How to Increase Online Sales: 4 Techniques for all Businesses

As part of Solutions Review’s Contributed Content Series—a collection of contributed articles written by our enterprise tech thought leader community—Sean Evers, the VP of Sales & Partner at Pipedrive, shares four techniques companies can use to improve their online sales.

Knowing how to increase online sales is a superpower in most industries. It’ll help you hit targets in slow quarters, impress higher-ups, fulfill your earning potential, and grow company revenue. While there’s no magic formula to boost sales volumes instantly, there are plenty of tactics for improving your team’s performance. Below are four of the most practical and proven for all businesses.

1) Map Your Online Sales Pipeline

Mapping your pipeline involves creating a roadmap for your online sales process. A pipeline map breaks down your customers’ buying journeys into stages, from the initial contact to the final purchase. Everyone’s sales process is different, but many pipelines include these stages:

• Prospecting
• Qualifying
• Contacting
• Building relationships
• Closing
• Following up with cold leads / providing after-sales services

Once you understand the steps, you can identify areas where leads often stall or drop off. Knowing this allows you to refine your sales and marketing strategies and increase online sales volumes.

Say you discover that leads tend to stall after the initial product demo. Knowing this, you can improve post-demo follow-up tactics to keep leads moving smoothly through the pipeline. You might create new follow-up email templates or start contacting leads sooner.

There are a couple of ways to map your sales pipeline. The cheapest and most basic are an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheets, with help from a free sales pipeline template. However, you can go into more detail and generate valuable insights using a customer relationship management (CRM) system. The software should show you where your leads are at any given moment and help you spot weak points in your sales funnel.

2. Automate Next Steps/Actions

Sales teams often spend a lot of time on repetitive administrative tasks, like data entry, sending routine follow-up emails, and responding to frequently asked questions. By automating this work, your reps can reclaim valuable time to concentrate on what they do best: selling. Automating the next activity or task to be done saves time but also means you don’t miss your cadence. Sellers need to create a lot of next steps and activities—setting this out and automating makes it all work seamlessly.

For instance, implementing chatbots on your website (that can instantly respond to common queries) and sales email templates will save time when reaching out to leads. Automation like this boosts productivity and enhances customer experiences by ensuring leads get timely responses.

Look to CRM software, marketing tools, and dedicated automation apps to remove the most time-consuming tasks. The software allows you to trigger custom actions, like sending personalized emails to new leads or notifying colleagues when a deal updates.

3.  Use Sales Performance Data to Refine Your Tactics

Analyzing sales performance data will help gain insights into pipeline generation and overall sales productivity. You can look into metrics like:

• Number of contacts – calls/emails/SMS
• Stage status – the time between stages, deal sales cycle
• ACV – average contract value
• Conversion rates between each stage

Use what you learn to tweak your tactics and close more deals in less time. For example, say you notice that a particular product is consistently underperforming in sales while another is always out of stock. You could switch your team’s focus for the next month to restore the balance. You’d also get to know the underperforming product in more depth, making it easier to sell in the future.

4. Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

Becoming more visible on search engines is one of the most cost-effective and sustainable ways to build brand awareness and increase e-commerce sales. It’s a process called search engine optimization (SEO). Buyers use search engines 20 percent more year-on-year. They are also 68.7 percent more likely to click on the top three results on Google. If you “rank” in the top positions for relevant searches, you’ll likely also increase traffic to your site. If you have a well-planned strategy targeting keywords your most interested customers might be looking for, you can also increase sales.

Understanding your audience, where they are in the buying journey and the keywords they may be searching for are all critical components of an SEO strategy. SEO is complex, but you can follow some basic guidelines to make your site or online store more visible to search engines:

• Include audience-relevant keywords in your product copy and blog content
• Optimize meta tags (text snippets that describe a page’s content) and page titles
• Structure your website in a clear, logical way
• Ensure your site loads quickly and appears correctly on mobile devices
• Use HTTPS to encrypt website visitors’ data

If your goal is increasing online sales, in-store sales, or any other type of deal, the strategies in this article will help. While there’s no instantaneous solution, implementing effective techniques can propel teams toward navigating challenging periods and reaching sales targets. If one of these strategies works for your business, you can work to implement it in all aspects of your business to amplify returns.