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. See Paul Shearstone’s Creating Sales Incentive Programs That Work for how to make your sales incentive program “sweet and simple and attainable”.
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 instance, when I last had my carpets cleaned, the cleaner noticed a pet stain. Instead of just cleaning it up, he drew my attention to it, and showed me how easily and effectively the spot cleaning solution removed all trace of the stain. Did I buy the spot cleaning solution? You bet. He persuaded me that buying it was beneficial to me and made it convenient to purchase it. Result: increased sales for the carpet cleaning company.
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Show potential customers that you follow green business practices and you could reap more green on your bottom line. Green marketing isn’t just a catchphrase; it’s a marketing strategy that can help you get more customers and make more money. But only if you do it right.
For green marketing to be effective, you have to do three things; be genuine, educate your customers, and give them the opportunity to participate.
1) Being genuine means that
a) that you are actually doing what you claim to be doing in your green marketing campaign and
b) that the rest of your business policies are consistent with whatever you are doing that’s environmentally friendly. Both these conditions have to be met for your business to establish the kind of environmental credentials that will allow a green marketing campaign to succeed.
2) Educating your customers isn’t just a matter of letting people know you’re doing whatever you’re doing to protect the environment, but also a matter of letting them know why it matters. Otherwise, for a significant portion of your target market, it’s a case of “So what?” and your green marketing campaign goes nowhere.
3) Giving your customers an opportunity to participate means personalizing the benefits of your environmentally friendly actions, normally through letting the customer take part in positive environmental action.
Let’s put the three essential elements of a successful green marketing campaign together by looking at an example.
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I have to assume that you’re unhappy with your small business marketing. If you weren’t, why would you have clicked your way to an article on effective marketing strategies for small businesses?
I’m also going to assume that you’re unhappy with your small business marketing because it hasn’t been doing anything for your bottom line. After all, that’s the bottom line for effective marketing. Effective marketing strategies are the ones that result in more sales and more profits.
This Small Business Marketing Makeover will show you how to avoid wasting time and money on ineffective marketing strategies and how to pick and implement effective marketing strategies instead. Follow these steps:
1) Look at your small business marketing from the right end of the telescope.
Too many small businesses get and stay hung up on the cost factor of marketing. The first question they ask about any marketing strategy is, “How much does that cost?”
This is entirely the wrong question. The right question is “Will that target the right market?”, the market of potential customers for your products and/or services.
For instance, creating and distributing flyers is an inexpensive marketing strategy that small businesses often use – probably because it’s so inexpensive. Now suppose that you run a small business selling ski equipment. You design a bunch of flyers on your home computer, print them, and then go down to your local Community Centre and put one of the windshield of every vehicle in the parking lot - the night of the big Annual Horticultural Society meeting. Unless a lot of little old ladies suddenly decide to take up snowboarding, you’ve just wasted most of your time and energy.
Sure, it was inexpensive marketing – but it’s not effective marketing.
You need to switch your telescope around and look through it from the right end - the end that will keep you focused on customer-directed rather than cost-directed marketing.
2) Focus on your target market.
Dump the idea that everyone in interested in your products and/or services. They’re not. The reality is that only people who feel they have a need for your products and/or services will be interested in them – and those are the people your marketing has to reach. They are your target market.
Step 1 of effective small business marketing is knowing who these people are.
So first, read How to Find and Sell to Your Target Market and learn how to zero in on your target market by using market segmentation.
Then work through Writing a Business Plan: The Market Analysis. This article, part of The Business Plan Outline series, directs you to write out your Market Analysis in paragraph form. You don’t have to do that as you’re not writing a business plan, but you do need to write down answers to the questions about your target market.
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