If you’re a medical device sales rep who’s been around the block a time or two, you are always looking for ways to better yourself and your business. Even sales reps who are part of a big company can find small ways to tweak performance for the better.
Start with the basics:
1. Identify, Clarify, & Segment
No one likes a muddled sales pitch. If you can’t communicate your product or services to others, there’s very little chance of you closing any deal. A quick and easy way to streamline your sales process is to cut the fat with three simple steps:
- Identify your objective and overall message
- Clarify your message and objective
- Compartmentalize the message for easy digestion and understanding
These simple steps help to trim any excess fat (words) from your pitch to reduce time wasted. They also facilitate better and more comprehensive understanding on behalf of the client. Time is money, after all, isn’t it?
2. Sell the Benefit Instead of the Comparison
One of the biggest faux pas any sales rep can make is also one of the most common. Newbies to the game will often focus on comparing an old product or service to their new product or service. Now, this can be useful, but it’s an amateurish move.
Instead, focus on the benefits of the new product or service. Forget about the old one; the only one that matters is what you’re selling. Full stop.
3. Content is King
You’ve probably heard this phrase before and thought nothing of it. But if you’re an individual operating your own personal sales business, creating SEO blog content is a fantastic way to boost your ranking and increase visibility.
It doesn’t need to be super in-depth or crazy specific articles. It can be something as simple as explaining a case study or listing your personal tips for closing a deal. Research other thought leaders in your industry. Do what they do. It’s worked for ProSellus and it can work for you.
4. Sell to Customer Needs
This one seems like a no-brainer, but we all need to be reminded of it sometimes. Regardless of the product or service you’re representing, you have to keep client needs in mind.
You can’t sell a new heartbeat monitor to a Podiatrist. But take this one step further: anticipate the needs of your potential or current clients. How could this client best utilize a new product you’ve got? What could it do for their quality of life, their profits, their patients?
Addressing all of these questions will not only make you a better salesperson, but it will help immensely with number 8 on this list.
5. Fail Quickly, But Not Often
Failure is not the end of the world. It’s a necessary tool in order to grow and learn to do better. That said, you can also plan for failure in order to mitigate fallout and decrease recovery time needed.
In terms of marketing, this philosophy goes double. You can’t afford to waste hundreds or thousands of dollars on frivolous marketing ventures that produce zero results. Start with small tests, targeted ads, and specific PPC campaigns. Run them for 2 – 3 months, then measure the results. Do your own A/B split testing using your blog content (since it’s king and all).
Failure is a good thing in small doses. Remember that.
6. Share the Spotlight
Nobody likes a know-it-all, but everyone loves to network. In doing so, you can make connections with manufacturers or other sales reps with more presence than yours. Then, all you have to do is share the spotlight.
Go a guest blog post on their website or vice versa. Go in on a joint project together and collaborate. These connections should NOT go un-leveraged. You can benefit from each other’s audiences and grow together and respectively.
7. Have a Mobile Presence
Everyone practically eats and sleeps with their phones now. Admit it — you do, too. It’s important to maintain some non-digital marketing channels, but your biggest audiences are in the palm of your hand.
Leverage your LinkedIn contacts by posting regular articles or blogs and interacting with other people’s posts. Update your Facebook page. Learn to love and how to smartly use hashtags. Even text messages are a huge tool for marketing. Think about it: 95% of Americans have cell phones. And 98% of their text messages get opened.
That’s a pretty good ROI wouldn’t you say?
8. Build Relationships & Develop a Referral Network
Having a gregarious nature and making friends easily should come natural for all sales reps. You need to develop relationships in order to close deals. The trick to growth is maintaining and further cultivating those relationships. But again: this network should NOT go un-leveraged.
Ask for client referrals or recommendations. Build a network of potential clients based on your current list.
If any of this seems like a foreign concept to you, email me at scottwalle@prosellus.com and let’s enlighten each other. Share the spotlight, remember?
We have all seen Glengarry Glen Ross and that infamous scene where Alec Baldwin’s tells everyone to 
Let’s piggyback on that last paragraph. If your sales team is like the STEM department, what would that make the marketing team? If you guessed the social sciences and arts, you nailed it. In the same way that a society can’t function without its engineers and doctors, you need artists, writers, designers, and researchers to come full circle in the world.
Combine concrete numbers with creative problem solving solutions and you have a recipe for success. Your next question might be, so which came first –