Once you have the basic sales techniques mastered, there are six advanced strategies you can use to up your game as you navigate the ever-changing sales industry.

Overall, these strategies are quality of life changes that will improve your performance and boost your levels of success by helping you expand your sales and customer service skills. Those strategies are:

Time Management: Making a schedule and prioritizing your time is extremely important. To become a great salesperson, you need to make sure you have a schedule you stick to religiously. Keeping an up-to-date and note-filled calendar that you can look at first thing in the morning and last thing before you go to bed will help you manage your time more effectively.

Use of Technology: With all the ever-advancing technology at our disposal, the world of sales has never been easier, or more complicated. While technology will provide you with all the tools you could ever need to stay organized and improve your customer communications, you must put in the time to learn the technology if you hope to benefit from it. Finding potential customers has also been made easier thanks to social media but you must stay on top of the learning curve in that area as well. Researching those potential customers prior to a first meeting is also easier than it’s ever been but again, you must put in the time to optimize results.

Personal Connections: Customers want to feel like they are being listened to and that they are important. Empathy is a great sales tactic that allows you to connect with your customers in a meaningful way if you are genuine and don’t come off as fake. If you can relate to your customer through shared experiences, you can earn their trust and loyalty. You should always remember that your job as a salesperson is to become friends with your customers and that you took this job because you like interacting with people on a deeper personal level.

Use of Metrics: To make sure your sales process is repeatable and measurable; metrics must be part of your sales process. Using metrics to gauge what’s working and what isn’t is an extremely effective way to boost sales. You can even use them to track which pitches are more successful. Make sure your process is repeatable and that your goals are measurable goals and time sensitive.

Referrals: The most reliable way to reach prospective customers is through word of mouth. Referrals are essential as they create lasting connections with customers looking for feedback that they can use to make an informed decision. Referrals are essentially free advertising. The things to consider when looking for referrals are the length of your relationships, the customer’s satisfaction, the rate of communication between you and the customer, and whether the customer communicates with you.

Consistency and Integrity: The sixth and final advanced strategy is to provide consistency with all your interactions with customers and maintain integrity. Providing consistency means giving the same quality pitch and customer support to everyone you deal with. Even when things get tough, you must stick to your guns and stay consistent. Maintaining your integrity means treating all your customers with the same level of respect regardless of the size of the account. You never know? Some day they may turn into to big customers. Or, they might refer you to that career defining big fish!

Finding success in sales today is challenging enough but succeeding as a sales leader is perhaps more difficult than it has ever been as finding success as a sales leader in today’s competitive market comes with a completely different set of obstacles that can be difficult to overcome.

Compounding these challenges is the recent seismic shift towards online sales in the wake of the global pandemic as building trust to stand out from the competition can be extremely challenging in a digital setting.

Compared to the good old days, technology has evolved so much. Sales are not so much about going door to door, and much more about who can build a better social media campaign. As a result, competition is also much tougher than it once was.

Due to this competitive nature of today’s sales world, sales leaders face their own unique challenges. Sales leaders sometimes have unrealistically high expectations that can result in disappointment in their sales team and a lack of clear direction. Without clear communication, the sales leader should not expect their team to know what to do. This can also be a primary cause of a lack of motivation.

Sometimes, sales leaders make the mistake of believing their sales team members are all motivated by the exact same things they are. So, they end up offering incentives based on their desires. Unfortunately, this can lead to sales leaders floundering because they fail to relate to their team members or figure out what motivates them.

However, sales leaders are still being well compensated, and if you think you have what it takes, here are a few tips to make it happen and succeed as a leader.

A good sales leader should have a deep and profound sales intuition, which is the practical knowledge gained from the experiences of participating in sales cycles and managing salespeople. They should also be able to closely monitor and strictly enforce a sales process, which is known as control orientation.

Being able to control and enforce the sales process also takes a higher level of mental toughness. Even when you make mistakes, you will need to dust yourself off and get back up again. Being able to keep your emotions in check is key in stressful situations. The final most important tip is being able to adapt to the ever-changing sales climate.

Adapting to suit each individual leads to much more success than a “one size fits all” approach. Multiple studies have shown that higher performing sales managers have had higher team efficiency than underperforming sales teams in certain situations.

It may be extremely daunting as a leader to adapt a new approach of leading and motivating to fit with the times, but this is part of the challenge and if you welcome this challenge, you may be amazed to find out just how beneficial the results can be. You must be willing to take on all the trials and tribulations of being a successful sales leader.

If you’re not familiar with the term disruptive selling, it means throwing all your previous biases out the window and making changes to your methodology.

It means looking at the latest selling trends and practices, analyzing what people are saying, and then doing the exact opposite. This is probably a very different approach to everything you have learned so far in your career as the basic premise is that refusal to change will hinder your performance. Here are some important things to remember about disruptive selling:

It’s always time for change

Mixing things up from what is considered the industry norm is crucial to mastering the art of disruptive selling. For example, using plus-size models to sell clothes was unheard of not that long ago. Until relatively recently, what would be considered traditional models were always used to sales market clothing regardless of who the target customer was.

Thinking outside the box has helped manufacturers of plus-sized clothing dramatically increase their market share and their success demonstrates how using distinct and unique methods is vital to being a successful sales professional.

Plan ahead but be agile

The second-best tactic for disruptive selling is to always plan things out in advance but be agile enough to move them around if necessary. A good example of this is how ads for Christmas seem to pop up earlier and earlier every year. Traditionally, Christmas ads would start immediately after Halloween, but advertisers are seeing the benefit of giving people longer to warm up to the idea that they need to start thinking about what they are going to buy their loved ones.

Be memorable

Getting noticed is another one of the most important elements of disruptive selling. The Liberty Mutual television commercials featuring an emu are a great example of this as they are extremely memorable despite the fact they do not go into a whole lot of detail about what the company does. By the end of the ads, the name of the company is burned into your brain as is the fact that they do insurance. That’s all they need to do. Mission accomplished!

Don’t back off from an idea

You need guts to handle disruptive selling as you never know what’s going to stick. Giving up on an idea will not bode well for your sales as sometimes they take time to catch on. These days, you just never know when an idea is going to hit it big or go viral so you must have the courage of your convictions and keep going. Make your idea unique and memorable but be sure to create something that resonates with the audience you are trying to reach.

To achieve this, it is critical that you conduct in-depth background research before you launch your idea and then continue with the analytics to see how it is progressing. Then, if necessary, you can fine-tune your idea and make changes. Ultimately, if you follow these tactics, you can master the art of disruptive selling and be on your way to a brighter professional future.

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In today’s job market, a sales job is relatively easy to get as the turnover rates are extremely high. Ironically, while this plagues many sales managers, it is often their own management style that is the reason for the high turnover.

As opposed to making horrible hiring decisions, many sales managers are the masters of their own demise with their approach to motivating (or de-motivating) their subordinates. To combat this, it is important to think and grow rich with inspiration and motivation in your business and personal lives. With an endless number of books written on motivational sales techniques, it is important to remember the basics when it comes to inspiring salespeople. They include:

Product Knowledge Is Power

Educating your sales team on every important aspect of the product you offer inspires confidence and enables your team to create effective presentations. Additionally, many potential prospects will pose challenging questions and it is critical that each potential team member is prepared in advance of the presentation. Having extensive product knowledge and acting more as a sales mentor than a sales boss will help you gain the trust and confidence of your team and in turn, prospective customers.

Enthusiasm Is the Missing Piece to Your Ultimate Success

Finding success in the job market is like solving a puzzle and, in the experience of many sales mentors, the final piece is always enthusiasm. People feel more motivated when they are around highly enthusiastic people, and you can inspire people to work harder when you bring a positive attitude to the table. Having high levels of enthusiasm allows a sales professional to inspire the same feeling of excitement with a prospect they are trying to close on.

Rewarding Good Performance

Every salesperson wants to set their own personal goals and achieve them. When a goal is accomplished, they should be recognized and rewarded appropriately. Many sales organizations will have a wide variety of reward programs and contests. These could range from monetary incentives such as bonuses whenever certain sales deadlines are reached, to other incentives and perks including paid vacations. These types of rewards can motivate and inspire a sales team to work as hard as possible and achieve their sales goals.

Emphasizing Teamwork

Although individual and personal sales goals will always be important, creating a team-oriented environment is essential as well. Meeting regularly as a team to discuss how to move forward on a and sharing stories of how to be successful can be a unique way to set an organization apart from its competition. It is extremely important to have daily or weekly meetings and discuss your game plan together. Sharing ideas can be highly motivational for everyone involved.

Establishing Realistic Goals

A sales management team should always set realistic goals that they know their team can achieve. This allows the team member to have a strong sense of achievement along with striving to do even more. This approach is much better than showing your frustrations to your team and giving them impossible deadlines to reach to complete these goals.

Intimidation and anger should never be used as a method to motivate your team members. This can create a toxic work environment leading to a lack of trust and motivation.

Ultimately, it is necessary for you and your team to think and grow rich together to achieve motivation and inspiration. Without these two key factors, you and your company will falter. Completing your goals as an effective sales team is the only way to be successful!