The word ‘Sales’ depicts a vast topic with several important yet micro aspects. Sales process and sales methodology are two integral aspects. In the world of sales, you must have noticed that people use the terms, sales process, and sales methodology interchangeably.
However, these terms have critical differences. Understanding the meaning of these terms and how to integrate them is the sole key to successful sales for your organization.
What does the Process and methodology of sales mean?
If you consider the sales process as the roadmap, sales methodology is the turn and direction of reaching your destination. The sales process guides your sales reps throughout the stages of making a sale. It is basically the step-wise journey of finding a prospect and instigating the potential client to make the final purchase.
On the other hand, sales methodology basically focuses on the “how” aspect of this journey. It is an approach to optimize the sales process. Sales methodology is the key to boost the efficiency of the sales process by focusing on certain areas.
The sales process involves a guide to sales reps of the actionable steps to conduct a buying journey. But sales methodology is the set of practices that can help sales reps achieve the desired results through the sales process. While the sales process is unique to your brand and may vary from your competitors, sales methodology can be the same for you and your competitors. Sales methodology aids your sales process by providing guidance to deal with challenges that come up during the sales process.
Sales Methodologies are easily accessible and broadly known in the sales industry. However, choosing the best fit sales methodology to build your sales process can greatly improve your sales effectiveness and improves sales behavior in the long run.
Integration of Sales Process and Sales Methodology
The sales process is the path to guide sales reps through the sales cycle. It is structured according to your product/service, target audience, market trends, sales organization structure, etc. Therefore, the sales process is distinct for your brand and plays a key role in gaining leverage over your competitors.
Sale is a dynamic process and often unpredictable. Hence, integrating sales methodology to optimize the pain points of your sales cycle boosts the productivity of the sales reps. Either you may use one of the widely known sales methodologies or blend in multiple methodologies as per your business needs.
Implementation of most sales methodology requires initial investment and extensive training but it definitely pays off well. Popular sales methodologies such as SNAP selling, NEAT selling, Solution selling, challenger methodology, etc. cater to different problems in specific stages of the sales cycle. Therefore, it is important to research well to decide on the type of sales methodology that will serve your sales process the best back-up.
Familiarizing sales methodology aid your sales reps with different sales strategy and also standardize sales behavior. Adopting sales methodology to shape up your sales process can help you attain consistency and effective sales strategies.
A sales process without integrated sales methodology may fail to reflect company identity and culture which may lead to loss of potential prospect. Sales methodology helps you to drive new clients and sales by reflecting your business identity, culture, and value. It serves as a guiding philosophy to the company as well as the sales reps to evaluate and resolve problems with the existing clients as well as engaging new clients into the sales cycle.
Adopting sales methodology along with sales process aids sales reps to know the sales strategies and find exact “how” answers to sales stages. It helps out the sales reps to cover their weakness and perform with their individual strengths and the right sales strategies.
Final Thoughts
The sales process is definitely an essential aspect of every organization. Therefore, it is essential to design a clean and well-defined sales process so that sales reps perform as per the path laid for them. However, the sales process alone cannot aid the sales reps to drive sales. Sales methodology if implemented properly adds value to the organization as well as the sales reps.
Sales methodology provides the sales reps the right tools and strategies to execute the sales process. The right combination of the sales process and right sales methodology helps the organization to develop a successful sales cycle by combating all the challenges that come up during the sales process. Do visit Pragna Technologies website for more blogs.
Sales prospecting is an essential activity that highly influence your sales growth. Building market strategies to develop effective sales prospecting involves Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning. While segmentation of target groups provides you a broad overview of the market, targeting narrow down your focus to specific target group to position your product or services. Targeting is the process that makes your sales prospecting more specific by building a solid ‘Ideal Customer Profile’ or ‘buyer persona’.
Importance of Specificity in Sales Prospecting
Sales prospecting is the most challenging part of marketing process. The effectivity of sales prospective forms the basis of success or failure of further stages of market process. Specificity in prospecting helps in gaining more successful leads.
For instance, if you are selling a set of knives, you can segment a group based on age, say 18-40 years. But if you are specifying the target group, say, men and women between the age of 18 to 40 years and having cooking as hobby, you are likely to get more effective leads through this sales prospecting group.
Marketing people know that all sales prospect does not convert. But building specific buyer persona while sales prospecting enhances your chance of better conversion rate. It helps you prioritize and determine the effort of pursuing leads that fits in your ideal customer profile. Therefore, specificity in sales prospecting helps you develop effective sales funnel to maximize leads.
How to build specific Buyer persona?
Developing a buyer persona is easy but building specific buyer persona requires research and clear understanding of the product/service you are selling. To simplify the process, you can build a buyer persona by answering to these questions.
What are the characteristics and qualities of the product or service?
What specific problem will your product/service solve for your buyers?
Which emotional aspect can your product/service trigger?
Is your product/service designed for a particular economy group?
Things that affect sales prospecting and buyer persona are follows.
software or sustainability of the company
Industry: The ideal customer profile usually overlaps with you competitors in the same industry. Therefore, a thorough study of the industry will help you develop more specific buyer persona.
Company size: A SME will have a lower budget assigned for marketing than a large organization. Therefore, it is essential to customize your sales prospecting plan according to the requirement and budget of your company.
Social media image and engagement: In this digital world, you cannot build effective sales prospecting without the use of social media platforms. Consistent engagement through social media posts or comments can help you to step up your prospecting game.
Following up: The importance of following up your prospect is immense in marketing. However, there is thin line between following up and irritating your client. Therefore, one must be aware of the frequency and approach of following up your prospect.
Cold mailing: Most people use personalized cold mailing to reach out to their prospects. Email marketing is an effective marketing tool that has huge impact even today. Use attractive and catchy copyedits to engage your prospects and thereby leading to conversion.
The Bottom Line
Sales prospecting is a vital function in marketing. You have the capability of generating quality leads if you can build buyer persona or ideal customer profile with specificity. Effective sales prospecting becomes easier if you know where to put in your search efforts. Do visit Pragna Technologies website for more blogs.
Soft skills, such as communication, empathy, critical thinking etc., play a significant role in any professional career, especially when it comes to sales. Even though you may not find these as eligibility criteria in job descriptions, these soft skills serve as an important parameter in recruitment as well as in retaining the job. Emotional Quotient (EQ) or emotional intelligence is one of the most critical elements that can impact your performance and career drastically.
EQ refers to the awareness of one’s own and others emotions. Empathy has come to the limelight in this pandemic situation as one of the essential values in professional life. EQ is just the parameter of empathetic behavior. In sales, it is important to adopt an empathetic approach to understand the buyer and close the deal. Therefore, EQ has been recognized as an essential parameter to judge performance in sales. Fortunately, EQ is one of the rare soft skills that can be developed with the help of guidance. Most sales leaders are instructed to teach their teammates the virtue of emotional intelligence in order to drive productivity.
5 Ways Sales Leaders can strengthen EQ of their team
Emotional intelligence has been forecasted as one of the most significant job skills for the near future. It has been observed that higher EQ has proportional relation to high performance. Sales leaders can help their teammates develop EQ to drive performance.
Emotional Awareness of Intelligence
Most employees hardly know the definition of EQ. It is important to make the sales reps understand the meaning and importance of emotional intelligence. Sales leaders can organize online training or provide useful links to their teams to acquaint them with the concept of emotional intelligence. Leaders may also purchase some popular books on EQ. Some of the popular yet pocket-friendly books on EQ are Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ ( Daniel Goleman), Emotional Intelligence: Mastery – A Practical Guide To Improving Your EQ (Eric Jordan) and EQ Applied: The Real-World Guide to Emotional Intelligence(Justin Bariso). These books will help your sales team articulate the fundamentals of EQ and how it can affect their performance.
Teach Through Application
Tough challenges can invoke an emotional response. Building scenarios to bring forward emotional response is a great way to develop EQ. These scenarios can be rejection or objections. Sales leaders can demonstrate the importance of EQ and how to apply it to deal with such situations. It is undeniable that the EQ application can help when a client is derailed from the buying journey. Therefore, sales leaders must pinpoint where EQ comes into play in their sales process.
Show your EQ as an example
Sales leaders are great when it comes to leading by example. Leaders should keep practicing what they preach. You cannot teach someone something that you don’t master. Analyze your EQ skillset gaps through stress tolerance, reality testing, empathic approach and decision making. Sales leaders must know their EQ skill gaps and work to improve them. Sales reps learn from how sales leader handle or deal with specific situations.
Assessment of EQ through relevant metrics
If you do not measure a skill through appropriate metrics, that skill cannot be analyzed and improved. Build metrics to judge the EQ of your team through actions and outcomes. Quantifying EQ-based actions will help you in setting the correct metrics. Keeping a scoreboard open to your teammates can help develop EQ, improve sales behavior and enhance buyer experience. Consequently, this will contribute to revenue generation.
Develop a Sales culture that prioritizes EQ
Company culture plays a significant role in driving employee productivity. Similarly, sales culture in a sales team is undeniably important. Prioritizing EQ as an integral part of your sales culture will help your team develop EQ and apply it to enhance their performance.
Final Thoughts
Emotional Intelligence is such a soft skill that can fetch profits more than you can expect. This skill can not only help sales reps to bounce back from setbacks but also help in building strong internal and external connections. Sales leaders can strengthen the EQ of their teammates through simple exercises to make them resilient and top performer.
The first thing that comes to mind when we hear the term “Recruitment marketing” is probably various methods used to attract active and passive candidates to build a pipeline. It includes everything from your organization’s employer branding and job advertising to your candidate engagement and conversion strategies.
For few people this may seem like a lot to take in. But each and every step plays a significant role in creating an efficacious, well-rounded recruitment marketing approach for your business. It’s quite alike to how marketers engage and convert clients.
Let’s understand this whole process step by step. Recruitment marketing funnel consists of mainly four stages:
1. Entice
Top talent is not easy to find everywhere on the planet. Majority of candidates are passively, looking out for jobs. But passive candidates can quickly become active if they come across a right opportunity. They key to find passive candidates is by thinking and analyzing like them.
The major means to reach out to them should include both in-person networking combined with social media platforms like as LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+, Facebook etc.
One way could be to do job postings in similar LinkedIn Groups. To make great candidates to apply to your jobs, you should promote your company as a potential employer. Spotlighting your company’s success brings to attention the positives of your company. This branding can help get the term out about your company.
2. Engage
After evolving candidates interest next step should be to engage them. Tactics like providing a potential candidate with details that will boost his interest levels in your company. For this to be successful develop content that is logical and closely related to your employer branding campaign.
3. Convert
Your pitch is set, now it’s time to reel them in. Now that candidate has shown consistent interest in your company, it time to speak about your opening in detail and how it is different from other jobs in the market. Also you can provide more specific information about your company as a potential employer, the benefits, perks, compensation you offer and everything else an applicant needs to know before concluding and making a decision to apply.
4. Hire
This is the final step where the candidate is interviewed and hired. But an absurd interview process can turn down candidate’s interest. Simplify the hiring process short and simple starting from applying to job. Trim out any unnecessary qualification and application requirements, and provide them with all the juicy details of your offer.
One of the key components of victorious recruitment marketing is using the mindset of a marketer. That means approaching candidates not for their resumes; but as consumers that needs to be impressed, and won over. Because today’s candidates expect a lot more from the recruiting process.
To conclude job seeker’s are driving the job market. There are more job openings than potential applicants thus leaving more options for candidates to choose from. Candidates are more selective and resourceful; they tend to compare company’s strengths and weakness before applying to jobs. In this environment recruitment marketing is the only solution to excel.
A good marketing strategy enables recruiters to lure right candidates even before they submit an application and the hiring process is in full motion. Curated marketing efforts can help you find great hires quicker. Data driven reports can be used to track down the performance and make changes accordingly.
When recruiters are looking for quality hire, there is more than a way to reach out to the potential candidates. Apart from LinkedIn and other social media site, email is an excellent tool to reach out to the potential candidates and urge them to apply for the job. If you are thinking that email is an outdated method, the statistics says otherwise.58% professionals never fail to check their email, and if you are counting the hours, they spend an average time of 2.5 hours a day checking their emails.
Email marketing serves a targeted method of sourcing candidate. You must have been using email as a source of communication. But when you take up email marketing as a recruiter, there are few tips than can help you make the right candidate reply to your email.
Surf for the best automation email marketing service/ platforms
When the goal is to reach out to qualified candidates, you must look for a few important features while selecting the most suitable email marketing automation platform. Here are the checkboxes you must tick while checking the feature.
Segmentation
social media integration
A/B testing
Personalization
Performance monitoring through data analytic
smart content
Some of the best emails marketing automation platforms are Customer.io, Contact solution, Hubspot. If you are looking for marketing solutions, do not forget to visit our website.
Segmentation is inevitable
Another significant factor which decides the efficiency of your email marketing strategy is segmentation. Segmentation of your email compliant list can be based on several factors such as job roles, active and passive job seekers, and experience in the industry or in the same domain. The main aim of segmentation is to pick the list of email recipients who are qualified and interested in the job vacancy you are offering. A pre-defined job role and expected experience can help you in the segmentation, so you don’t shoot emails at people who are not at all interested.
Simple and Clear Content with every required information
A complicated and vague content won’t help you in the success of email marketing. The email should contain the following details in clear and simple language (better to avoid jargons).
A few lines about your company (backed with your website link)
Job description of the vacancy
Expected qualification requirement
Benefits of the job like flexibility of working hours, health insurance, free trainings etc.
Expected or starting salary with the scopes of increment
A clear call to action
When a person opens his inbox, he scans through the mail first and then opens the one that catches his attention. So never forget to add suitable subject to your mail.
Personalizing attracts attention
Personalized emails get a better click rate than non-personalized email. As a recruiter, when you are enlisting the name of the recipient, you can create a connection and urge him to read through the whole mail. Your email compliant list contains a section of passive job seekers, you can increase their engagement and enhance their chances of conversion through regular newsletters or blog posts related to their professional skills, tips on job interviews or some programs or courses to upgrade their skills.
Visible Call-to-Action
The primary purpose of email marketing for recruiters is to pool application of qualified professionals fitting well in the vacancy. So, if you miss out to convey a loud and clear call-to-action, you may end up getting 5 applications per 100 emails. Either opt for an integrated ‘Apply Now’ or clearly state where the applicants can send their CV. You may also enlist the contact number of the recruiter so that the applicants can clarify any query related to the job. In order to lure job seekers for prompt action, you may use infographics to draw their attention to the lines or button of call-to –action.
Email marketing is an evergreen strategy that can help you get the desired response if used correctly. As a recruiter, you can definitely make your job of sourcing candidates less hectic through effective email marketing. The above mentioned tips can help you to kickstart or redefine your email marketing for recruiters.
What were the pain points of your marketing strategy? Let us know in the comment section below
We often come across a statement “The hiring manager doesn’t have to sell the job to candidates. It’s the candidate’s job to sell him- or herself to the hiring manager”.
In 21st Century if you go by this statement then that means your hiring engine is designed to attract people with enough low self-esteem that they don’t need to be sold. They’re desperate. They’ll take anything. You’ve got an open position? Great. I want the job. I don’t need to know anything about your company. I just want to get hired!
But if you wish to recruit top candidates you have to be on top of your game too. Just imagine you are sitting in interview room with the job description in front of you, and your usual line of questioning. Then a smart, well-presented candidate walks in, and hits you with a question: “What happened to the last person in the role? What’s a typical day in this office?”
Good candidates know that hiring is a two-way process. Particularly in this market, with unemployment rates near historic lows, it’s tougher than ever to win a candidate’s attention and get them to apply to your positions as they have a lot of options. Interviewers have to be prepared to sell the role and the company just as much as candidates have to sell themselves.
Below are the best ways to make your company attractive to exceptional candidates and selling your employment opportunity to them during the interview:
Social Media Tricks– It is important to post jobs on social media platforms but this doesn’t mean you do it in the most boring way. Instead of uploading a dull and boring list of job description, post a video or photo of someone actually doing the work. When a candidate sees the work being performed, it’s easy for him to imagine himself in the role.
Make each Job Irresistible– When you post jobs, promote the upsides of your opportunity. Think like a candidate, in addition to earning a competitive wage, what else would attract you towards this job? Few things which are just as important as money:
Exceptional benefits
Challenging work
Opportunities for learning and advancement
Convenient location
Flexible work options
Early or frequent performance / salary reviews
Mentoring opportunities
Improve Communication- Take great care of candidates and be proactive at every step of sourcing and recruiting process. Ensure it’s convenient and quick for candidates to submit an inquiry or apply to a job – especially from mobile devices. Keep them informed about timelines and next steps, from the moment they upload a resume or respond to the job posting. If you tend to remove a candidate from consideration, inform them as soon as possible. Being “left hanging” is a chief complaint among job seekers – and may drive them to post negative reviews on sites like Glassdoor.
Be Friendly, Organised and Prepared- Hiring Manager is the only link between the company and the candidate, everything they know about the job they know from you, so put on your best smile and sell the job. An excited interviewer will transfer their passion to the candidate. Make sure you have studied the candidate’s resume and cover letter in detail to understand their motivations for putting themselves forward for the role. Try to show that just as they have been researching your company, you have spent as much time researching them, and the companies they have worked for.
The Position- This makes the most sense but talking just about the job description can be monotonous and boring. If this is a top candidate, he/she already meets the criteria. Instead, make it compelling.
The Company’s Potential for Growth- Take them through the company’s journey from incubation and share the vision of company’s potential for achieving growth within the marketplace. Top candidates want to be part of an achiever, so show them how your company already is a winner and will continue to be in the future.
The Company’s Culture- Every company has its own work culture and not every candidate fits or feels comfortable working in the same. This point is often overlooked, but doing so can be a serious mistake. The candidate wants to know how they fit into the company’s culture. You must be able to communicate that to them
The Position’s Potential for Growth- Top level candidates are always curious to know more so go beyond the position in its current form and discusses what growth potential the position offers and explain how the position ties into the company’s plans for the future.
The Candidate’s Potential for Growth- The whole process is about the candidate, they want to know how making the leap to a new company is going to benefit them, especially in regards to the growth and overall well-being of their career. A-level candidates thrive on vision, so share that vision with them.
So pull up your socks and get inspired with the tips discussed above, sell your jobs and get the best candidates on boarded.
