The concept of sales goals is constantly evolving.

It’s 2024 and “sell as much as you can, as fast as you can” isn’t a sustainable sales goal anymore.

You might have a clear vision of where you want to take your business, but without a set of well-thought-out sales goals that fit your team, your sales plan might never get off the ground.

In this article, I’ll cover what sales goals are and why you need them. I’ll also highlight six examples of sales goals and give you eight practical tips to set and achieve your sales goals.

This Article Contains:

(You can click on the links below to go to a section of your choice.)

• What are Sales Goals?
• 6 Examples of Sales Goals to Set for Your Team 
  • Breaking Down Sales Revenue
  • Increase Your Win Rate
  • Increase Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
  • Reduce Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
  • Decrease Customer Churn
  • Boost the Number of Qualified Leads
• 8 Simple Tips to Set and Achieve Excellent Sales Goals

Let’s jump into it.

What are Sales Goals?

Sales goals are targets geared towards increasing revenue and boosting sales efficiency.

Sales goals can be defined from the standpoint of the company as a whole or just for an individual salesperson. In this article, we will share examples of both.

Typical sales goal examples are “increase annual revenue by 30%” or “reduce customer acquisition costs by 15%.”

Businesses use sales metrics like revenue growth, customer acquisition costs, and lifetime value to measure whether they’re on track to meet sales goals.

Most sales goals are set as both an annual goal and a quarterly goal. This helps sales teams to break down big goals into smaller, more manageable tasks for them to achieve in the short run.

It’s important to note that a sales manager can’t set sales goal plans alone.

They need to consult with other managers to set goals based on the company’s growth plans. Once sales goals are decided, they’re usually broken down into smaller steps so that reps can achieve their sales target quickly.

Why You Need Sales Goals

The sales goals you set for your business provide direction for your future marketing and sales decisions.

When you have clear sales goals, it keeps employees accountable. Clear sales goals also help team members visualize their goals and gamify the daily tasks of every salesperson, increasing their motivation levels.

Additionally, setting sales goals can help any sales leader quantitatively measure the performance of agents.

You now have a good idea of why sales goals are crucial for your business.

But which sales goals should you set for your team?

6 Examples of Sales Goals to Set for Your Team

Here are six examples of effective sales goals you can set for your sales team:

1. Breaking Down Sales Revenue

Increasing revenue is probably the most common annual sales goal set by sales teams.

When you set this goal for your team, you break it down by monthly, quarterly, or annual sales revenue.

You could also break it down by product, product category, territory, season, and other classifications.

Why does it matter?

Breaking revenue into categories helps your team create a more granular sales strategy.

It helps you understand what matters most in each product, season, or territory and adapt your sales strategy to that particular situation.

These revenue-based sales goals also play an essential role in determining other sales goals you may set for your team.

How can you achieve this goal?

The key to attaining these sales goals is understanding the dynamics of what matters most in each product category or market. A few ways to do this are:

• Assign salespeople to the products where they are the most comfortable.
• Assign sales territories based on knowledge of the customer preferences in those markets.
• Have customized sales collateral based on the category.
• Align your marketing strategy to each category and ensure that your sales and marketing teams work more closely to attain those goals.
• Individual sales goals like activity goals should be in line with categories, such as how many product demonstrations they should conduct or how many sales calls they should make in a week.

2. Increase Your Win Rate

The win rate is the number of successful conversions of prospects compared to the number of leads in the pipeline.

Win rates aren’t easy metrics to achieve.

Sometimes, a sales rep can do everything right but miss out on converting due to uncontrollable factors. Improving your win rate can be a challenging yet heavily rewarding process.

Why does it matter?

An increased win rate is vital for businesses because they bring in more revenue and can motivate a sales rep to do better.

Additionally, keeping track of your win rate can give you an idea of how effective your sales process is and what needs to improve.

How can you achieve this goal?

A good way to increase the win rate is by encouraging sales reps to focus more on the more qualified leads rather than just maximize the number of meetings. The better your potential customers meet the qualification criteria, the higher their chances of winning deals.

A sales professional should avoid jumping from prospect to prospect. Once you have enough interested parties, ensure your team develops deeper relationships with the most qualified leads. For example, if you’re a B2B business engaged in B2B sales, forming relationships with C-level executives is critical.

Help prospects find solutions to their problems, then proposition your product when the time is right. This method can help you vastly improve your win rates.

3. Increase Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

Customer lifetime value is the total amount of money a customer brings to your company throughout their lifecycle.

If your sales department is responsible for account management, increasing LTV can work wonders for your revenue goal.

Why does it matter?

Generating revenue from existing customers is much easier and cheaper than finding new prospects to convert.

Your LTV/CAC ratio has to be at least 3:1, and it’s a lot easier to reach that number when you draw on existing customers.

How can you achieve this goal?

The key to increasing LTV is upselling (upgrade the current offering to the next tier) and cross-selling (sell complementary products and services).

Ensure your reps have enough time to communicate with existing customers and determine how they can benefit from upgrading. Additionally, you can use a good CRM tool to make interactions easier for your reps.

Increasing LTV is a goal that goes hand-in-hand with reducing churn, so you can couple them together. Look to customers at risk of churning and see if upgrading or cross-selling can help meet their needs.

4. Reduce Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Customer acquisition costs are all the costs associated with bringing in new business. This includes sales and marketing expenses, as well as other overhead and administrative costs.

The goal of reducing CAC can have a significant impact on your profitability and even change the way your sales team handles prospects.

Why does it matter?

To profit from a specific customer, you need to increase their LTV (lifetime value) so that it exceeds their CAC.

As mentioned earlier, LTV refers to the amount of money a customer brings to your business throughout their lifecycle. When you reduce CAC, you have a better chance of generating profit from that customer.

How can you achieve this goal?

Figure out which steps in the sales process cost you the most and try to rework them. For example, if prospecting takes up most of the budget, you can change how each salesperson approaches prospecting to reduce costs.

Typically, customer LTV should be at least three times their cost of acquisition. If existing customers aren’t reaching this threshold, you’re better off targeting prospects that cost less to convert.

Additionally, refining buyer personas can help you stop wasting money on prospects that aren’t likely to convert.

5. Decrease Customer Churn

Customer retention is essential if you want your business to survive.

Since most modern sales teams handle account management, reducing customer churn is an excellent sales goal to tackle.

Why does it matter?

Customer churn (customer attrition) happens when customers stop doing business with your firm. It’s an obstacle to your company’s growth that can compound if you don’t pay attention.

Reducing churn means increasing retention — and it’s much easier to sell to existing customers than finding new prospects.

How can you achieve this goal?

To reduce overall churn, companies have to identify and combat several types of churn.

For example, delinquent churn happens when payment methods like credit cards used by customers expire without them noticing. You’ll need special software to deal with this type of churn.

Other types of churn can happen when customers don’t find value in your offering. To reduce churn, talk with outgoing customers and ask why they’re leaving.

Once you have the information, you can see which customers are at a higher risk of churn. Then, take steps to improve customer retention — engage with customers, provide incentives, and offer proactive customer service.

6. Boost the Number of Qualified Leads

Qualified leads are the basis of successful conversions. Your pipeline needs to have a sufficient supply of qualified leads for you to increase your conversion rate and generate more revenue.

Why does it matter?

A strong supply of qualified leads allows your sales team to focus on prospects that have a potential for high LTV. They won’t have to waste resources on prospects that aren’t likely to convert. Instead, they can use that time to initiate contact with high-value prospects.

How can you achieve this goal?

First, you can use sales software and processes to filter high-quality leads from the rest, streamlining the lead qualification process.

You should also incentivize your sales team by offering commissions on recurring revenue. That will prevent the practice of closing deals that end up churning.

Additionally, avoid setting too much emphasis on sales activity metrics that encourage people to talk to too many prospects rather than fewer qualified prospects.

8 Simple Tips to Set and Achieve Excellent Sales Goals

Here are some tips to help you set and tackle brilliant sales goals:

1. Decide on Company Goals

It’s best to set your sales goals based on what your business wants to achieve.

Look at historical data and decide on what aspect of your business you want to focus. You can set organizational goals like increasing overall revenue, focusing more on high-margin product sales, or growing your customer base without worrying about profits.

Once you’ve identified the direction you want to take your business, you can set goals to help you move forward.

2. Analyze Market Potential

Before starting with goal setting, it’s crucial to study the market and identify what prospects and customers want.

Determine if there’s room for growth in the market and analyze which demographic will be the most successful target for your business. You can gather information directly from the market if your internal data is insufficient.

Once you have all the data you need, you can optimize your sales goals, making your sales objective easier to reach.

3. Calculate Your Ideal Sales Revenue

A good rule of thumb is to align the set goals to suit your target revenue.

Meeting revenue targets is critical for the growth of your business. When sales goals focus on increasing revenue, it’s a lot easier to reach your revenue target and growth goals.

You can calculate your target revenue for the year and then split it up as a monthly sales goal. Use this monthly goal to decide your sales goals — like how much revenue every salesperson should bring in per month or how many customers you need to upsell.

Remember that seasonal variations can affect sales numbers, so your team will have to go beyond targets during good months to compensate for the weaker months.

4. Gauge the Capacity of Your Sales Team and Help Them Improve

If you give your team unrealistic targets, you’ll do more harm than good.

Before you hand out sales quotas, evaluate your sales team. Learn their strengths and limitations by talking to them and analyzing past sales performance.

Once you know where they stand, educate and empower them to meet the sales goals you set. Break down each rep’s sales approach and improve steps that aren’t working well. Provide training so they can engage customers and prospects effectively and increase conversion rates.

Don’t forget to provide tools like CRMs and other automation software to make their jobs easier — leaving them to focus on more important tasks like engaging prospects and upselling customers.

5. Set SMART Sales Goals

You’ve probably heard of SMART goals before.

But if you haven’t, they stand for goals that are:

• Specific – Focused and narrow goals help you plan easily
• Measurable – Goals that are quantifiable help you measure progress
• Achievable – Setting reachable yet challenging goals motivates your team
• Relevant – Goals should be relevant to your business’s long-term plans
• Timely – A realistic timeframe should be set for each goal

Setting SMART goals is a way to guarantee success for your sales reps. They account for your team’s capacity and prevent you from setting goals that are too vague or out of reach of sales reps.

SMART goals help any team leader set out clear, time-bound, quantifiable activity goals that reps easily understand.

These are also realistic sales goals, so your agents know what they need to do and will focus more on the tasks ahead of them.

An excellent way to set a SMART goal for your team is by handing out activity goals to reps. Activity goals are repeatable actions that have helped land sales in the past and are thus realistic goals.

6. Provide Incentives

Getting a salesperson to focus on your sales goal is key to achieving them.

And an easy way to keep reps focused?

Incentivize them.

Even if you’re just starting with the business, you can work with your first sales reps to define a commission structure.

Pay each sales representative a base salary and as more deals are brought in, decide how you will pay out commissions. You can refine this commission structure as your business grows.

You can also incentivize employees by paying out retention bonuses.

These bonuses are paid when clients signed by a sales rep become repeat customers, upgrade to higher plans, and hit anniversaries like one year or two years with your business.

This helps reps focus on finding the correct type of customers.

Ideally, you should also look at rewarding employees for achieving stretch goals. Stretch goals are targets set above what’s typically expected. If an employee reaches a stretch goal, it means they’ve gone above and beyond in their work and deserve to be rewarded.

7. Plan for When Errors Occur

Your sales staff won’t meet every team goal you set out for them.

There’ll be times you have to adjust goals based on the market or when most of your reps seem to be having a bad month.

When your sales goals fail, gather your team and determine:

• What caused them to fail
• Whether your team was focused entirely on the goal
• Whether your team had the right tools to meet the goal

Once you have all the answers, consider a different sales strategy to achieve the goal.

You can repeat this process and try out alternative tactics until you arrive at the result you want. And even when you reach your business goals, continue to improve your processes so that you don’t fall behind.

8. Leverage Technology to Meet Your Sales Goals

You may have a perfectly thought-out process, the best sales team, and a clear vision of achieving sales goals.

But without the right tools, you’re going to have a hard time getting any sales activity off the ground. 

An essential tool for any sales team is a robust CRM.

You can use software like Zoho CRM and Pipedrive to track interactions with customers and prospects. If you’re looking for a complete sales solution, consider a suite like Salesforce.

Sales automation tools like HubSpot and LinkedIn Sales Navigator can also help make things easier for your sales team, allowing them to automate repetitive tasks.

You’ll also need a tool to reach prospects and customers directly. And for this, look no further than GMass. GMass is an email sales and marketing tool used by companies around the world.

With GMass, you can:

• Schedule and send bulk emails.
• Personalize outgoing emails automatically.
• Track email performance with metrics.
• Send automated follow-up emails.
• Use custom tracking domains to increase deliverability.

To use GMass, all you need to do is download the Chrome extension, and you’re good to go!

Wrapping Up

There are tons of sales goals you can set for your team, but the best ones always revolve around reaching your company’s growth milestones.

Go through this article and decide how you want to set your sales goals, and don’t forget to pair them up with a tool like GMass.

That killer combination will have your agents consistently delivering above and beyond their sales goals!

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

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While traditional selling may simply push a product or service without considering what the client needs, consultative selling takes a different approach — it focuses on helping the potential client overcome their challenges.

But is consultative selling as good for your business (and leads) as it seems?

In this article, I’ll discuss what consultative selling is and its three overlooked benefits. Then I’ll mention seven easy-to-follow strategies you can pursue to become a truly successful consultative salesperson.

This Article Contains:

(Click on links to jump to specific sections.)

• What Is Consultative Selling?
• 3 Overlooked Benefits of Consultative Selling 
• 7 Powerful Consultative Selling Practices
  • Best Practice #1: Ask Good Questions of Your Prospects
  • Best Practice #2: Listen Actively to What Your Prospects Say
  • Best Practice #3: Do In-Depth Research on Your Prospects
  • Best Practice #4: Add Value to Your Prospect’s Life
  • Best Practice #5: Consistently Follow Up with Your Prospects
  • Best Practice #6: Be Open to Feedback from Your Prospects
  • Best Practice #7: Leverage Software Solutions to Simplify Your Consultative Sales Approach

Let’s jump right in, shall we?

What is Consultative Selling?

Consultative selling is a sales approach that prioritizes helping your prospects over pushing your product or service.

Unlike traditional selling or transactional selling, where your sales rep focuses on one-time sales and achieving revenue targets, the consultative approach puts the prospect front and center. It empowers the potential customer to overcome their challenges and achieve their goals.

But what does the consultative sales approach involve?

As a sales leader or salesperson adopting the consultative selling technique, you would:

• Reach out to and engage prospective clients.
• Try to understand the true nature of your prospects’ pain points.
• Help prospects explore different solution categories.
• Guide potential customers on how to weigh the pros and cons of each solution category.
• Recommend the perfect solution based on your consultation.

However, you need to understand that sometimes your solution may not be best suited for a prospect’s unique requirements. In that case, you should recommend an alternative that’s more suitable for the prospect or potential buyer.

Why?

Because the ultimate goal when implementing the consultative sales methodology is to help your prospects — not to force a sale.

The idea with this sales technique is that even if a prospect or potential buyer doesn’t purchase your product or service at the moment, they’d remember how helpful you were to them.

It’s quite likely that, down the line, they might refer someone to you or purchase from you in the future.

Now that you know what the consultative sales technique is, let’s see how it can benefit your business:

3 Overlooked Benefits of Consultative Selling

Many salespeople fail to see the massive benefits that this form of selling has. Adopting a consultative sales approach in your business helps you in three ways:

1. Build Trust

With the consultative selling approach, you won’t blindly push a product or service on a potential buyer.

Instead, your salesperson will first ask the prospective customer about their pain points, short-term goals, and vision — essentially, find what they actually want.

Asking prospects what they want before making a sales pitch can make a lot of difference.

How?

It shows that you genuinely care about addressing the prospect’s needs and not just about closing your sale. This makes it easier for the prospect to trust you and your recommendations because you emphasize the consultative in “consultative sale.”

They won’t perceive you as a pushy salesperson but an advisor on whom they can rely.

2. Provide More Compelling Solutions

The consultative selling process involves active collaboration with your prospects. As a result, your sales professional will have a good understanding of your prospect’s unique challenges and goals.

Based on this understanding, your salesperson can provide informed and compelling solutions to the potential customer.

But how?

You can customize your solution to match a prospect’s needs uniquely.

And even if you can’t offer a customized solution that matches the prospect’s requirements, you can point them in the direction of alternatives that are best suited to their needs.

In this respect, the consultative approach is similar to solution selling.

3. Refine Your Lead Pool

Your consultative sales conversation can reveal if a particular lead or potential buyer is a good fit for your business.

How?

By talking to a potential customer, you’ll know more about their unique needs, budget, timeline, and priorities. Based on this info, you can determine whether a potential client matches your ideal customer profile and buyer personas.

This way, your sales rep can focus their efforts on good-fit leads who would benefit from your product or service. And as for bad-fit leads, the consultative salesperson can recommend alternatives they could try and then remove them from your sales pipeline.

Knowing which leads to pursue and abandon will help your sales professional:

• Close more deals with minimal effort
• Streamline the sales cycle and stop wasting time on leads that would not close
• Improve your sales performance
• Close deals with far higher customer retention rates

But how do you get the consultative sales process in motion?

Are there any practices you can follow while implementing a consultative selling strategy?

7 Powerful Consultative Selling Strategies

Here are seven easy-to-follow practices that will help you make the most out of your consultative sales technique:

Best Practice #1. Ask Good Questions of Your Prospects

Asking good questions is crucial to the consultative selling approach.

What do I mean?

Good questions are empathetic and open-ended. And answers to such questions help you understand a prospect’s unique context, challenges, short-term goals, and long-term vision.

Additionally, good consultative selling questions also empower your potential client to discover critical insights for themselves. This includes the nature of their pain points, consequences of not overcoming their challenges, positive implications of having the right solution, and more.

Here are some consultative selling questions your sales professional can ask the potential customer or buyer during a sales conversation:

• What are your most significant needs and challenges right now?
• What would be the biggest benefits of being able to address these needs and challenges?
• Have you explored any solutions to your challenges yet?
• What criteria do you have to decide whether a solution is right for you?

Best Practice #2. Listen Actively to What Your Prospects Have to Say

Unfortunately, many sales professionals don’t properly listen to what prospects say during the sales conversation.

And to make things worse, these salespeople also interrupt prospects mid-speech to showcase their product or service. Doing so will only make you look like a pushy and untrustworthy salesperson.

What can you do instead?

Listen actively to what your potential client or prospect is saying.

And as you listen, stop focusing on what response you’re going to give them as soon as they’re done talking. Instead, try to understand everything that your potential customer is saying. If anything feels unclear, request clarification.

Active listening is one of the most essential consultative selling skills your salesperson needs to develop.

This is because it conveys that you genuinely value the prospect’s input and care about providing a solution that will make a difference in their lives.

To get better at active listening, keep these tips in mind:

• Avoid distractions during your consultative sales conversation.
• Note down the critical points (challenges, objectives, etc.) covered by your prospects.
• Occasionally paraphrase what the prospect just said to confirm your understanding.
• Don’t rush the conversations — give prospects the time to collect their thoughts.
• Ask a relevant open-ended question to encourage your prospects to share more about their unique context, challenges, and goals.
• If you’re in a face-to-face sales meeting or a video call, pay attention to their body language, tone, facial expressions, and more to better understand the potential customer’s needs.

Best Practice #3: Do In-Depth Research on Your Prospects

Gather as much information as possible about your prospects and their businesses.

Research can help you determine whether a prospect will actually benefit from your product or service. Moreover, it will allow your sales reps to talk about things your prospects can relate to in your conversations.

How do you do prospect research?

For starters, sales organizations can look up the prospect’s social media handles (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.), find relevant news articles and interviews on them, and more.

Additionally, the sales organizations can study the prospect’s niche or industry to:

• Analyze recent trends and developments
• Identify future opportunities and challenges
• Evaluate how your product or service fits into their bigger picture
• And more

However, when discussing your research findings with prospects, your consultative salesperson should stick to only the most relevant ones and be concise.

Remember, the goal isn’t to showcase your research skills — it’s to convince a potential customer or buyer that you genuinely understand their context and have their best interests in mind.

Best Practice #4: Add Value to Your Prospect’s Life

When communicating with your prospects, always ensure that you’re adding value to their lives.

But how?

Use your conversations to educate prospects on the complete nature of their challenges and the categories of solutions available to them. A good strategy for educating your prospects is to share relevant, helpful content with them.

This can include:

• Blogs
• Ebooks
• Case studies
• Infographics
• Whitepapers
• And more

Sharing such resources would help your prospects better understand which solutions can effectively help them overcome their unique challenges.

Best Practice #5: Consistently Follow Up with Your Prospects

Your prospective client will rarely decide to convert the first time that you approach them. This is especially true if multiple stakeholders are influencing the buying decision.

My point?

Your prospect or potential buyer will need more nurturing and convincing before they’re ready to buy from you. And until the prospect is prepared, you must sustain your conversational momentum to stay top-of-mind with them.

And following up with your prospect can help with that.

Your salesperson can send follow-up emails to the prospect, call them to check if they’ve got additional questions, reach out on social media to see how things are going, and more.

However, it’s best to stick to follow-up emails since they’re non-intrusive and cost-effective.

And with the right email marketing tool, you can also quickly scale up your email follow-up efforts to stay in touch with many potential clients.

Best Practice #6: Be Open to Feedback from Your Prospects

One of the most valuable traits needed in the consultative sales approach is openness to feedback.

Why?

Your prospects may have some concerns about your product or service, which makes them unsure about buying. And when they raise those concerns to you, you must be willing to hear them out.

When a prospect or potential buyer tells you about their concerns, you could get new insights into customer needs.

And based on this information, you can adjust your positioning, amend your solution, or perhaps even suggest more suitable alternatives. This can be especially helpful in product selling as it can help you develop new use cases.

Moreover, feedback from a prospective client or buyer can help you identify gaps in your consultative sales process and opportunities for improvement.

You can use this input to refine your sales approach and become a better consultative seller.

That’s not all.

When you’re open to feedback, you create a safe space for collaboration with your prospects, which will help to improve your customer relationships.

Best Practice #7: Leverage Software Solutions to Simplify Your Consultative Sales Approach

The consultative selling approach involves a lot of work — your salesperson will need to:

• Research about prospects
• Reach out to them
• Send follow-ups to keep them engaged
• And do so much more

That’s the work needed for just one prospective client.

Imagine how many hours your salesperson will need to consult and engage with several prospective clients consistently!

However, with the right tools, your consultative selling process gets easier.

For example, you can use dedicated prospecting tools like Leadfeeder and Datanyze to find prospects and gather sales intelligence on them. Additionally, with CRM tools like Salesforce and HubSpot Sales Hub, you can organize all of this info conveniently in one place.

Finally, you can approach and engage with these prospects with software like GMass — a powerful email marketing tool that works entirely inside Gmail.

With GMass, you can:

• Auto-personalize your prospect outreach emails, including paragraphs, images, links, attachments, and more
• Evaluate email performance through detailed analytics reports generated in your Gmail inbox
• Create workflows to send automated follow-up emails to your prospects until they open your email, reply to it, or click on a link inside
• Send out behavior-based campaigns to your prospects according to how they engaged with your last email
• Schedule your bulk emails to go out at the right time, so they reach prospects when they’re most likely to engage

Final Thoughts

Consultative selling is a powerful sales approach that prioritizes addressing a customer’s needs. Here, instead of trying to push your own product or service, you try to find the solution that works best for your prospect.

However, without the right tools, your consultative selling strategy could be unsustainable.

Fortunately, with a good prospecting tool, CRM system, and email marketing software like GMass in your toolkit, you can easily find the right prospects and address their key challenges.

So why not kick things off and try GMass today to upgrade your consultative selling process?

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

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Hard selling is a sales approach that uses straightforward and typically aggressive tactics to make a quick sale. And while it’s an established sales technique, a shift in customer preferences has made hard selling useful in only limited situations.

But before we get into that, let’s first cover what the hard sell is and its key advantages and disadvantages. Then, I’ll discuss four tips on how to implement the hard-sell technique in 2021.

This Article Contains:

(Click on a link to jump to the specific section.)

• What is the Hard Sell?
• 3 Key Benefits of Using a Hard-Sell Approach
• 3 Major Limitations of a Hard-Sell Approach
• When to Use a Hard Sell
• 4 Simple Tips to Successfully Implement a Hard-Sell Approach

Let’s dive in, shall we?

What is a Hard Sell?

A hard sell is a direct sales approach where you persuade the prospect to buy your offer as quickly as possible. This aggressive sales technique uses sales tactics like repeated cold calls and cold emails to reach prospects.

How is a Hard Sell Different From a Soft Sell?

Hard selling uses a strong sales pitch that attempts to push the product or service onto the prospect, and it “doesn’t take no for an answer.”

By comparison, a soft-sell tactic is a subtler, gentler approach to selling. You subtly persuade the potential customer by providing value-adding content throughout the buyer’s journey, leading them toward a purchase decision in their own time rather than pressuring them to buy now.

Want to know more about the soft sell approach?

Read my comprehensive guide on how to master the soft sell. 

Several other characteristics separate a hard sell from a soft sell, such as:

• Hard sellers will attempt to provoke the buyer, flatter them, or leverage their fear of missing out to make the prospective buyer feel like purchasing the product or service now is a smart decision. This is similar to how an old-school car salesman would position an offer.
• A hard-sell product demonstration tends to be characterized by lots of enthusiasm, intended at getting the customer excited about the product. It will often have lots of facts and figures designed to overwhelm the prospect with the benefits of making a purchase.
• Hard-sell advertising typically contains forceful, in-your-face slogans and graphics designed to grab the buyer’s attention.

Although hard selling has fallen out of favor with most sales professionals due to changing customer preferences, this sales approach still offers several advantages.

3 Key Advantages of Using a Hard-Sell Approach

Let’s take a look at four key reasons why a hard sell tactic still works:

1. Creates a Sense of Urgency

Hard selling is all about creating a sense of urgency and a need for quick action.

Since a hard-sell approach puts pressure on the potential buyer, they’re much more likely to buy the product without too much delay.

2. Much More Straightforward and Saves Time

Some leads may find the idea of a hard sell off-putting.

However, adopting such a straightforward sales approach can actually be a bonus for other buyers who have already made a purchasing decision.

Why?

If you have customers ready to purchase the product, they probably won’t want to spend more time thinking about it or having more meetings with the sales rep.

Some salespeople may also argue that a hard-sell tactic is more time effective. Without having to spend too much time nurturing a lead, you can sell more in less time.

3. Easy to Replicate and Implement

The soft-sell approach involves subtle persuasion. A soft seller needs to have the skills to understand each prospect’s pain points and then tailor the pitch to their particular needs.

However, a hard sell takes a more one-size-fits-all approach. This makes it much simpler to replicate and implement than a soft sell, making it easier and faster to train new sales reps.

3 Major Limitations of Using a Hard Sell Approach

While sales reps can use hard selling today, there are several downsides associated with this sales tactic. Some of these limitations include:

1. Can Alienate Prospects

A hard-sale approach can alienate prospects who find the aggressive technique unpleasant. The high-pressure nature of hard selling can overwhelm customers to the point where they dismiss the sales pitch or move away from the product altogether.

2. Typically Not Suitable for Repeat Sales

Another downside associated with hard selling is the lack of repeat purchases.

Hard selling forgoes building trust between the businesses and the customer. As a result, customers often have no emotional connection to the brand and will be more open to exploring alternate options.

3. Less Effective During Periods of Economic Decline

A hard-sell approach may be particularly ineffective during times of financial difficulty. Counterintuitively, it works better in times of abundance.

For example, most people don’t plan on purchasing products or services during an economic recession. In such cases, businesses may find that a hard-sell approach is much less effective than a soft sell.

Although hard selling may be less practical in such situations, there are specific times where hard selling can be particularly effective.

Let’s have a look at some of those situations.

When to Use a Hard Sell Approach

Despite having several disadvantages, there are two situations where a direct sales approach like the hard sell will have a greater chance of success.

1. Low-Ticket Cost

One scenario where hard selling may be particularly effective is when you’re selling low-cost products. Encouraging your prospect to make an immediate decision is far easier when there is a low purchase cost as it’s typically low-risk for them.

Additionally, since the monetary value of a conversion is low here, it doesn’t make sense to waste too much time trying to convince a lead to make a purchase.

2. Clear Need

Another situation when hard selling is effective is when the prospect’s need or pain point is clear. For example, if the prospect is in urgent need of a replacement for a faulty product, they are less likely to spend too much time considering alternative solutions.

However, to make your hard-sell approach that much more effective, it’s essential to keep in mind that you shouldn’t be too aggressive.

Why?

Being aggressive can come off as rude and pushy to the prospect, which can damage both your personal and your company’s reputation.

That said, let’s take a look at some practical tips on how to implement a hard-sell method effectively.

4 Simple Tips to Successfully Implement a Hard-Sell Approach

Implementing a hard-sell sales approach is a little easier than a soft-sell approach since it’s far more direct and shorter.

Here are four tips that can help maximize your chances of successful hard selling:

1. Ensure You Know the Product or Service Well

As a hard-sell sales professional, you need to know all of your product or service details to serve the prospect best and close the sale.

Why?

Compared to soft selling, hard selling focuses more on the individual seller than on a larger sales process — this means that the sales rep has a greater impact on whether a prospect decides to buy or not.

That’s why you need to be well-versed with your product details and how each feature can help solve each prospect’s particular problems to make a successful sale.

2. Hire the Right Type of Salesperson

Hiring the right type of salesperson is essential for a hard-sell tactic.

You need people who are confident and work well under pressure. And part of that involves thinking on your feet and adjusting your sales pitch to what the prospect is saying.

Having an assertive nature is another important trait for hard selling.

Your sales rep needs to have the energy and confidence to present the offer quickly and ask for the sale. They should also be able to address objections confidently.

3. Create High Quality, Persuasive Content

As hard selling emphasizes quick decision-making, you need relevant content that targets your audience and backs up your sales pitch.

You need to leverage high-quality marketing materials, such as case studies and customer testimonials, in your hard-sell tactic. This will make it much easier to convince your potential customer to buy your product or service.

But how do you find content that appeals to your customers? 

A great way to determine the type of content you should use is to analyze site usage and traffic sources to see where your visitors are going.

Speaking to advertising partners can also help you understand how prospects react to your content.

You should also ensure your hard-sell content contains a solid call to action, such as  “limited time only,” “don’t miss out,” or “buy now before it’s too late.” This helps bring in the immediacy that’s essential in a hard-sell approach.

4. Leverage Email Marketing

Email marketing is a fantastic way to generate sales when you use the hard-sell approach.

How?

Remember, hard selling is all about taking a direct approach to selling your product or service. An email is a time-effective and direct sales approach that’s easy to replicate, making it the ideal communication method when you can’t meet with the person.

Moreover, email allows you to make a direct sale, which isn’t something that social media marketing or content marketing can necessarily do.

But what should you include in a hard sell email?

Since the idea is to have the prospect move through your sales pipeline as quickly as possible, there are a few points you could include in your emails to help with this.

Here are some tips to consider:

• Ask your prospect if they would like an initial sales consultation.
• Encourage them to visit your website.
• Ask if they would like a quote.

Now that we’ve covered what to include in your hard-sell emails, you need a powerful way to deliver those emails.

In other words, you need GMass.

What’s GMass?

GMass is a powerful email marketing tool that works directly inside Gmail and can help drive sales.

Its features have made it popular among employees in tech giants like Uber and Google and workers at social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn. GMass is also an excellent tool for SMBs, salespersons, and solopreneurs.

Here’s a quick overview of GMass’ key features:

1. Automatic email personalization

Personalizing your emails is essential, irrespective of which sales tactic you use.

Why?

Because everyone wants to be viewed as an individual and doesn’t want to see generic, mass-created emails. The problem is, personalizing every email could take forever.

Fortunately, GMass lets you add personalized links, images, attachments, and even entire paragraphs.

2. Powerful email list builder
Being a sales rep means you likely have several emailing lists for various customers at different stages of the buyer’s journey. With GMass, you can quickly build large, segmented emailing lists with minimal effort.

3. Detailed email analytics
Having access to detailed reports and analytics is vital in determining whether your hard selling emailing efforts pay off for you. To help with this, GMass automatically creates a Campaign Report highlighting metrics like bounces, opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and other metrics that you’ll love.

4. Automatic follow-ups
Chances are that you’ll have a chunk of prospects who won’t reply to your first email. All you need to do is follow up.

Fortunately, with GMass, you can automatically send follow-up emails to maximize your engagement and encourage your prospects to make a purchase.

5. Email scheduling
Ensuring that your email arrives in the recipient’s inbox at the right time is crucial to making the most out of your sales and marketing efforts. GMass can help you here, too.

Simply compose your emails and schedule them to be sent at the desired date and time, and GMass handles the rest.

Wrapping Up

Hard selling can still be a very effective sales technique, provided that the situation calls for this approach.

To maximize the impact of your hard-selling efforts, consider using a powerful email marketing tool like GMass to quickly and efficiently reach lots of potential customers.

With GMass, you can send out mass personalized emails, set up follow-ups, track your email performance, and so much more.

So why not try GMass today and overhaul your hard-selling approach?

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

A sales pipeline represents the different stages prospects go through as they transition from leads to customers of your business.

A well-managed sales pipeline will help you pinpoint where prospects are on their buyer’s journey, calculate predictable revenue, and improve sales performance.

But what are the stages in a sales pipeline, and how do you build an efficient pipeline?

In this article, I’ll explain what a sales pipeline is, its key benefits, and its nine typical stages.

I’ll also show you how to build your own high-converting sales pipeline and highlight three tools you can use for sales pipeline management.

This Article Contains:

(Click on links to jump to specific sections.)

• What is a Sales Pipeline?
• 3 Key Benefits of Using a Sales Pipeline
• 9 Stages in a Typical Sales Pipeline
• How to Build and Manage a High-Converting Sales Pipeline (Step-by-Step)
• 3 Excellent Sales Pipeline Management Tools

Let’s go.

What is a Sales Pipeline?

A sales pipeline highlights the different stages a prospect goes through as they transition from a lead to a customer of your business. It helps you visualize your sales process in a highly organized manner.

A pipeline will also give you insights into how effective your sales efforts are at all times.

How do you build one?

When it comes to building your sales pipeline, there’s no right way to do it.

Why?

The stages in your sales pipeline will depend on your buyer’s journey — which is the process a customer goes through when purchasing your offering, and it’s unique to each business.

Additionally, if your business offers a variety of products or services, you’ll require multiple pipelines to match each offer’s distinct sales process. It’s also essential to understand that leads will advance at different velocities along your pipeline.

For example, eager early adopters will likely transition into customers quickly and have a higher pipeline velocity. On the flip side, others may take a while to warm up and move forward in your pipeline, resulting in a lower pipeline velocity.

My point?

Your sales pipeline expectations shouldn’t be set in stone. Every pipeline must evolve based on the changing needs of your potential customers and the various buyers’ journeys.

Does all of this sound like the sales pipeline resembles a sales funnel?

Sales Pipeline vs. Sales Funnel

Many people confuse a sales pipeline with a sales funnel — but they are two different things.

While the sales pipeline depicts the different conversion stages a prospect goes through, the sales funnel shows the number of leads at each stage and the percentage of leads advancing through each stage.

By analyzing the sales funnel, you can identify which pipeline stages tend to lose prospects and take preventive measures accordingly.

Now that you clearly understand what a sales pipeline is, let’s see why it’s crucial to your business’ success.

3 Key Benefits of Using a Sales Pipeline

Here are three reasons why you need a sales pipeline:

1. Provides Detailed Insights into Your Deals

A sales pipeline offers in-depth insights into each lead’s progress and who is likely to convert.

This gives you visibility into the effectiveness of your sales process and helps a sales leader make more informed sales decisions. This way, you can focus more energy on closing sales-ready leads and less on deals with lower chances of conversion.

2. Helps Forecast Your Revenue Accurately

By analyzing your sales pipeline, you can accurately determine the monthly, quarterly, or yearly sales revenue estimates based on the monetary value of likely-to-convert deals.

This sales forecast info is critical to decision-making at other departments in your company like finance, marketing, human resources, operations, and so on. For example, your finance team can use the info for better budget estimates.

3. Improves Your Sales and Marketing Teams’ Performance

With an effective sales pipeline that accurately reflects your sales process, you can quickly identify anything that impedes your sales progress — like follow-up delays, lack of quality marketing materials, and more.

Based on this knowledge, you can adopt preventive measures to overcome roadblocks before they pop up and improve the performance of your sales and marketing team.

Additionally, the pipeline also provides insights into each sales rep’s sales activities, how close they are to meeting their sales quota, and more. This way, if you notice underperforming salespeople, you can coach them and help them to improve their sales performance.

But what makes for an effective sales pipeline? 

To understand that, let’s check out the different stages you can expect to see in a high-performing pipeline.

9 Stages in a Typical Sales Pipeline

Remember, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to building sales pipelines.

The number of sales stages in your pipeline depends on several factors like your business type, sales process, sales cycle length (the time it takes to close a sale), and more. However, most sales pipelines share some standard stages like lead generation, outreach, and follow-up, etc.

Here are nine sales pipeline stages you can pick from for your business:

1. Lead Generation

Lead generation is usually the first stage in most sales pipelines. The objective at this sales stage is to get noticed and attract potential buyers to your business.

You find people who are interested in your offerings through:

• Advertisements
• Social media marketing
• Content marketing
• Email marketing
• And so on

Want to learn how to find and nurture email leads in 2021?

Check out my comprehensive article on email leads for helpful info.

2. Lead Qualification

In the lead qualification stage, you gauge whether a new lead you generated is a good fit for your business.

To determine that, you can research the new lead and analyze them based on your:

• Ideal customer profile: Defines the essential criteria that a lead must satisfy to qualify as a potential customer for your business.
• Buyer persona: Specifies things like behavioral traits, demographics, and unique needs of the people who want to buy your product or service.

Leads matching both your ideal customer profile and buyer personas can become qualified leads, a.k.a. prospects.

Check out my ultimate guide on sales prospecting to learn more.

3. Prospect Outreach

Once you’ve found your prospects, it’s time to reach out to them via channels like phone calls, social media, emails, and more.

The critical thing here is to meet your prospects on the channels they use. This way, your prospects will be more comfortable engaging with your sales rep.

And in professional settings, the best way to approach your prospects is via email — it’s fast, reliable, cost-effective, and super popular.

Fortunately, with powerful email marketing software like GMass, you can:

• Auto-personalize your outreach email messages, including images, links, paragraphs, attachments, and more.
• Improve email deliverability by refining your marketing campaigns based on insights from detailed analytics reports.
• Send out behavior-based campaigns based on how a prospective buyer responded to your previous outreach emails.
• Schedule bulk messages to go out at optimal times when your prospects are most likely to engage.
• Integrate with the Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform to organize all your prospect info in one place.

4. Relationship Building

After initiating contact with your prospects, you need to build meaningful relationships with them.

How do you do that?

By adding value to their lives — identify what’s troubling them, locate helpful resources, and regularly share relevant content with your prospects.

Additionally, your salesperson can leverage this opportunity to help prospects understand the complete nature of their challenges and explore different solution categories.

The goal here is for your sales rep to become a prospect’s trusted advisor and subject matter expert.

5. Product or Service Demo

When a prospective buyer seems willing to explore your solution, the next step is to do a demo.

Ask the prospect when they’d like to see a demo of your product or service and schedule a meeting accordingly.

Additionally, be sure to inquire who else will be attending the demonstration. This helps you tailor your sales conversation during the demo to your audience.

For example, when meeting with C-suite executives, you’d talk about the big picture and how your offering helps them there. But with junior employees, you might discuss immediate challenges and goals instead.

6. Sales Proposal Submission

If the demo went well and the participants are interested, you can submit your sales proposal to the potential customer.

Summarize the prospect’s biggest challenges in your proposal and explain how you’re uniquely positioned to solve their problems. Additionally, you can add your market research findings to demonstrate awareness of their business context.

The sales proposal must also mention your:

• Deliverables
• Associated costs
• Scope of work
• Social proof
• And more

Remember, the proposal’s objective is to provide the prospective buyer with the info they’ll need to make a nuanced purchase decision.

Read my article on writing great sales proposals for more pointers.

7. Prospect Follow-up

Many sales professionals wrongly assume that sending a sales proposal marks the end of your sales pipeline.

However, even after receiving your sales proposal, the prospect could:

• Have some unanswered questions
• Receive sales proposals from your competitors
• Feel reluctant to commit at the moment, and so on

What should you do?

Have your salesperson follow up with the prospect and offer support. If they’ve got objections, let them know how you can work around them.

As for competitors, reassure the prospects why your solution is best suited to address their needs. And if they’re reluctant, keep nurturing the prospect until they’re sales-ready.

As a rule of thumb, unless a prospect explicitly tells you that they’re not interested in your product or service, it could be okay to follow up. But remember not to go overboard with the number of follow-ups you send, or you might come across as pushy.

Fortunately, sending follow-up emails is a breeze with an email marketing tool like GMass.

GMass lets you set up automated follow-up workflows, adjust the number of follow-ups you send, fine-tune the follow-up frequency, and more.

Want to write great sales follow-up emails?

Check out my sales follow-up guide for handy tips and templates.

8. Sales Close

A sales manager can expect to negotiate with the prospect at this sales stage. For example, there could be specific concerns you’ll need to work around, some discounts you might have to offer, and so on.

If your negotiation is successful, you’ll add to the win rate and your business’s bottom line. And if you lose, don’t worry — your salesperson can nurture that sales opportunity into conversion in due time.

9. Post-Sales Management

The “sales close” is usually the final sales pipeline stage for most businesses.

However, a company with an exceptional sales organization would also include a post-sales management stage in their sales pipeline.

Why?

The post-sales management stage ensures that:

• Your customers have an excellent onboarding experience.
• Your product or service helps the customers overcome their challenges and accomplish their goals.
• You delivered on your promises to customers.

This way, you can sustain a meaningful relationship with your customers and ensure customer loyalty. Moreover, it helps you ask for referrals from existing customers and cross-sell or upsell your offerings to them.

Once you’ve got a solid understanding of the different stages possible in a sales pipeline, you’re ready to build your own sales pipeline.

How to Build and Manage a High-Converting Sales Pipeline (Step-by-Step)

I’ll cover the five key steps that will help you create and manage an effective pipeline for your business.

Step #1: Choose Your Sales Pipeline Stages

Remember, the number of stages in your sales pipeline will depend on factors like your:

• Type of business
• Revenue goals or sales targets
• Conversion rate, and more

For clarity, you can analyze your sales process to see which stages are crucial to increasing your conversion rate and bottom line.

Step #2: Organize Your Prospect List

After choosing your pipeline stages, you should organize the list of prospects.

Consolidate critical info about the people and businesses who want to buy from you in a sales CRM platform. This includes their contact info, demographic details, revenue, interaction history, and so on.

Based on these data points, you can assign potential buyers or customers to different stages of your pipeline.

Step #3: Define the Sales Activities of Each Pipeline Stage

Now, you should clearly define the activities your salesperson will perform at a particular sales pipeline stage.

For example, in the outreach stage, your sales rep should send out emails, share relevant content, or call your prospects.

This way, you’ll have a clearer and smoother sales process, and your salesperson will understand precisely when a potential customer is ready to move to the next sales pipeline stage.

As a sales leader or sales manager, define the activities for each sales stage and ensure that each sales activity:

• Ultimately helps you close a B2C or B2B sale
• Is best suited to a particular sales pipeline stage
• Is easily understood by your sales team

Step #4: Review Your Sales Pipeline Periodically

A sales pipeline is rarely perfect out of the box.

And that’s why you must analyze the sales performance of your pipeline regularly.

But how do you analyze a sales pipeline?

By using sales pipeline metrics. Sales metrics allow you to put together a sales pipeline report that carefully analyzes the sales effectiveness of your pipeline.

Some critical sales pipeline metrics you can monitor include:

• The number of deals: how many qualified leads you’ve got in the pipeline

• Average deal size: the average financial value of your sales contracts

• Win rate: the percentage of your sales leads who become paying customers

• Sales velocity: the average time a lead stays in your pipeline before they convert

Step #5: Hone Your Sales Pipeline

After your sales pipeline review, you should address any roadblocks in your sales process and implement improvement strategies.

Feel free to add more stages or cut the number of stages.

Just remember that it could take several attempts to build multiple pipelines that successfully reflect your sales processes and contribute to your business’ bottom line.

Moreover, a pipeline is just one of several things your sales organization needs to manage.

You have prospecting, outreach and engagement, sales demos, and more to stay on top of — your reps can’t focus all their sales efforts on just the pipeline.

Fortunately, with the right tool, sales pipeline management becomes much more accessible.

But which tool do you need?

Don’t worry.

Here are some powerful tools you can use to simplify your sales pipeline creation and management process.

3 Excellent Sales Pipeline Management Tools

Here are three tools that help make sales pipeline management a breeze.

1. Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a sales CRM platform that helps you create visual sales pipelines that highlight exactly where each sales deal is.

Pipedrive Key Features

• Automated repetitive tasks to streamline your sales process
• Custom chatbots and forms add a new lead directly to your sales pipeline
• Customized metrics to provide insights into the company’s sales performance against predefined sales goals

Pipedrive Pricing

Pipedrive’s plans start at $15/user per month.

Pipedrive Ratings

• Capterra: 4.5/5 (2270+ reviews)
• G2: 4.3/5 (1330+ reviews)

2. Pipeline

Pipeline is a sales platform that helps you build efficient sales pipelines and accelerate your deal closing process.

Pipeline Key Features

• Performance Pulse offers insights into your sales pipeline, revealing bottlenecks, sales coaching opportunities, and more.
• Organize all sales-related tasks and conversations in one place.
• Generate a daily agenda that shows what you need to do for any prospect or deal.

Pipeline Pricing

Pipeline’s plans start at $29/user per month.

Pipeline Ratings

• Capterra: 4.4/5 (600+ reviews)
• G2: 4.3/5 (840+ reviews)

3. HubSpot Sales Hub

HubSpot Sales Hub is a sales tool designed to help you manage your sales pipeline and build better prospect relationships.

HubSpot Sales Hub Key Features

• Sales management playbooks provide call scripts, positioning guides, and more to empower your sales team.
• Sales analytics and reporting features let you visualize your sales performance.
• Mobile apps for Android and iOS let you manage contacts, deals, and tasks on the go.

HubSpot Sales Hub Pricing

HubSpot Sales Hub offers a free plan, and their paid plans start at $50/month for two users.

HubSpot Sales Hub Ratings

• Capterra: 4.5/5 (280+ reviews)
• G2: 4.3/5 (6950+ reviews)

Final Thoughts

A sales pipeline is a visual representation of your sales process, covering everything from prospecting to closing a B2C or B2B sale and beyond.

The objective of your pipeline is simple: to help you convert leads into customers efficiently.

However, remember that reaching out to prospects is an essential part of any sales pipeline. Fortunately, with email marketing software like GMass in your arsenal, email outreach has never been easier.

GMass helps you auto-personalize your outreach emails, analyze campaign performance, build automated workflows to send out timely follow-ups, and do so much more.

So why not try GMass today to power up your sales pipeline?

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Today, 97% of buyers go online to research companies and their products or services.

What does that mean for businesses?

Buyers are more educated than they have ever been in the past and no longer want to be sold to. They don’t need to be told what a product can offer; they already know it.

As a result, the modern salesperson needs to change their sales approach. Sales reps must now use their soft skills to create lifelong relationships with customers instead of aggressively selling products.

And what’s the best way to do this?
By employing a soft-sell approach.

In this article, I’ll explain what the soft sell is, how it differs from the hard sell, and give you 7 tips to master this approach.

This Article Contains:

(Click on a link to jump to the specific section)

• What is the soft sell?
• Hard sell vs. soft sell
• 3 key benefits of soft sell
• 7 simple tips for an effective soft-sell approach
  • Perform in-depth research
  • Employ active listening
  • Build positive relationships
  • Give your prospects enough time and space
  • Be friendly
  • Ensure mutual benefit
  • Use technology to automate processes

Let’s get started.

What is the soft sell?

The soft sell is a technique that employs a more subtle sales approach.

Instead of pressuring the lead to make a purchase right away, you create a low-pressure sales experience for the buyer.

How?

You limit aggressive sales tactics and instead focus on conversations and subtle persuasion to keep the prospect engaged. This way, salespeople remain active throughout the sales process — even though they aren’t pushing for a sale.

Now, before we dive into how to perform soft selling, let’s first see why it’s far more effective than the hard sell when it comes to generating repeat sales and creating lifelong customers.

Hard sell vs. soft sell

Soft sell advertising and sales are more indirect, aiming to subtly persuade a potential client or customer to make a purchase. In fact, most sales reps who use the soft-sell technique don’t view sales as their ultimate goal.

Instead, they focus on building lasting customer relationships. For example, if your company has a blog, you could share a blog post containing value-adding content to a prospect to kick-start a relationship with them.

On the other hand, hard-sell tactics are much more straightforward, aiming to make a sale as quickly as possible.

And while the hard-sell approach may result in more sales in the short term, most customers perceive it as overly aggressive, uncomfortable, and pushy. They may end up avoiding the product — or worse, avoiding the brand altogether.

After analyzing 4,500 emails in a B2B context, a recent study found that while more aggressive emails (hard-sell emails) had a slightly higher response rate than soft-sell ones, a greater percentage of those responses were negative.

The softer, more subtle emails received a 31% positive response rate versus 13% for the more aggressive emails.

This highlights the importance of allowing customers to make the decisions for themselves, rather than sales professionals making the choices for them.

However, higher response rates aren’t the only potential benefit from implementing soft selling. Take a look at a few other major benefits:

3 Major Benefits of Soft Sell

Here’s a quick look at the three key benefits of soft-sell marketing and sales:

1. Less pressure on customers

In soft selling, you don’t push your products or services onto the customer.

As a result, it makes them feel less pressured to make a purchase, and they can reach a purchasing decision in their own time.

Creating a low-pressure sales environment can help you avoid resistance (the fear/doubt that prevents the prospect from purchasing), increasing the likelihood of the potential customer making a purchase.

2. Creates trust

With the soft sell, you’re essentially providing your audience with value without asking for anything in return. This shows them that you care about more than just making a sale and genuinely want to help them overcome their unique challenges and achieve their goals.

As a result, they’ll be more willing to engage with your brand.

Moreover, since soft selling is a far more comfortable process for the buyer, you’re much more likely to build trust — which is essential to building long-term relationships with your customers.

3. Increases brand awareness

Even though you’re not pushing your brand onto prospects, a soft-sell approach can be very effective at creating brand awareness.

How? 

With soft sell, the focus is on the quality and relevancy of the content and less on the sale.

By creating high-quality, helpful content that speaks to your target audience, they’ll be far more likely to share it with friends and colleagues.

This promotes word of mouth knowledge sharing, which in turn boosts brand awareness — helping you gain extra followers.

7 Simple Tips for an Effective Soft-Sell Approach

Now that we’ve outlined why soft selling is effective, let’s take a look at seven tips that can help you master it:

Tip #1. Perform in-depth research

Before you reach out to your prospect, learn as much as you can about their goals and challenges.

This gives you a clear understanding of how you can help your customer achieve these goals or overcome their challenges.

Here are some of the things you should do:

• Perform in-depth research on the company or individual you’re hoping to engage. This demonstrates your commitment, improves your credibility, and gives you the information you need to offer specific, practical solutions to your customers.
• Communicate with your advertising partners to gain insights into what your target audience finds appealing. You could also analyze site usage and your best traffic sources to understand what resources on your website the prospect finds interesting and focus on highlighting them during your interactions.

This way, when you eventually begin to do business with your prospects, you’ll be better positioned to make recommendations as you’ll know more about the prospect’s unique needs.

Tip #2. Employ active listening

Active listening is one of the secrets to effective soft selling.

Not only does it make the prospect feel heard, valued, and respected, it also helps a salesperson understand if the prospect is actually a great fit for their offerings.

Here are some active listening techniques you can use when interacting with prospects:

1. Listen with genuine interest to what your prospect tells you. This is more about hearing what the prospect says to understand their needs and challenges rather than looking for an opportunity to respond. Let the prospect talk first, and you can use what they’ve mentioned to steer the conversation.
2. Paraphrase what the prospect said. The goal here is to convey your understanding of their situation. When your prospect tells you something important about their challenge or goal, confirm your understanding by saying what they’ve told you in your own words. This will create an immediate impression on your prospect and make them feel heard.
3. Confirm you’ve understood the prospect. After you’ve conveyed your understanding of their situation, ask them if you’ve understood their goals and challenges accurately. If they answer no, you have the chance to improve your understanding with follow-up questions, like asking them to clarify what you may have missed.
4. Ask relevant follow-up questions to gain a deeper understanding of their situation. Ask open-ended questions that encourage the prospect to share more about their goals or challenges. The benefit of open-ended questions is that the prospect can convey how they feel in their own words and on their own terms.
5. Pay attention to more than their words. This means going beyond just hearing what they’re saying. Pay attention to their language, tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language to pick up subtle cues that’ll help you understand their needs better.

Tip #3. Build positive relationships

Fostering positive relationships is at the core of soft-sell advertising.

Take the time to get to know your prospects.

With time, the lead will begin to see you as a trusted advisor and will be in a much better position to make a purchase.

How do you build positive relationships?

Don’t dive straight into talking about business.

Instead, take a few minutes to get to know them personally. It doesn’t have to be a long or complicated process; you could start with a simple “how has your day been?”

Doing so will show your prospect you have a genuine interest in them.

Tip #4. Give your prospects enough time and space

Another core aspect of soft selling is to allow your prospects the space they need to make their own decision. Do not try and bombard them with sales emails and calls right away.

Instead, send the prospect relevant information that will help their decision-making process without pressuring them to make a purchase.

It’s generally a good tactic to wait about 48-72 hours before contacting them again. And when you do reach out, check if they have any further questions or if you can provide them with more relevant content to help them out.

What’s an easy way to reach out appropriately?

With an email marketing tool, you can schedule your outreach emails to send at just the time you need, or you can set a trigger to send an email once your prospect has taken a specific action.

Tip #5. Be friendly

While it’s important always to remain professional, you don’t need to be overly formal when communicating with potential customers.

Be empathetic in your communication and offer genuine recommendations to help the prospect solve their problem. Your personality will play a significant role when making a soft-sell sales pitch.

Additionally, keep a conversational tone during your meetings to make yourself more approachable. You can easily achieve this by not directly reading from a sales script or following your presentation word-for-word. Alternatively, you could begin with a personal anecdote they shared in a previous meeting.

You can also use email marketing tools to personalize your emails automatically, reflecting each prospect’s needs accurately. Doing so will create a more natural and casual conversation.

Tip #6. Ensure mutual benefit

Soft selling is as much about the prospect as it is about making a sale.

In essence, it’s about creating a win-win situation.

Sure, you benefit from their purchase. But if the customer leaves feeling pleased, you also benefit from a better brand image, potentially increased brand awareness, and knowing you might have created a long-term customer.

The prospect benefits, too, as they feel like they’ve left with the right product and are happy about the decision they made.

However, a big part of soft selling is knowing when to walk away if the deal isn’t right.

Remember, if you sell someone something that they don’t need, they probably won’t renew the contract, won’t purchase any cross-sells, and won’t refer your product to their friends or family.

Tip #7. Use technology to automate processes

Capitalizing on automation is a fantastic way to boost several soft-selling aspects of your sales and marketing campaigns.

For example, providing value at every stage of the buyer’s journey is a crucial part of soft selling. But manually keeping track of which leads could use additional information, and then delivering that, can be time-consuming.

In addition to having a dramatic impact on your efficiency, automating various aspects of the soft-sell approach can help better align your marketing and sales departments.

In fact, automation can result in a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead.

And one powerful tool to help automate your email outreach efforts is GMass.

What is GMass?

GMass is a powerful email marketing and communication tool that operates directly inside Gmail. Its suite of advanced features has made it a popular tool among employees in social media giants like LinkedIn and Twitter and large firms like Google and Uber.

The best part?

GMass is a perfect tool for small business owners and solopreneurs, too.

To use GMass, all you need is to download the GMass Chrome extension and sign up with your Gmail account.

Here’s a quick look at how GMass can boost your email outreach:

1. Automatically personalize your emails: GMass’ powerful personalization features can automatically personalize various aspects of your email, such as names, paragraphs, images, links, attachments, and more.

2. Build extensive emailing lists right inside your inbox: Easily build comprehensive email lists simply by running a search in your Gmail account.

3. Analyze your email campaign efficiency with detailed reports: Quickly analyze the performance of your emails with insights into core email metrics like the number of unique opens, replies, bounces, unsubscribes, and more.

4. Send behavior-based email campaigns: Send emails based on how recipients interacted with your previous emails, such as those who replied, those who clicked a URL, and so on.

5. Send automatic follow-ups: Improve your recipient engagement levels by customizing when and how many follow-ups each prospect receives.

6. Schedule your emails to be sent at the right time: Set the date and time when your emails will be most impactful, and GMass will automatically send them when the time arrives. You can even reschedule emails from within the Gmail Drafts folder.

7. Integrate with Salesforce CRM: if you use Salesforce CRM to manage your prospect details, you can integrate it with GMass to track and analyze all your email communications with ease.

8. Send a drip campaign to your prospects: Provide value regularly by sending an automated series of emails to your prospects based on a set schedule or triggers.

Final Thoughts

Soft selling has several advantages over hard selling tactics and can help you create a more pleasant experience for your prospects.

Remember, soft selling is about relationship building and providing value at every stage of the buyer’s journey — rather than aiming to close a sale as quickly as possible.

And a consistent way to provide value is by utilizing an email outreach tool like GMass to automate many of the time-consuming aspects of the process. GMass can personalize your emails, send drip campaigns, schedule your emails to send at the perfect time, and more.

So why not download the GMass extension and take your soft-selling efforts to the next level?

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

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