their operations.

Sales tactics have a wide range of uses, and they’re important puzzle pieces for some companies, but others just can’t find a place to fit them into the bigger picture. Another surefire way to learn the right sales tactics for your team is to ask the group of people they affect the most. Your prospects.

See what your prospects have to say about them.

In the world of testing out new sales strategies, surveys are your best friend. Sales teams can predict anything they want about how well a sales tactic is going to work, but your prospects are the only ones who know how well these strategies are working.

But you need to be meticulous with how you ask for surveys. You shouldn’t just go up to a new customer, or a lost prospect and say “hey, how effective were these sales tactics at coaxing you into agreeing to a sale?” That’s a bit forward and makes the whole process feel demeaning.

Instead, ask them how they felt over the course of the sale. Something along the lines of “did our recommendations make us feel like authorities in the industry?” or “what was the kicker that made you feel that partnering with us was the right call?”

These subtle questions can give you the information you need without pestering your clients for their thoughts on every detail of your sales tactics.

They’re not “one-size-fits-all.”

Sales tactics aren’t something you can rip from another team’s playbook and expect to succeed. It takes a lot of tweaking, trial-and-error, and input to properly adapt to your team. But once you master these tactics and apply them to your team’s funnel, you’ll be able to give your clients an offer they can’t refuse.