Business is all about sales – that’s the bottom line.
Jacqueline Raw, owner and founder of marketing consultancy Ycagel says: “Not everyone is a sales guru, but you can learn how to do great sales.”
“Exploding your sales growth is as simple as modelling the behaviours and sales strategies of successful businesses and business people,” she says. “Remain a student and keep experimenting. The only non-negotiable rules in sales are to never give up and to always speak the truth. If you do that, you’ve already created a solid foundation for your explosive sales strategies.”
She shares three tried and tested strategies that she says will help to improve sales in just 30 days.
Create an offer
Chances are that your product or service is the same as an ocean of competitor products and services.
A fatal mistake most entrepreneurs make is trying to differentiate on brand or benefits. If you’re selling a health shake – a shake is a shake is a shake. There’s not much difference from product to product.
So how do you stand out from the ocean of highly competitive, red waters? You create an offer around your product or service.
Sticking to the health shake example (and assuming you’ve done your upfront customer research), we know that most of your customers are working moms looking to lose weight. Most of them have tried other diets and fads and haven’t had much success and they attribute that to being unable to stick with the diet due to their busy lives.
One of the things you could identify as a tool to help moms stay motivated is a weight loss tracker/forecaster. You can then build this tool into your product.
Another key pitfall you may have identified is that most moms actually need one-on-one consultations addressing their own individual struggles on their weight loss journeys. So, to address this gap you could build a free, weekly WhatsApp Video or Facebook Video consultations into your product as well.
Now, instead of selling a shake, you have elevated your positioning to selling an offer. When a time-strapped mom, desperate to lose weight starts looking around for which product she will choose, which do you think she’ll go for? The off-the-shelf product or your offering that’s tailored to her specific needs?
Cross selling
Cross selling involves leveraging your existing database.
Take all your health shake customers, for example, and introduce one of your other relevant products to them.
If you’re a health coach that sells numerous products to assist customers with living fuller, healthier lives, then you could perhaps offer some of your coaching services into your health shake customer base.
It is far easier to sell to people who are already buying from you because a trust relationship already exists. Cross selling leverages the “adding more value” principle so whichever product or service you want to introduce into an existing customer database, needs to complement the current product or service your customers are purchasing and add more value to them.
Cross selling is a quick-win sales strategy that allows business owners and sales managers to explode revenue in a short time.
Referral selling
Reward customers that refer business to you and encourage referrals.
When customers are buying from you on a regular basis, you are starting to build real, long-term loyalty. Loyal customers very rarely leave you and they are the first people to spread the word when they are happy and taken care of.
The concept of referral selling is not new, it’s been around for a while now and businesses and entrepreneurs have been leveraging the power of the multiple successfully across many different industries. Why not you?
Creating a solid incentive for your customers to recommend people to your business or to send you the information of friends that they believe will love your products or services as much as they do, is a massive sales opportunity in any business.