8 Ways Sales Teams Can Finish the Quarter Strong

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It’s been a challenging quarter for businesses around the world, with high energy prices and bottlenecks in global supply chains resulting in increases in inflation and interest rates—hitting consumers and businesses hard. 

We’re all in it together, however, and as inflation finally starts to drop, there are plenty of opportunities for businesses to thrive. Your sales team should be at the heart of this ambition, maximizing efforts to close deals and drive last-minute revenue before closing the quarter. 

That’s because a strong finish to the quarter can give your business much-needed momentum as we head toward the end of the year. To help, we’ve highlighted eight strategies that can power your sales team’s performance through this crucial period and beyond. 

8 Closing-Quarter Tips for Sales Teams

1. Leverage Analytics for Quick Wins

When it comes to sales, the importance of analytics should never be overlooked. Your sales team can use data to identify potentially easy wins, highlighting everything from the selling scenarios that are leading to the most deals to the teams or reps that are hitting the most targets.

Aircall’s Analytics+ offering makes it easy to obtain a comprehensive report on how sales teams are performing, along with identifying the areas that are ripe for improvement. You can easily track statistics such as the number of inbound and outbound calls, the total time spent on calls, the number of missed calls, and the average waiting time for callers, alongside other metrics such as the average duration of calls. 

Aircall also takes this a step further and gives you the ability to zoom in on call activity through several interactive graphs and data exports via an XLS file. This enables you to hone in on the most used tags; the top users making, receiving, and missing calls; and to make use of new advanced filters that allow you to break down your data by user, team, and line activity.

You can also benefit from real-time analytics using Aircall’s Activity Feed, which displays real-time metrics of your sales team’s activity, including service level, calls waiting, missed calls, longest waiting time, average waiting time, and user availability. 

CRM integration with the world’s biggest brands, including Salesforce, HubSpot, and ActiveCampaign, further helps your company identify trends around the agents most likely to close deals the quickest—and the areas you should focus on to achieve the most success.

Tracking analytics such as missed calls, call waiting, and call volume, also makes it easier to keep on top of trends, with analytics flagging potential areas of improvement for your sales teams. 

“Analytics has been really surprising. Other small business owners are in the same boat too. Everything is looking rosy, then you look at the calls and the analytics and it’s a real eye-opener!”
— Brendan Cappello, Managing Director, RapidG

2. Nail Follow-Ups and Re-Engage Prospects

Reaching out to potential customers is just the first step of the journey for your business. To generate the most useful results, build stronger relationships and close more deals to close out the quarter strong. 

While this may sound like a daunting task, there are plenty of ways that you can optimize lead nurturing, and Aircall is a great tool to help you build those all-important relationships. 

Use Aircall to implement automated and personalized marketing emails, for example. This can make lead nurturing and follow-up less overwhelming, along with being easier to track, analyze, and optimize your prospect communications.

Once again, it makes sense to take advantage of Aircall’s integrations, with platforms such as HubSpot giving you oversight of whether you are catering to the right audience. 

A/B tests are another ideal way to ensure you’re on the right track, providing context into whether prospects are opening your emails, clicking on links, interacting with content, and more.

3. Target Upselling Opportunities

When it comes to sales, it’s easy for companies to get wrapped up in chasing new business. This isn’t always the best way—after all, you’ve already done the hard work and cemented a working relationship with existing customers, so take advantage of your contacts and relationships and target upselling opportunities where possible. 

Keep in contact with your existing customers and look to encourage them to purchase your premium products, including upgraded services, features, or additional offers. Highlight the value that these products can provide and the difference they can make to your customers. They’re already happy with the services you provide, so your business is a natural fit when it comes to potential upgrades.

If you don’t continue to resell to existing customers at regular intervals, you’re missing out on massive amounts of revenue that could be the difference between meeting your quarterly targets. Plus there’s every chance these customers will want to hear about new products and services.

4. Optimize Your Outreach Strategy

Optimizing your outreach strategy becomes increasingly important if you want to smash your targets before the end of the quarter and preserve some much-needed momentum. 

Use Aircall to increase sales productivity by streamlining your call workflows and sales processes with features such as PowerDialer. Aircall’s powerful sales dialer makes it easy for reps to quickly compile and call a list of numbers in just one click, with the potential to save two minutes or more per call.

Voicemails are another essential tool when it comes to outreach and connecting with customers. It’s not always possible to be present for every call, but you can customize and personalize voicemails using Aircall, ensuring that customers feel valued. 

“This is the first phone system I’ve used that has an easy-to-use voicemail. You can listen to the voicemails easily and identify who you need to call back versus which ones are just a pocket dial,” Blair says. “Being able to leave a voicemail and get a call back is really impactful for us. We’re able to call back within the hour and provide a stronger customer experience as a result.”
— Blair Redfern, Head of Customer Support at Spaceship

Integrations like Gong can also help when it comes to sales optimization, revealing where your reps are doing things right, such as the questions they’re asking, how they’re discussing pricing, and what their talk-to-listen ratio is. The best plays can then be brought together into a playbook that lays the foundations for future customer service success.

5. Collaborate for Maximum Impact

When your company is under pressure to meet tight deadlines and achieve its targets, it’s critical that your sales team works together. Efficient collaboration can help your business deliver the best possible customer service, helping your agents strike up better relationships with prospects and existing customers and close more deals. 

Aircall provides multiple collaboration features, including Shared Contacts, Warm Transfer, Shared Call Inbox, and Call Commenting and Assignment. Together, these features help your sales team enjoy seamless collaboration and coaching through calls in real-time, keeping agents connected and in the loop.

Beyond collaborating with each other, your sales team should look for opportunities to work more closely with cross-functional teams like marketing. Working as a larger group, they can explore quick-win campaigns to drive leads, including re-engagement nurture emails, paid adverts with a time-sensitive offer, or events, which can make a big impact on closing-quarter goals. 

6. Overcome Objections with Confidence

Naturally, your sales teams aren’t going to win over all their prospects straight away, and it’s inevitable that there will be objections and hesitations. Training your sales team can build confidence and give your reps the knowledge and experience they need to answer difficult questions and close tricky deals.

Aircall’s Call Recording feature can help when it comes to training and coaching, providing in-depth customer understanding and data, along with real-world examples of how your team is performing.

Call Monitoring can also help, with the ability to view any call your employees are on, listen in, and even offer advice to your sales reps without disrupting the flow of the conversation.

Aircall also provides AI-powered transcriptions, which can be used to improve training within your sales team, helping you dive deeper into call analysis and feedback, increase team knowledge-sharing, personalize your coaching strategy, and leverage customer insights. 

“With Aircall transcription, we can review calls at a higher speed and easily identify when specific customer interactions take place. Being able to rapidly double-check information and find those important insights helps us to audit specific complaints while improving the efficiency of our team.”
— Oliver Moss, Quality Assurance Specialist at FlightHub

These features can all help your sales team to build knowledge, experience, and confidence, but it’s inevitable that reps will still face some difficult conversations, so what more can be done? 

First, listen to your customers—knowing they’ve been heard goes a long way. Take your customer seriously and apologize if something has gone wrong, helping find a resolution that pleases everyone. This will help to build their confidence in your company and lead to retention and future business success. 

7. Strategically Time Your Communications

Timing is everything when it comes to closing deals. According to Close, your chances of reaching a lead will be 100 times higher if you call within five minutes of a sign-up.

Your conversations with prospects will also be better—they’ve literally just signed up, so they’ll know who you are and why you’re calling them. It’s the perfect time to talk!

Naturally, your reps won’t always be on hand to respond immediately, but this is where features such as Aircall’s Call Queuing come in, letting you customize the call queuing experience with personalized messages and hold music and giving prospects the option to request a callback.

Forward to Phone can also help your reps when it comes to timing, with the ability to link multiple devices and send incoming calls to several mobile phones, ensuring your agents can respond to prospects whenever and wherever they are.

8. Celebrate Wins and Fuel Motivation

It’s often easy to focus on negative trends when you’re combing through data, but it’s important that you also celebrate each and every win that your sales team enjoys—however minor.

Motivation plays a huge role when it comes to sales, with energy and enthusiasm leading to more calls, stronger relationships, and better results. Use Aircall’s Analytics+ features to celebrate milestones, picking out those feel-good numbers. 

You can also use the data at your disposal to create healthy competition between sales reps. Along with creating competition between agents, consider providing incentives for meeting targets or going above and beyond. 

It’s also important to ensure your sales reps avoid burnout, which can negatively impact morale. Aim to create a culture of stress reduction where agents are encouraged to pace themselves and avoid working during breaks and lunch hours, keeping them fresh and happy ahead of the next round of calls. 

Together, this can help your business create a positive atmosphere, where sales agents can thrive. 

Building a Strategy for Closing This Quarter & the Next

By embracing the tools at your disposal, and following the eight strategies above, your sales team will be on track to close the quarter strong. 

With Aircall, implementing the strategies above doesn’t have to be difficult—with game-changing tools that can make every quarter better than the last. 

Discover how Aircall can help you close the quarter strong and book a demo today!

Published on September 8, 2023.