All posts in Sales

Why Upselling is the Job of Your Whole Company, Not Just Your Sales Team

upsellingThroughout a customer lifecycle, it is important to take opportunities when they present themselves.

One aspect which many SaaS companies will be familiar with is the ongoing attempt to upgrade customers to the next level of billing.

The core method of achieving this is to add features and improve your product.

This provides provides greater value for the client and gives them more reasons to consider purchasing your services – resulting in an upsell which works for both parties.

I imagine most of you reading have bought something from Amazon at some point in time. Yet when Amazon offer a more premium delivery service with access to films and television shows many of you will have gone from occasionally using Amazon for purchases to being fully fledged Prime users!

Amazon offered greater value and you thought it was worth paying for. You were upsold.

But importantly, both you and Amazon came out of the deal as winners!

In this article, we’ll look at how different companies have utilized upselling to drive their business forward, and try to learn a little something from each.

Then we’ll take a more in depth look at how Process Street upsells its customers, and the importance of seeing this as a company wide effort rather than small aspect of sales.

At the end of the article, we’ll give you a free Process Street process template you can use in your business for upselling customers. This process is geared to be run by a member of the sales team to try to upsell a valuable client, and close the deal.

Checkout the snapshot below!

upselling process street checklist

Continue Reading

How to Level Up Your Sales Operations Career

Born in 1970, sales operations was originally described as “all the nasty number things that you don’t want to do, but need to do to make a great sales force”.

Sales is moving from paper rolodexes into the world of AI, automation and cloud computing. With it comes more nasty number things than ever before, making operations staff a vital part of the sales team.

Continue Reading

How to Write a Cold Email: 10-Point Checklist for Sales Emails That Convert

The following is a guest post from Forster Perelsztejn. As content marketer, Forster gathers sales data at Prospect.io in order to deliver powerful and insightful advice to salespeople. Check out his Top 10 Cold Email Templates Based on 3,327,652 Emails Sent! and connect with him on LinkedIn.

An essential part of my job at Prospect.io is to help customers craft cold emails that actually get replies. Why is that? Because cold email brings business in!

Yet, you’d be surprised at how many of those emails are poorly written. Most of the ones I get are a cringefest even though they were sent by professional salespeople. For that reason, I feel it’s essential to spread the word about cold email best practices.

Use this 10-point checklist below to optimize your sales emails to make it more likely you’ll get results. After all, only around 1.7% of cold emails get a reply…

Continue Reading

What You Can Learn from Salesforce to Hit Your Sales Goals This Year

Sales goals salesforce header

Some people seem like naturals when it comes to sales. Their smooth talking and deep product knowledge entices customers and makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside.

sales goals salesforce skills Source

A high performing sales person is a huge asset to a company, and they’re often paid very well as a reward!

  • Maybe you want to start a new business and need to jump into the sales role to get your fledgling startup off the ground?
  • Maybe you want to build a sales team to crush sales goals while you focus on your specialty?
  • Or maybe you just want to get into sales as a career and need to know how to get up to speed fast?

Well, in this Process Street article we’ll cover solutions to each of these conundrums. We’ll look at:

  1. How Salesforce hit their sales goals
  2. 10 top tips the sales experts have for a beginner
  3. How Close.io CEO Steli Efti builds outbound sales teams
  4. What steps you need to take to build sales processes (with a load of premade templates to help you get started!)

“A goal properly set is halfway reached.” – Legendary sales guru, Zig Ziglar.

Continue Reading

53 Essential Business Metrics You Need to Be Tracking in 2023

business metrics

It’s impossible to run a successful business without taking the time to track your core business metrics.

If you don’t, then good luck knowing:

  • How much pure profit you’re earning
  • Where costs can be cut
  • Whether you’re selling enough
  • How much debt you have
  • Whether you’ll be bankrupt next quarter

Having said that, where do you start? There are so many metrics you could be tracking that it’s easy to get stuck tracking and recording everything rather than analyzing and acting on your data.

That’s why I’ve collected 53 core business metrics right here to get you started. Stop wasting time wondering what to track or flicking between 20 different posts going over five stats each – every metric here comes with a brief description and formula or method for easily tracking it.

Continue Reading

8 Ways to Improve Sales Productivity with Consistent, Repeatable Processes

sales productivity

What does your sales process look like right now? According to research by Vantage Point Performance, 66% of B2B sales teams don’t even have a sales process.

The vast majority of companies surveyed in that Vantage study had a revenue over $250m, and 39% made over $1b each year. These companies aren’t failing. In fact, they’re doing well.

So many companies get by without documented processes, it’s enough make you question why it’s worth implementing them at all.

…That’s until you check the rest of the stats.

Why you should bother with a formal sales process:

  • A formal sales process improves revenue by 18%
  • 3 hours per month on pipeline management improves revenue by 11%
  • Trained salespeople bring in 9% more revenue
  • Organizations that followed all three of these best practices above saw a 28% increase in revenue vs. those that do not
  • A formalized sales process leads to a 65% increase in individual reps hitting their targets and an 88% increase in companies hitting their goals
  • A sales playbook makes you 33% more likely to close sales at a higher rate

Simply playing it by ear — especially when you’re in the realm of $1b+ revenue — seems ridiculous. The benefits of documented processes are obvious to many organizations. As you can see, the numbers relate to real money.

Continue Reading

What We Learned Analyzing 281 Full Sales Cycles (1,183 Emails & Voicemails)

Benjamin Brandall August 25, 2017

Every SaaS company pours mountains of resources into building a sales team, creating efficient sales processes, and optimizing sales emails.

That’s because the most direct way to impact your revenues is by making sure your sales processes are as tight as possible.

But, how can you be sure you use the most effective methods to follow up with leads and close more deals?

Maybe we can help.

In partnership with PersistIQ, we analyzed the complete sales cadences of 281 SaaS companies, from intro to break-up. That included signing up for a whole heap of free trials, and then collecting over 1,000 emails and voicemail transcriptions.

If you want to get proven insights from some of the world’s best SaaS sales teams, build your ideal sales sequence and learn to write emails that close deals, then check out Inside SaaS Sales.

Inside SaaS Sales is a microsite we launched that collects and organizes every single piece of sales communication we received. It’s all there for you to browse through, swipe, and analyze.

With such a lot of data, it’d be silly not to study it to find out the key trends and share that knowledge with you. So, keep reading for our full analysis of the data!

Here are our key findings:

Continue Reading

9 Essential Marketing Tips from the Father of Advertising

marketing tips header

Ogilvy on Advertising was one of the first books I had on my reading list back when I created my system for reading more. My only regret after finally reading it is having delayed for a year and a half.

Drawing from 40 years of experience, David Ogilvy shows everything he learned from creating some of the most successful advertising campaigns to date (some of which are still running today).

From using research instead of rules to reminding yourself exactly what you’re paid to do, Ogilvy provides a blunt outlook of how to improve as a marketer and copywriter.

When I got a margarine account, I was under the impression that margarine was made from coal. Ten days reading the literature taught me otherwise.” – David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, p.11

At times his writing is standoffish and hostile, and he never claims to be infallible, but many of the marketing tips he championed 24 years ago still hold true today. Unfortunately, finding those nine golden tips in 220+ pages of case studies and niche information on how advertising agencies work is a bit of a nightmare.

That’s why I’ve done it for you. Time is money, after all, and the quicker you learn these marketing tips, the sooner you can succeed in selling.

marketing tips david ogilvy

Continue Reading

55 Insanely Useful Startup Blogs: VCs, Sales, Marketing & Design

At Process Street, a lot of startup blogs are required reading for our team.

It makes sense, because your startup will be informed and improved by what it reads, and every team needs to stay on top of what’s being spoken about.

In this post, I’ve compiled the 55 best blogs for startups (plus one recommended article from each) in these categories:

  • Venture capitalist blogs
  • Marketing blogs
  • Sales blogs
  • UX & design blogs
  • Customer success & support blogs

… All focused specifically on advice for startups.

Here they are:

Continue Reading

8 CRM Workflows to Destroy Data Entry and Close More Deals

CRM Workflows

As part of a sales team, you don’t get paid to fiddle around with the CRM. You get paid to close deals. But that can make work stressful for everyone, especially when just keeping the CRM up to date can feel like a full-time job.

It’s time to put an end to data entry, concentrate on running your sales operations more efficiently, and win bigger deals.

So, how do you start doing that?

At Process Street, we’re fanatics when it comes to automation, workflows, and systems.

That’s because we know that the foundation of an efficient business — one with lower running costs and higher output — is a solid set of processes. That’s not just for things like finance and HR. It comes down to the nuts and bolts of how you and the rest of the sales team uses your CRMs.

CRM expert David Young explains:

“Customer interactions that rely heavily on manual processes can be hit or miss. A key benefit of automation is providing a consistent customer experience. Workflow automation allows you to develop standardized response protocols and ensure that they’re followed. A good process, that is consistently followed, will almost always translate to more positive customer experiences.” — CRMSwitch

In this article, I’m going to show you how to spend less time searching, updating, and making sense of the disorganized data inside your CRM.

Continue Reading

Take control of your workflows today