Business owners often do more talking than listening. When it comes to making sales, often it’s best to do more listening than talking. Instead of overthinking and brainstorming what your prospects might want, why not just ask them? You’d probably be surprised at how easy it can be to sell them what they’re already telling you they most want/need.
For example, if you’re selling a variety of online marketing or web services, instead of trying to force them to buy a particular SEO package to help rank their site, why not ask them what they think their biggest issues are right now with their business? You might find that they really don’t care much about their ranking but might instead be focused on their social media, e-mail list management, or some other service that you could easily do for them.
Once someone tells you what their issues are, ask them what they think that would do for their business if those issues were solved, and then ask them how much more they think they could make with all of those things being fixed and running smoothly. This lets THEM tell YOU the value those services mean to them rather than you trying to convince them of the value that you can bring to the table. The more you talk about yourself or your services instead of just listening to what their needs are, the less likely you are to typically land those sales.
And, as an added bonus, this method works well both for prospects who’ve never bought from you, as well as for existing customers that you could sell other things to. For instance, you might find that all of your clients of one service are practically begging to buy a different service if only you offered it! And this might be incredibly easy for you to either offer or outsource.
One of our clients once was able to nearly double his net income just by finally asking what his current clients also wanted … and then simply offering them that after years of not selling them anything else! It’s amazing how much money is often left on the table by most businesses out there (even we’re guilty of that from time to time). You also might be surprised at what your customers say that they want, as it might be completely different than what you think they’d want.
So ask your prospects and clients what their needs are and what would help them the most and then provide them with a product/service that fulfills that need. Do more listening than talking to land the most sales.
For more help mapping out your upsells and sales funnels, so you can look at how you can increase your business, check out this software that helps you build out your sales funnel. BizFire's Free Funnel Maker & Analyzer.
How can you encourage customers to make their second, third, and fourth purchase with you? How can you entice them to keep coming back and buying from you, changing them from a once off customer to a regular? Future-use coupons are one great strategy to employ to incentivize customers to make that next buy.
One of the most important things to understand is that leads are far more than just random people who might be interested in your business. A lead is someone who needs what your business has to offer. The only thing you should have to do is capture their attention and easily be able to convince them that your products and services supply that need.
For many people, their businesses are their primary source of income and the way they provide for their families. In order for a business to continue generating a steady source of income, and to grow, a business needs to seek new clients. Anyone who's been in business for a day can tell you how competitive it is. Your customers have plenty of businesses to choose from so you have to go out and find them. It's hard to be found by new customers, but luckily in the age of the internet we have thousands of platforms and means to advertise and market ourselves.
Most businesses tend to practically ignore their prospects and even their best clients. This is a horrible thing to do, as you’d be leaving a ton of money on the table in doing so.
In terms of cost-efficiency, the most crucial method for attracting traffic to your website is through organic searches. They allow you to reach people who don't even know about your site initially but are searching for a specific product or service related to your website. The primary factor of the success in organic searches boils down to the ranking of your website on search engine results pages (SERPs).
How can you improve your marketing and create new products - products that your customers already want? Simple. Ask for feedback from your customers and see what the common themes are. What do your customers like most about your product? How can you focus on that more in your marketing? What do they believe that your product/service currently lacks? Think about how you can use their feedback to create a new/improved service and offer that to your customers.
Too often business owners try to fight over the scraps. They try to make deals or land sales with anyone and everyone that they can find, regardless of if those deals are barely worth any money to them.
You’ve probably bought electronics before and been offered the purchase an additional warranty. Or maybe you’ve purchased furniture before and been offered a white glove service to deliver and setup your new couch.
One of the best things you can do to get people to take action, especially online, is to offer a free plus shipping & handling offer. These offers have an obvious HUGE value because nothing beats free, and by having them pay a small S&H fee, they still see the value in the free product, despite how often times your products’ costs might be completely covered in this S&H fee.
According to a survey conducted in the United States a stunning 90% of businesses were active in some way on social media in 2017. Facebook alone, has close to 1 billion users, equal to the total population of India, all over the globe.
People often overlook this very simple, very easy way to increase their business’s profits: increase your prices. Most people tend to undercharge for their services, so try increasing your prices, as a test, and see what happens. Funnily enough, most people perceive something that is higher priced as being of higher quality, which can encourage people to buy your product or service. As you increase your prices, you’re also receiving more per sale, increasing your profit margin. Take this strategy a step further and target higher value clients.
Don’t you hate it when you’re searching for an item, find it at an amazing price, then see that shipping is going to cost you an arm and a leg? One way to increase your sales, especially over a short period of time, is to reduce the cost of your shipping, or offer a sale period time where shipping is free. By putting a time limit on when you make free shipping available, you add a sense of urgency, encouraging customers to buy now, as opposed to at a later date. It’s also a good way to encourage customers who may have been on the fence to make a purchase now.
Too many business owners and marketers will only create one version of an offer, sales page, opt-in page, ad, etc., and simply hope that it works. If it does, they’re happy. If it doesn’t, they think that the offer simply doesn’t work.
It’s often way more effort and expense to find new customers than to sell again to your current customers. So how can you persuade your current customers to continuously purchase from you? One way is to put in place a loyalty program that keeps them coming back for more.
Anyone who owns a website and publishes original content on it wants to see the site ranked higher on Google and other search engines. While many may believe that writing a top-quality piece of content, publishing it, and promoting it is enough to make the website successful, it is certainly not. In this era of fierce competition when thousands of websites are competing for the same kind of audience.
In the past few years, social signals have become an essential part of a business' website ranking. These trends have only increased as the use of social media has become highly popular around the world. A well-executed social media marketing strategy can greatly boost your business.
A membership program is where your customers sign up, either for free or for a fee, to be part of a community or elite club. As an incentive to sign up they often receive special discounts, invites to product launches, early access and other rewards. The benefit to you is that by offering incentives and rewarding customers’ loyalty, you encourage them to keep coming back to you and buying from your business. You also have the benefit of beginning to build a list of clients that you can regularly market to and offer deals to.
It’s time to check out the competition!! In school it may have been called cheating, but in the business world it’s just good old-fashioned market research!
Contests can be a great way to grab more leads or prospects, get feedback or testimonials from existing customers, encourage participation or attendance on webinars, and more. And, it’s not like you have to give away a car or something crazy expensive. In fact, often times cheaper giveaways will help increase your conversions even more (perhaps because they think they’ll have a better chance of winning?).
Business to marketing seems like a foreign language to many people who are trying it for the first time. The consumer markets seems so much plainer and easier, after all, we're dealing with every day people. With businesses we feel we are dealing with some mysterious entity or some divine VIP, a thing whose persona is foreign to everything we knew in the every day human consciousness.
There’s only so much time in the day, and although it can be a great idea to add extra services that you sell and fulfill yourself, it’s not always practical. This is why it can be a great idea to look for other services or offers that you can sell yourself but easily outsource to others to do with little to no work on your part.
Selling digital products like e-books or videos (or even services) can be great, as they often carry much higher margins than physical products. However, people often place a much higher value on physical products that they can touch and hold.
