Tips to help improve your sales approach, get more and better leads, and increase sales.
Know your customer value proposition
What value – what unique benefits – does your business and its products or services provide? Ensuring salespeople articulate this message clearly can create stronger links with consumers who would most value your offerings – which means more sales. Summarising your value proposition into a concise ‘elevator pitch’ can also help when spreading the message to employees and consumers.
Create a sales document
Put your value proposition into a document alongside key information such as company history, vision, values, what you do and for whom, what makes you unique and better than the competition. Be brief but include anything that adds credibility. Doing so could aid planning, help to define key sales messages, and become the basis of marketing materials such as brochures or flyers to give to potential customers.
Have a plan
What are your sales goals and priorities? Are your sales forecasts realistic? Which consumer groups represent your best targets? What are your key sales messages? What are your sales opportunities or threats? What are your key sales tactics? How could you work to improve your overall sales approach?
Manage leads
Good lead management focusses on both quantity and quality of leads. Do you know which customer groups generate the most leads that end in sales? Or which sales approaches bring the highest value customers? Keep an analytical eye on leads; it helps to know how many leads you need to reach targets, and which sources of leads return the most sales – or the most valuable sales.
Use a system
Online customer relationship management systems can be useful and cost-effective for both individual salespeople and big sales teams. Beyond the basics such as storing contact data and sales interactions, they offer tools for tracking and managing leads throughout the sales process, and analysing sales and customer data over time. Such systems can also be integrated with productivity software such as MS Outlook or Google Apps, or accessed via smartphones. (Examples: Salesforce, Zoho, Dynamics).
Rethink sales approaches
Review how you generate leads and sales and rethink the options. Which approaches deliver the most or least sales? Which approaches are you missing? Example approaches: lead generation via advertising, direct marketing, flyers, email or online marketing, telesales, discount promotions, referral or word-of-mouth schemes with existing customers, exhibitions or networking events, creative selling.
Encourage word-of-mouth
Customers who recommend you to others are invaluable sales drivers because people tend to trust friends or colleagues more than businesses they have never used. It can happen organically by selling quality products or services and treating customers well. Or you can encourage it by asking customers to tell friends, offering incentives to do so, or providing easier ways to share, such as via online social networks. But remember: word-of-mouth belongs to the consumer – encourage but don’t try to control.
Offer free samples
In an economy where consumers are reluctant to open their wallets to new companies, free samples or test drives could represent a strong sales generator. It’s a softer alternative to the hard sell, and it could persuade new customers to switch from competitors. Many products and services can be tried in some way before purchase, so explore if and how it could work for your business.
Listen to customers
Sometimes sales are achieved not through marketing messages and value propositions but through the simple act of listening to customers and linking their individual needs with the value you can offer. Well thought out sales messages are important, but don’t forget the value of listening. See Are you listening?
More information – Identify and sell more to your most valuable customers