Throughout your sales career, you have definitely been told that a proactive sales representative is more successful than their lazy counterpart. The problem is that advice is rarely followed with examples you can learn from. So, how does one become proactive? 

How to be a Proactive Sales Rep

Lestraundra Alfred, writing for HubSpot, has some advice for implementing these sales representative skills into your daily sales strategy. It will give your success rate the boost it needs.

Add Value Upfront

Do not just call or email a prospect with a vague message. If the only point of your message is promising to reveal later how your product or service can work wonders for them, you are only short-​changing yourself. You may think that an air of mystery will intrigue a prospect, but the lack of details could also make them distrustful and, therefore, unresponsive. 

That's why a proactive sales rep establishes value during their initial outreach instead of waiting until later. So, Alfred recommends providing your prospective customers with relevant and informative content in that first message. Providing valuable content will help you gain the prospect's trust in a few ways. 

One, you establish yourself as an industry expert by knowing and showing the value of your product or service. Two, you also show the prospect that you have both researched on them and have their best interest at heart. 

In a profession infamous for its sales reps only caring about making money, you will pleasantly surprise your prospects and begin sowing the seeds of trust. When your clients trust you, they will start to be more comfortable with the thought of making a purchase from you. Both the trust and comfort of your prospects will increase your chances of landing the sale.

Use Your Data

Hopefully, you have been paying attention to, if not documenting, which sales strategies of yours have both worked and failed consistently in the past. Or even better, you have sent surveys to your new customers to determine which parts of your sales strategy worked best for them. 

A proactive sales representative will study this data and learn from it so that they can craft their sales strategy to be the most effective it can be. 

For example, according to SalesFuel’s Voice of the Sales Rep study, the most common sales objections sales reps encounter are:

• Prospects are happy with the ways things are now, or they are afraid to make a change
• The prospect does not have the budget to change
• The price of your product or service is too high for them

When you know which objections you are most likely to run into from prospects, you can prepare how to best respond to them.