Measuring sales volume is an important part of every business. It helps you segment your revenue and assess how your products perform on the market. By monitoring whether items in your catalog meet KPIs you can optimize your marketing and sales processes, improve your campaigns and increase profits.
But what exactly is sales volume?
Sales volume is the number of items from a product line that have been sold by a company over a set period of time. Measuring it allows you to track how different products are selling, monitor performance peaks and drops, compare results, and analyze them to identify the factors that influence fluctuations.
Following a consistent approach can help you build a successful strategy that increases sales volume and improves profits. To achieve this you have to focus on the key factors involved in making a sale – company, product, buyer. By taking a closer look at each of them, you will gain a better understanding of the whole process, identify the weak points, and make the necessary adjustments.
Read on for some useful tips and a step-by-step strategy to increase sales volume.
1. Evaluate Your Team’s Performance
Every endeavor to increase sales volume should start with an evaluation of your company’s resources and your manpower’s performance. To keep the sales flowing and even give them a boost, your team has to be in optimal form, because, let’s be honest, even the best products can’t sell themselves.
Еvery successful deal is the result of a dedicated team effort. Sometimes even small workflow improvements can make a big difference and give your sales volume a boost.
Analyze Data from Previous Periods
A data-driven approach can help you find the best solution for practically every problem. By analyzing results from previous periods, you can identify the circumstances affecting sales volume fluctuations and address them.
Take into account inside factors such as the number of calls made by reps and how many of them were successful. Investigate the reasons for performance drops and offer constructive solutions. Make sure to also read more into positive changes and encourage these as well. Showing that achievements don’t go unnoticed is just as important as fixing issues.
You should also consider the outside factors that influence the market. Sudden changes in customer behavior can be related to seasonal changes, economic or social turbulence, emerging trends, etc.
Finding the correlations between such influences and your sales can help you navigate the market better and take swifter action the next time they happen. You can even prepare sales and marketing strategies to take advantage of the changes and turn them into profits.
Unite Marketing and Sales
A coordinated strategy between your sales and marketing teams can be invaluable for your business growth. Working together in sync will help both departments to fine-tune their approach.
Sales have a better knowledge of the customers and their needs, and marketing knows the best way to influence prospects and send out the right message. By combining this knowledge, you can make sure that your marketing team creates the most on-point content and adverts that target the right audience. Also, they can focus their efforts on underperforming products, and make it easier for reps to seal deals and increase sales volume.
Encouraging closer collaboration between departments will not only improve performance and productivity but will help your company run more smoothly. It can also remove any friction between different teams and allow them to focus on the common goal – bringing in profits.
Take Care of Your Sales Team
Being a sales rep is a stressful occupation. They have quotas to meet, have to compete with ambitious colleagues, communicate with pretentious clients, and cope with rejection on a daily basis. This, combined with any personal life complications, can lead to increased levels of stress and can affect productivity. Such issues should be acknowledged and addressed in time. Reps are the driving force of your sales and need to be taken care of.
Furthermore, if they feel underappreciated, their performance may suffer and they might even leave your company. If they are experiencing personal or mental health issues, they might even need some encouragement to take a few days off. People are often reluctant to ask for time to acknowledge and address personal problems because they are afraid their absence from work might affect their position in the company and cost them their jobs.
By encouraging your team members to manage their stress and take paid-leave if they need to, you are building a safer work environment. Happy employees are more productive, more loyal, and do an overall better job of every task they undertake. Increasing the life-quality and workplace-satisfaction of your reps will, no doubt, benefit your sales volume, and, what’s more, it will strengthen your team.
Motivate Your Reps for Optimal Results
Providing incentives and bonuses can motivate your salespeople to increase their efforts and get creative. Give them realistic goals they can strive to achieve and will manage to accomplish. This will improve their confidence and will also make them work harder. However, unrealistic goals can have the opposite effect, so make sure to base targets on reasonable numbers.
2. Analyze Your Product
Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your product can help you market it better. To increase sales volume, you have to understand what makes it sell well, and what’s holding the product back when it doesn’t.
Highlight Its Purpose
Your product is the star of every sale and its qualities and usefulness can guide you towards the right audience and the best marketing approach. If you believe in your product, this means that you believe it can improve people’s lives and be of service. Focus on fixing your customer’s pain points and make this the selling point.
Take Into Account the Competition
Compare your product to similar ones on the market and analyze the differences. Identify how it is better than the competition’s and what makes customers choose it over others. Maybe it’s the better price, some extra features, or superior quality.
Focus on the assets and build a marketing campaign to highlight them. If, by any chance, the competitor’s products are better, consider offering attractive promotions to make yours more appealing. A reduced price, a gift package, or a “buy one, get two” offer can give your product a head start. Meanwhile, you can consider how to improve your product to make it sell better in the future without compromising the price.
3. Know Your Buyers to Win Them Over
Focusing your marketing and sales efforts on the right audience will guarantee you the most satisfying results and will give your sales a boost.
Target the Right Customers
The ideal buyer is who your product was initially meant for. This is the person who will make the most use of it and will benefit the most from purchasing it.
Trying to sell to the wrong people can cost you time and money and will most likely cause a drop in your sales volume. It will also decrease the motivation of your salespeople, exhaust and frustrate them, and make them less likely to manage to sell to more viable clients.
Find Their Pain Points
Once you’ve identified your potential buyers, studying them well will help you design the best strategy to approach them.
People buy products and services to make their lives easier, fix problems, or entertain themselves. Knowing what your customers need and identifying how your product can help them, will allow you to sell it better to them. If your product offers a solution to your customer’s problems, focus on this and let it show that your goal is, amongst other things, to make their life better.
Analyze Their Buying Habits
Understanding the buyer and their decision-making process will help you sell them the right product at the right time.
If your reps know how a customer usually behaves, this will help them easily determine where they are on their journey and will give them an idea of how to proceed. Maybe this particular client spends more time on research, or they need to validate decisions with superiors more often, or maybe they are always on the hunt for discounts.
Studying the buying habits of existing customers and gathering market information for potential ones will allow you to provide your reps with valuable intel on customers.
Focus on Your Top Accounts
Every company has top accounts that outperform the others. When trying to increase sales volume, focusing your efforts on these might easily do the trick. You can encourage them to buy more by making special offers, developing loyalty programs, and designing irresistible product packages.
Also, consider matching your top clients with your best reps. This way you will be sure that optimal results are coming your way.
Bonus Tip: Make a Social Commerce Campaign
Social commerce allows you to utilize the power of satisfied customers and use user-generated content to build a successful campaign for your products. People tend to underestimate the benefits of social media platforms in B2B sales but the fact is that 75% of buyers check social networks before making a decision.
Running a social commerce campaign for your product can help you to increase sales volume and also build brand awareness.
You can challenge your customers to describe the benefits of your product in a few words or in a few hashtags, encourage them to share feedback, or photos. The possibilities are countless, and how you choose to approach the campaign depends on the specifics of your product and your company.
Recap
To successfully increase the sales volume of your products you have to first analyze and understand the three main factors that come into play in every sale – your team’s performance, the product itself, and the customer.
Taking care of your reps and making sure they are happy and motivated will increase their work-satisfaction and productivity. When they give a top performance and join forces with your marketing department, you can be assured that a boost in sales will not take long to follow.
Team DevriX
This article is crafted by DevriX's seasoned marketing team, boasting over four decades of collective expertise in crafting sophisticated marketing funnels, devising comprehensive content frameworks and pillars, implementing engaging email campaigns, and creating impactful social media content designed for scalability.
Our marketing experts specialize in the complete spectrum of inbound marketing strategies. As an accredited HubSpot Agency Partner and a Semrush Partner, we engage in meticulous research, blending our extensive experience with the unique insights of our highly skilled team.
We set benchmarks in content creation by incorporating cutting-edge marketing trends, leveraging in-depth industry research, and utilizing state-of-the-art AI tools for data segmentation and captivating content hooks. Our proficiency extends across a diverse range of sectors, including working with SMEs, Fortune 1000 companies, global B2B brands, major publishing entities, WooCommerce platforms, business directories, and affiliate networks.
