5 ways to speed up sales in 2016

Editor’s note: This is the first part of a two part article. We will publish the second part next week.

Let’s talk one-on-one for a few minutes. I don’t often write using the first person narrative, and I rarely share the inside secrets of the billion dollar companies that we support. But after a conversation with a senior executive a few days ago, I thought I would make an exception.

Here is the big news — my team and I have managed to do more business in three weeks than we did all last year … seriously.

It took us three months of hard conversations and tough work to get to the “start line” and begin executing our process — but it was worth it. I’ll tell my exact numbers at the end of the second part of this article (which is going to be published next week).

I know you might be struggling to increase your — or your team’s — performance. So I wanted to share a few secrets I’ve learned about a cool process I found called “Predictable Revenue” (which may or may not be so predictable, but I didn’t name it …)

Here is how you can do the same:

1) Get laser focused on your lead generation.

Finding new customers is hard. Really hard … which is why you need a system or a process. And it’s hard to sell to people you don’t know exist.

That’s where smart tools, like the following, come in:

• Lead generation apps, like LeadFuze or AeroLeads, will allow you to piggyback off of LinkedIn data in order to build your lists.

• We’ve also heard great things about Clearbit Sheets, another killer product for doing lead generation at scale via your Google Sheets interface.

2) Double (or triple) your outbound sales email.

Frankly, you can’t increase your sales unless you increase the number of high quality outbound emails sent, phone calls logged, in-person visits made, smoke signals sent — you get the picture. It can be a numbers game, so start acting like it.