In today’s market, it’s difficult to know what it’s going to take to sell efficiently. New selling strategies and tools are constantly popping up as the new best thing since sliced bread. How do you keep track of every new solution and innovation in order to sell efficiently? How do you know which ones you should adopt in your selling method and which ones you should ignore? Should you drastically change how you sell?

Being able to sell efficiently in 2015 takes a totally different strategy than it did in the past. The rise of the digital age completely changed the game. Not every new solution on the market will help you sell efficiently, but there are some strategies that are here to stay and that you should be using to sell efficiently in 2015.

Educate

If you’re going to change anything in your sales method to sell efficiently, it should be this: educating your prospects. Buyers are now doing their own research online before they make purchases. Take advantage of this shift in buying behaviour and provide prospects with educational materials so they can become more knowledgeable. When they’re searching online for information about your type of product or service, you should be where they are, ready to provide the content they’re looking for. Educating your prospects is a form of content marketing, and this new type of marketing is what will make you stand out from your competition.

Tailored Content

In order to sell efficiently, your content marketing methods need to be tailored. Just sending out basic, general content isn’t good enough. All of your correspondence—whether that’s a sales pitch, an email, a call, or an advertisement—needs to be tailored to the specific client you’ve identified. Mass email blasts will likely be sent to the trash because they’re impersonal and not tailored to the person’s need, and using the same stale sales pitch on every client isn’t taking into account that prospect’s unique wants and needs. Part of nurturing relationships with these clients is understanding that they all need and want different information, which depends on a variety of factors. It’s your job to figure out what they need and then tailor your content accordingly in order to sell efficiently.

Inbound Marketing

With inbound marketing, you’re making sure prospects find you—you’re leading them to your website. You can do this by using SEO to target your audience with specific keywords. Once they search for words related to your business, they will have the option to click on your website—and this is exactly where you want them. Once they’re on your website, they’ll be faced with calls to action—whether that’s signing up for your newsletter, asking for a consultation, or providing contact information in return for a valuable offer. These calls to action allow you to gain valuable insight and contact information from your customers. This allows you to better tailor your future messages to them to lead them down the sales pipeline so they ultimately become buyers.

Social Selling

It’s hard to ignore the power of social media. Just about everyone seems to be networking online using sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Social selling allows you to engage with your customers and generate leads through social media sites. Social media gives you instant access to a wealth of information about your customers and gives you an easy way to interact with them in order to build strong, empathetic relationships so you can sell efficiently. Nurturing your client relationships is vital in today’s market.

Automate

Using selling tools like customer relationship management software, an email receipt tool, a social media dashboard, an e-signing program, and an email-scheduling program can all help you sell efficiently in 2015. Taking advantage of new technologies to automate your selling process can make selling faster and easier.