| 6 ways to increase sales |
Do you want to increase sales dramatically? Then shift your sales focus from attracting new customers to enticing your proven customers to buy again. The best sales prospect is a prospect that’s already converted – in other words, one of your current customers. Think of it this way; if your business is located in a small town with a population of 1000 people and you sell a sprocket to everyone in that town, man, woman, and child, you’ve sold 1000 sprockets – and saturated your market. Your sprocket selling days are over. Is it time to pack up and move on? No! If you start focusing your sales efforts on your proven customers, you’ll be able to increase your sprocket sales dramatically. And these sure ways to increase sales will help build customer loyalty, too. Try some or all of these ideas to increase your sales: 1. Set up a sales incentive program. Give your sales staff a reason to get out there and sell, sell, sell. Why do so many businesses that rely on their sales staff to drive sales have incentive programs in place? Because offering their sales staff the trips and/or TVs for x amount of sales works. 2. Encourage your sales staff to upsell. Essentially, upselling involves adding related products and/or services to your line and making it convenient and necessary for customer to buy them. Just placing more products near your usual products isn’t going to increase your sales much. To upsell successfully, the customer has to be persuaded of the benefit. For example, say you were a company selling sales process training workshops and someone called wanting to book in 2 staff members. Upselling would be exploring whether or not there were more staff members involved in the sales process, and if there were, informing the caller that the other people could attend for little extra cost. The benefit to the client is that it is inexpensive to add a few more people, and now everyone can participate fully in their sales process. 3. Keep your staff accountable. Make sure you’re on the same page as your staff. If they don’t know what their goals are, or what they should be doing, how can you expect them to achieve the results you want? A good strategy for keeping everyone on track is something we’ve dubbed ‘10@10.10’. At 10 past 10 every morning, we spend 10 minutes getting all staff members to announce the one major task they will complete that day, and how it will benefit the company. It is a surprisingly easy way to keep everyone accountable and on track. However, the tasks need to be specific: instead of saying, “I’m going to increase my sales”, say “I will make 10 calls with the aim to win 6 sales”. 4. Tier your customers. There should be a clear and obvious difference between regular customers and other customers – a difference that your regular customers perceive as showing that you value them. How can you expect customer loyalty if all customers are treated as “someone off the street”? There are all kinds of ways that you can show your regular customers that you value them, from small things such as greeting them by name through larger benefits such as giving regulars extended credit or discounts. 5. Set up a customer rewards program. We’re all familiar with the customer rewards programs that so many large businesses have in place. But there’s no reason that a small business can’t have a customer rewards program, too. It can be as simple as a discount on a customer’s birthday or as complex as a points system that earns various rewards such as discounts on merchandise. Done right, rewards programs can really help build customer loyalty and increase sales. 6. Distribute free samples to customers. Why do so many businesses include free samples of other products when you buy something from them? Because it can increase sales in so many ways. As the customer who bought the original product, I might try and like the sample of the new product and buy some of it, too. Or I might pass on the sample to someone else, who might try the product, like it, and buy that and other products from the company. At the very least, the original customer will be thinking warm thoughts about your company, and hopefully telling other people about your products. Attracting new customers is a good thing. But attracting new customers is not the only way to increase your sales, and is, in fact, the hard way of going about it. Shifting your sales focus to enticing your current customers can make increasing your sales easier – and best of all, build the customer loyalty that results in repeat sales. If you would like to know more, contact a business advisor on 5413 9300 or by email. Source |
