Ten Top Tips for a Successful Sales Campaign

Struggling with your sales campaigns? We share must-read tips and advice to help you plan and launch campaigns that will showcase your business in the right way.

Here at Ethical Sales, lots of businesses complain to us that their sales activities just aren’t working to bring in enough leads. 

When we dig a little deeper into this statement, we find these businesses often have the same problems: scattergun activities, no tracking in place, no systems (such as a CRM) and no alignment with their marketing function. 

Sales campaigns require some detailed planning before launch – you can’t just decide to do one without due care and consideration. From our experience, the most successful ones are those that follow the simple steps we’ve outlined below. 

These ten tips come from our years of experience in running successful sales campaigns, and will help to give you the best chance of making an impact with your next campaign. 

1. Plan campaigns properly 

It might sound simple, many business development functions don’t actually sit down and plan out their sales campaign before jumping into activity. So before launching any campaign, take some time to work out what the aims and objectives of it are. Consider outcomes, targets and who you’ll be approaching. This can be used to form the basis of sales activity and monitor progress against objectives. 

It can be useful to ask the following questions during a campaign briefing or planning session:

• How will the campaign data be gathered or created, and who is responsible for this?
• What data is required? 
• What are the expected sales process and campaign activity? 
• What sales activities will take place, such as telemarketing or virtual sales approaches? 
• What sales materials will be available for the campaign activity?
• What marketing activities will take place during the campaign if any? 
• When will the campaign activities be reviewed?

Put some proper time into planning and make sure it’s a team effort before moving onto the execution stage. Any questions that can’t be easily answered may mean that the business is probably not ready for its first outbound sales campaign.

If you’d like more guidance on planning a successful sales campaign, download the free Ethical Sales handbook and turn to page 35.

3. Launch a gateway product 

Don’t have a marketing team or a joint project you can leverage for a sales campaign? Then consider launching a gateway product as a way of generating interest instead. 

This can have less of a high bar than your usual products or services, but provide an introduction to the business that will attract new customers. Read this blog by Watertight Marketing for more insights on gateway products:

4. Review your sales processes for campaign ideas

There may be ways to bring elements of your sales process into the campaign, such as the discovery workshop you usually run during onboarding. 

Are there elements of this you can package up and bring into your prospecting activities in the form of a longer exploratory meeting that leaves the prospective client with a report or some food for thought? Perhaps it could also become part of your ‘gateway’ product….

From experience, we’ve discovered that the more value you can bring to your prospect during the sales process the more likely they will be to buy from you. In fact, we would go as far to say that the best deals end with the prospect feeling like they owe you something for all the hard work and relationship building you have put in so far. 

All the added value you bring will come back to you, either in the form of increased sales or more referrals into the business from those prospects who become champions of your business!  

 5. Bring in skilled team members to support

Outbound sales can be a lonely place. We recommend a team effort to ensure momentum is building and learnings can be shared on a regular basis. 

Every team member needs to be comfortable with outbound sales activities, such as picking up the phone, having conversations over LinkedIn and writing highly personalised emails. Take some time before the campaign to make sure everyone is happy with these, and provide training for any gaps as required. For some advice on how to build a high performing sales team check out these expert insights. 

6. Establish a sales cadence 

There are so many sales channels available for your campaign, from email and telephone to LinkedIn and other social media. When planning your sales campaign, think about how your sales cadence – the sequence of touchpoints with prospects to build a relationship – will utilise these channels, and in what order.

For example, consider warm-up activities such as connecting via LinkedIn before getting on the phone or sending a first email. Or start with an email, then follow this up with a phone call the next day.

Usually a prospect will need 10+ activities before they convert to a warm lead, so make sure the sales cadence takes that into consideration. 

7. Create a master campaign document or call flow 

To stay on track and focused during outbound sessions it’s worth gathering all the sales campaign information into one place and having it available to refer to at all times. This can be as simple as a spreadsheet in a shared Google Drive if you don’t have anything currently set up. 

Having a master campaign document also helps with tips 2 and 5, as this will ensure the whole team knows what’s happening and when.

8. Get data ready before launching into outbound activities 

Having access to well-researched, clean prospect data is a huge part of any sales campaign – otherwise, so much time is wasted trying to find contact details or filling in empty lines of a CRM. 

If you don’t have a CRM set up for outbound sales, we recommend HubSpot as a good one to start with. While you can pay for it, the free version has everything needed to start a sales campaign, including user management, contact website activity, email scheduling, prospects and list segmentation.

9. Use templates and automation where appropriate

While we’re definitely not a fan of mass emailing 60,000 contacts to secure just one meeting (and annoying the hell out of a lot of others in the process), we do acknowledge that time is a precious resource – so when activities can be sped up then they should be. 

There are some nuanced ways you can consider using templates and automation during a sales campaign, which include: 

• Creating email templates that can be easily personalised and sent out directly to prospects.
• Using clever automation tools for social channels such as LinkedIn to help connection requests to be sent at a higher volume to a targeted audience.
• Making sure your CRM is set up so that all automated activities can be tracked and measured.

10. Be consistent and patient.

It takes time for a sales campaign to build momentum and start generating leads, so don’t worry if it isn’t an instant success. It may be a slow burner to begin with until the activities start to gather natural momentum. Expect to review results after around 6 weeks of solid, consistent activity and plan to work on each campaign for a duration of 3-4 months. 

As with everything to do with sales, there’s no shortcut to success, but if you take the time to plan your sales campaign properly using our tips and then work at it consistently, you’re much more likely to see the results you want.

Want more valuable information like this? Join our Ethical Sales Academy to access live monthly training with a group of supportive, like-minded salespeople and a library of 12+ hours of learning.