Managing sales opportunities to generate revenue is ultimately your company's goal—aside from creating loyal customers, which our Customer Retention & Growth Wrkflow can help with. However, it's best to uncover hidden sales opportunities you may not have considered to maximize revenue.
Where do I start? It's essential to identify your target market. You can do this by tracking the behavior of your potential sales leads—who are they? What is important to them? What pain points do they need to address the most?
There are many ways to identify the best sales leads, and you can achieve this through paid marketing campaigns (to track response) and cold-calling. This determines who is most likely to do business, so your sales teams can focus on the next steps—such as personalized email marketing to showcase your relevant products and updates.
Using AI to extract customer behavior from vast amounts of data is another way to learn more about your target audience. It can show you what products/services they look at the most, how long they spend on certain pages, etc. This step is among the sales processes that can be automated, freeing up your sales teams to do the heavy lifting.
Once you've narrowed down your potential sales leads based on your interactions (our Automated Prospecting Wrkflow can help), you can generate and manage sales opportunities through direct and indirect approaches. For example, if you know your ideal customers' age and lifestyle demographics—part of market research—you can tailor custom ads that speak to them directly.
There are other approaches to uncovering the best sales opportunities—not all are "direct." Here's what we mean:
Passive techniques can lead to active sales
You can establish your brand among your target audience with regular blogs, showing you understand the client's needs. This is not direct selling but offering information of value that can help them develop trust and authority. When you become a go-to source of industry insight, people are more likely to turn to your business when they need a solution.
Invite potential buyers to try your free product trial if you offer one. You could even volunteer to help them solve an issue, which will help build lasting business relationships.
Take the extra step and organize in-person or online events that interest your target demographic. Networking events are a great way to meet potential clients face-to-face, learn more about their challenges, and show off your solutions. Make this interaction fun and engaging while collecting potential leads to follow up on.
Listen to your leads
One of the best techniques for a sales team is not talking but actively listening to the potential customer. Through human conversations, your sales reps can learn more about who they are and their interests/needs.
This presents a golden opportunity to talk about your respective businesses and how they can benefit each other. For example, you can ask them what their teams are working on and how they plan to achieve goals. You can also discover solutions they're already using and whether you have more cost-effective offerings that can achieve better results.
Another way to identify sales opportunities is by looking at personnel moves. If one of your contacts moves up in the company, it could provide a chance to present solutions to help them in their new role. LinkedIn is an excellent platform to track these changes, so you can proactively contact them.
At the same time, updating your contacts on your company's staff moves (and new releases) is essential. This keeps your business top of mind for those needing your products/services in the future and even unlocks hidden sales or partnership opportunities.
Discover an effective discovery process
Discovery is essential when it comes to your ongoing customer success. It's the call to a prospect after you've made initial contact (and after they buy.) This step lays a solid foundation to navigate specific scenarios, such as when the customer gets cold feet at the last minute about closing the deal.
The ability to rescue a sale that has been put on hold by the buyer (sound familiar?) lies in the discovery stage. Suppose you've already identified how your offerings will benefit a client. In that case, you can return to these discovery points to help them decide favorably. You can also reiterate to them how not buying your solution will impact them, citing costs versus potential profits (as well as convenience.)
This is why discovery requires a human touch.
To recap, here are some good ways to identify hidden sales opportunities:
- Using automation/AI to uncover customer patterns and behaviors
- Building an authoritative blog to inform and entertain industry stakeholders
- Offering free trials/volunteer work to demonstrate expertise
- Actively listening leads to solving their work-related problems
- Hosting networking events to meet potential customers face-to-face
- Focusing more on the discovery process to push deals over the finish line
Sales forecasting also plays an important role
Another key function of your human sales teams is forecasting, which is the expected revenue amount within a given period. This is a tangible way to set goals and compare your performance.
Several factors matter when trying to reach a sales quota – some of them, such as market conditions, are not within your control. However, accurate forecasting is within a sales team's control, including effective sales pipeline management.
This step can identify when some customers are getting stuck in the sales funnel (helping you make significant changes to maximize revenue) and demonstrate to potential investors that you have a proven and consistent sales process.
Want to know more about uncovering hidden sales opportunities among your target audience? Wrk offers a free trial to unlock the power of our automated workflows. Sign up today.
