Sales is constantly evolving. What used to work just a couple years ago is ineffective today. You must keep up with current sales insights in order to adapt and move forward with the times. The rapid change in technology is forcing sales managers to continuously consider the effectiveness of their current sales methods and come up with new strategies that will help their sales people close more deals. Using sales insights for 2015 will help you develop new strategies that will drive results.

Take note of the following sales insights.

Get Better Leads

One of the most significant sales insights from 2015 is that companies are struggling to increase sales due to a lack of qualified leads. Your sales and marketing teams must work together to get more leads, and better qualified leads. Your marketing team must understand what your sales people need in terms of leads, hand-off, and workflow. Your sales team should be focused on selling, not finding prospects. With a clear sales and marketing alignment, you can improve your lead quality.

Get Better Content

Your sales team needs better content to be able to engage with prospects. People are hungry for content. They want to learn more about products and services before they commit to a purchase. They want to be informed. And your sales people need to be able to provide it to them. Make time to create infographics, ebooks, whitepapers, blog posts, stories, videos, and other forms of content that will help them engage.

Implement a Sales Process

A documented sales process with pre-defined steps will help your sales team successfully sell repeatedly. When your reps have a proven sales process that works and that can be repeated for positive results every time, they’ll stop winging it. They won’t close deals because of luck or coincidence; they’ll close deals because they have specific steps, activities, and tools that work. Adopt a widespread winning sales process and you’ll see a drastic increase in sales.

Use Digital Tools to Enable Performance

Many sales people spend the majority of their days inputting data into spreadsheets, composing emails, and building customer profiles. And this is a waste of time. You’ve hired them to sell, so let them sell as much as possible by providing them with digital tools that eliminate much of the administrative work. You can increase productivity and efficiency with a best-of-class CRM system that is intuitive and intelligent. The sales insights from 2015 show that an effective CRM system can help sales professionals sell.

Hire the Right People

You’re not going to see good sales numbers if you have a bunch of mediocre performers on your team. Adopting technology, tools, and strategies based on sales insights for 2015 won’t be effective if you have lazy, unmotivated sales people. The key to improved selling is hiring the top sales people. If your organization has a high turnover rate and many poor performers on staff, consider outsourcing the hiring responsibility to a sales recruitment agency that will ensure you hire the best in the business.

Use Big Data

Sales insights of 2015 will turn you into a lover of data. Use sales analytics and maximize revenue by gathering and making sense of as much relevant data as possible. Data will allow you to learn more about your customers so you can sell better. It will allow you to learn more about the successes and failures of your sales process and sales people so you can refine your methods. You can easily turn data into deals when you adopt analytics.

New Realities

The year 2015 has brought some new realities and sales insights. The faster you come to grip with these sales insights, the better you can engage with the digital consumer and allow technology to work for you.

These sales insights can help you create better strategies that enable performance and drive results.