Want to increase your sales in 2024?
Here are twelve explosive sales growth strategies that can help you with that…
- Sales Growth Strategy #1: Offer an Appealing Compensation Package
- Sales Growth Strategy #2: Provide Sales Training to New Employees
- Sales Growth Strategy #3: Have a Sales Mentorship Program
- Sales Growth Strategy #4: Get Better at Qualifying Leads
- Sales Growth Strategy #5: Create a Lead Scoring System
- Sales Growth Strategy #6: Streamline Your Sales Process
- Sales Growth Strategy #7: Do More of What’s Already Working
- Sales Growth Strategy #8: Prepare Case Studies for Each Customer Segment
- Sales Growth Strategy #9: Use Email for Cold Outreach
- Sales Growth Strategy #10: Automate Lead Generation
- Sales Growth Strategy #11: Automate Sales
- Sales Growth Strategy #12: Build a Brand
Sales Growth Strategy #1: Offer an Appealing Compensation Package
The saying “You get what you pay for” is true in general but it’s especially true for sales roles in particular. Why?
Because people who go into sales tend to be more ambitious, more driven and more motivated by money than the average person.
This means that if you want to attract, retain, and motivate talented salespeople, you need to offer an appealing compensation package.
Here’s what it should include:
Competitive Base Salary
The base salary should exceed the median salary for that role in your location if it’s a local job or in their location if it’s a remote job.
Competitive Commission Structure
You can either offer a commission from each sale or a commission based on the revenue generated.
Just be mindful of the fact that directly incentivizing your salespeople to make as many sales as possible can have unintended consequences. How so?
They might start focusing on closing sales by any means necessary and end up misrepresenting your offer and setting unrealistic expectations.
That is likely to backfire in several ways: disappointed customers will start requesting refunds, leaving bad reviews, and trash-talking your company on social media.
You can avoid this by paying out commissions only after the refund period has ended. If the customer requests a refund, the salesperson doesn’t get a commission!
Various Additional Perks
This can mean a generous paid time off policy, paid trips to industry events, fun company retreats, etc.
Sales Growth Strategy #2: Provide Sales Training to New Employees
There’s a trade-off inherent to hiring salespeople:
You can either hire people with less sales experience who will be less effective at closing sales but will agree to work for less money.
Or you can hire people who have more sales experience who will be more effective at closing sales but who will also expect more money.
If you decide to take the former approach, it’s crucial to provide extensive sales training to your new employees as a part of your onboarding process.
Here’s what your sales training should include:
- Persuasion training (Cialdini’s principles of persuasion)
- Sales psychology training
- Sales strategies and Tactics training
- Target audience and product training
- Lead sourcing and qualification training
- Cold outreach training (framework + roleplaying)
- Discovery call training (framework + roleplaying)
- Product demo training (framework + roleplaying)
- Sales processes and SOPs training
Providing comprehensive sales training will require a substantial financial investment on your part but it will help you get your new employees up to speed faster so that they could start closing sales.
Of course, you can choose to invest in hiring experienced salespeople instead. That way, you won’t have to teach them the basics.
You will still need to provide some sales training during onboarding, but you can limit it to target audience training, product training and sales processes and SOPs training.
Sales Growth Strategy #3: Have a Sales Mentorship Program
We also recommend providing ongoing sales training to your salespeople in the form of a one-on-one sales mentorship program.
This program should revolve around regular meetings with their sales mentor. Weekly, biweekly, or monthly meeting schedules can all work well.
Generally, less experienced salespeople tend to benefit more from a more frequent meeting schedule while more experienced salespeople tend to benefit more from a less frequent one.
These meetings should give your salespeople an opportunity to discuss their concerns, ask questions, and get actionable feedback.
The mentor should also help them reach their sales targets by keeping them accountable for meeting their daily, weekly and monthly cold outreach quotas.
You can either mentor your salespeople yourself or assign senior salespeople as mentors to junior salespeople.
Obviously, if you ask someone to become a sales mentor, that additional responsibility should come with a pay increase!
Sales Growth Strategy #4: Get Better at Qualifying Leads
If you improve your lead qualification system, it will help your salespeople disqualify low-quality leads faster, leaving them with more time to pursue high-quality ones.
We recommend asking yourself these three questions:
- What do leads that don’t convert into paying customers tend to have in common?
- What do leads that convert into paying customers but then ask for a refund tend to have in common?
- What do leads that convert into paying customers but then turn out to be high-maintenance and require a lot of customer support tend to have in common?
You can find the answers by analyzing your historical data. But what should you do once you identify those common traits?
It’s probably best to stop pursuing leads that don’t convert into customers, ask for refunds, or require tons of customer support.
So teach your salespeople to identify those common traits as quickly as possible and deprioritize the leads that have them!
Sales Growth Strategy #5: Create a Lead Scoring System
The Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, states that:
“For many outcomes, around 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes.”
What this means in the business context is that a minority of your customers may be bringing in the majority of your revenue.
We recommend analyzing your sales data to see whether that’s the case (note that the exact ratio doesn’t have to be 80/20).
If it is indeed the case, you want to identify the traits that the customers who belong to this lucrative minority tend to have in common.
Then use those common traits to develop a lead scoring system where your salespeople assign a score to each incoming lead based on how many of these traits they have (the more traits, the higher the lead score).
Your salespeople should then prioritize leads based on their lead scores and reach out to the highest quality leads first.
This should help you direct resources towards acquiring more of these lucrative customers, which can have a disproportionate impact on your revenue.
Sales Growth Strategy #6: Streamline Your Sales Process
Streamlining your sales process can help you save time so that your salespeople can spend more of it on cold outreach, discovery calls, and product demos.
Start by documenting your entire sales process so that you know what is happening at each stage. Then, see which tasks can be automated.
If you aren’t using customer relationship management (CMS) software, you can probably automate a lot of repetitive tasks with a CMS app.
You might also be able to automate some tasks with Zapier, a workflow automation app that allows you to connect various web apps so that you wouldn’t need to transfer data from one app to another manually.
Finally, if you discover repetitive tasks that cannot be automated with a CMS app or Zapier, it might make sense to create custom automation for them.
You can do that by either writing the scripts yourself if you know how to code or by hiring a web developer to write them for you.
Of course, if you choose the latter option, do the math first to see if paying someone to automate that particular task makes financial sense.
If it’s something minor that only takes a few seconds to do manually, then it probably doesn’t and you should just leave it as it is.
Sales Growth Strategy #7: Do More of What’s Already Working
Do you have an established business that is generating revenue?
Then the most straightforward way to increase sales is to simply do more of what’s already working!
Example: 10x Cold Calls
Let’s say that your salespeople are:
- Reaching out to sales prospects by cold calling them
- Converting those prospects into leads by getting them to agree to a discovery call
- Closing sales either at the end of that discovery call or at the end of the subsequent product demo call, depending on how your sales pipeline is structured
In theory, if your salespeople start making 10x more cold calls, that should lead to 10x more discovery calls, 10x more product demo calls and eventually to 10x more sales.
(This is assuming that the conversion rates across your sales pipeline remain the same as they are now).
In practice, of course, you need to take various resource constraints into consideration, most notably salespeople’s time.
Meaning: do your salespeople have the time to do 10x more of everything that they are currently doing?
Additionally, 10x more sales also means a 10x increase in workload for your other employees who deal with customers, such as your customer support team. Can they handle that increase?
In some cases, if there are a lot of inefficiencies in your business processes, you might find that you can free up the resources that you need by streamlining them.
It’s more likely that you will have to expand your team to accommodate the increased workload, though. Do you have the budget for that?
Do the Math to See What’s Realistic
Identify the key input in your sales process and then play with the numbers.
By how much can you realistically increase that key input given the resource constraints that you are operating under?
Say, if your key input is the number of cold calls that your salespeople make, do the math to see what would happen if you increased it by 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75x, etc.
Be Patient and Scale Gradually
We recommend scaling sales gradually so that your company would have the time to adjust to the increased sales volume.
Say, if after doing the math you come to a conclusion that your business should be able to handle a 2.5x increase, start with 1.25x, then progress to 1.5x, then to 1.75x, and so on until you reach 2.5x.
Keep in mind that unexpected issues always pop up when scaling and you can’t foresee them by looking at the math.
So adopt the Navy Seal mantra “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast”, be patient, and scale gradually!
Sales Growth Strategy #8: Prepare Case Studies for Each Customer Segment
The power of social proof cannot be overstated.
That’s why we recommend investing in customer case studies.
That way, when your salespeople reach out to sales prospects, they will be able to use those case studies to get the prospects’ attention, establish credibility, and build trust.
For example, if they are cold-calling sales prospects, they can mention the most impressive customer result when introducing themselves, then email the prospect that case study after the call.
If they are cold emailing sales prospects, then they can mention the most impressive customer result in the cold email and link to the case study.
They can also link to case studies in the P.S. section of follow-up emails. If they include a new case study in each email, that will increase their credibility in the eyes of that prospect.
Ideally, you want to prepare case studies for each customer segment, starting with the most lucrative one!
Sales Growth Strategy #9: Use Email for Cold Outreach
If your salespeople are cold-calling sales prospects, you might want to consider experimenting with cold email.
After all, cold email is easier to scale than cold calling, so switching to this cold outreach medium can help you increase sales. Plus, cold email may be more future-proof. Why?
Because it appears that a significant percentage of Gen Z and Millennials are struggling with phone anxiety.
Consequently, as these two generations come to dominate the workplace, phone calls may be on their way out as far as business communication goes. Meanwhile, email is likely here to stay!
We recommend reading “The Cold Email Manifesto” by Alex Berman and Robert Indries.
In this book, the authors explain everything you need to know in order to get started with cold emails, including how to avoid spam filters, how to structure your cold emails and how to scale your cold email campaigns.
Consider doing an experiment where you ask one salesperson to replace cold calling with cold email and see how that goes.
If they outperform other salespeople using this approach, then it might make sense to start gradually shifting your lead generation strategy away from cold calling and eventually drop it altogether so that your sales team could focus on cold email instead.
Sales Growth Strategy #10: Automate Lead Generation
Lead generation tends to be the most time-consuming part of the sales process. But what if you could automate it?
This is what lead generation funnels are all about:
- You create a lead magnet
- You build a landing page for that lead magnet
- You start driving traffic to that landing page
Then, people who are interested in your lead magnet give you their email addresses in exchange for it.
That way, instead of chasing potential customers with cold emails and cold calls, you get them to come to you!
The Squeeze Page Funnel
The most popular lead generation funnel is the squeeze page funnel.
It consists of just two pages:
- The squeeze page where you present your lead magnet and ask the potential customer for their email address in exchange for it
- The thank you page is where you thank the potential customer, provide instructions on how to access your lead magnet, and tell them what they should expect next
Once you have the potential customer’s email address, you can reach out to them to schedule a discovery call.
Our software includes a proven, high-converting squeeze page funnel template that you can easily customize according to your needs with our visual funnel builder.
Once your squeeze page funnel is set up, all you need to do is start driving traffic to it and watch the leads come in!
Sales Growth Strategy #11: Automate Sales
We believe that the best way to sell anything online is the Value Ladder sales funnel that was developed by our co-founder Russell Brunson. That’s what we used to grow our company!
Here’s what the Value Ladder sales funnel looks like:
The Bait stage represents your lead generation funnel (“bait” refers to your lead magnet) and the subsequent stages represent increasingly more valuable and more expensive offers.
Complete Sales Funnel Automation
If you are selling low-touch products or services, you can probably automate your sales process entirely by using email marketing to pitch them to potential and existing customers.
Completely automated sales funnels are the easiest to scale because all you need to do in order to increase sales is start driving more traffic to the funnel!
Partial Sales Funnel Automation
Meanwhile, if you are selling high-touch products or services, it may not be possible to automate your entire sales process.
However, you can probably automate lead generation as we discussed in the previous section.
You might also want to consider creating an inexpensive Frontend offer designed specifically for the purpose of converting leads into customers.
Once you have your Frontend offer, you can pitch it to potential customers using email marketing, automating the Frontend stage of your sales funnel.
You can then use email marketing to pitch your Middle offer and invite the customer to book a discovery call. Once they schedule that call, you are back to manual selling!
Sales Growth Strategy #12: Build a Brand
Finally, consider investing in building a brand, whether a personal one or a company one, depending on what makes more sense for your business.
Establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry will take time but once you do, it will be much easier for you to sell your products and services.
For example, our co-founders invested in building our brand by speaking at events, writing best-selling books and hosting our annual Funnel Hacking Live Conference.
On top of all that, there’s also this blog, our YouTube and TikTok channels, and our social media profiles.
As a result, ClickFunnels is not just a software company, it’s also a brand that pretty much everyone in the online marketing space is familiar with.
Having a strong brand helps us to maintain our dominant position in our niche and continue growing.
After all, there are a bunch of funnel builder apps out there. But there’s only one ClickFunnels!
So ask yourself: what can you do to build not just a business but also a recognizable, respected brand that will then do the selling for you?
Want to Learn How to Build Sales Funnels That CONVERT?
Our co-founder Russell Brunson used sales funnels to take ClickFunnels from zero to $100M+ in annual revenue in less than a decade.
He is now widely considered to be one of the top sales funnel experts in the world. Want to learn from him?
His best-selling book “DotCom Secrets” is the best place to start because it covers everything that you need to know in order to build sales funnels that convert.
This book is available on Amazon where it has over 2,500 global ratings and a 4.7-star overall rating.
But you can also get it directly from us for free…
All we ask is that you pay for shipping!
So what are you waiting for? 🧐