If you’re not a salesperson by nature, you as the owner of your small business may be missing some great opportunities to sell. But with the right tools and processes in place, you can snag more sales with minimal effort. Here’s how.
Tip 1: Own Your Analytics
Even if you don’t consider yourself technical, you need to learn how to read important data, like your website analytics. While you can go much more in-depth, simply paying attention to two or three components can give you ample information about which products visitors are most interested in, which pages people are exiting on before completing a sale, and where your web traffic is coming from.
Understanding all of this can help you craft more targeted marketing messages, promote the right products, eliminate barriers to closing an online sale, and direct your marketing in the right space.
Tip 2: Stay on Top of Client Relationships
The better connected you are with existing clients, the more repeat business you’ll see. That’s where customer relationship management software comes in so handy. You have all the information about a client you need in one place, including access to their social profiles, past purchases, emails, and notes from conversations.
Being good at selling is about anticipating your customers’ needs before they do. If you listen to what they say on social, what they do online, and what they don’t say in a conversation, you can offer products or solutions to their problems before they start looking elsewhere.
Tip 3: Have Multiple Lead Generators
You have different types of clients, so why would you have a single lead generation tool? Let’s say you have three types of clients to simplify the example. You could create a free whitepaper download for Group 1, a special discount offer for Group 2, and a free consultation for Group 3. Each requires leads to enter their email address to get the offer. Now you’ve got three segmented groups, and can send targeted automated emails to each.
Not lumping them into one generic group gives you a better ROI and conversion rate, since you can tailor the offer to what each really wants.
Tip 4: Track Opportunities
You’re juggling a lot of balls in the air at any given moment, so it’s understandable that you might drop one from time to time. That’s where having processes in place to track sales opportunities is a huge help. You can set up your process to notify you at different intervals, or even send automated emails to move a lead toward a purchase.
You can also use this data to determine if there’s a common theme with lost sales. Maybe you have many people who sign up for your free whitepaper. They open 5 out of 7 of the automated emails, then suddenly unsubscribe. What gives? You might look at that fifth email and see it’s got way too much copy. Clean it up, give it a call to action, and see if those numbers change.
Tip 5: Expand Your Sales Team
If you’re trying to take on sales in addition to running your company, you might simply need to admit that you can’t do it all well. Hire a part-time or independent salesperson to head up sales. If they’re experienced, they’ll be able to do a better job than you could anyway.
Give them access to any tools and software that will make their work easier. They may even be able to make recommendations on what your company could use from their past experience.
Tip 6: Pair Up Sales and Marketing
Sales and marketing should go together like peanut butter and jelly, but so many companies don’t remember to foster communication between the two. If Marketing has a promotion planned, Sales can support that effort by pumping up that promotion. And if Sales has a particular campaign going on, Marketing can amplify it via social media.
Don’t let one more sale slip through the cracks. Own the sales process and get help where you need it.
Image: PhotoSpin
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