Well the 2010 year is well on it’s way, everyone is back in full swing brimming with positivity and confidence about the year ahead. As always at this time of year, it’s important to re-evaluate your goals and what you want to achieve this year. Remember, if ‘nothing changes, then nothing changes’ so it’s important to reflect on what worked last year, what didn’t work and what you will do differently.
I recommend you do some analysis on your existing customers, what revenue they have brought in, what they have bought and what opportunity there is to cross sell and upsell. Many people spend so much time and effort trying to generate new sales that if they simply focused on existing customers, the same results can be achieved. Besides, you can always find new customers from referrals within your existing client base.
My tips below are designed to help you focus on your customers and give your sales a boost in 2010.
1. Analyse your customer spend.
Analyse your customer database and find out what percentage of sales each customer contributed to the overall revenue. Classify your customers into A, B and C level depending on the spend, percentage or value to the business. Dig deeper and list out what products or services they bought and what else they could get some value or benefit from.
2. Love your Customers.
When was the last time you sat down in front of your customers and had a strategic business discussion regarding plans and goals? Make appointments with all your A class customers and those B and C customers that are valuable to the business or have the potential to grow and ask them
- what does 2010 have in store for your business?
- what are the goals of the business this year?
- how can we make dealing with our business easier?
- is there anything else we can do for you?
- are you aware we also offer (insert new product/service)?
We often take it for granted that our customers know all about our business and the products and services we offer. Take the opportunity to inform them of your plans for the year and what products or services they aren’t buying that you feel they could benefit from, and why.
3. Develop an Account Management Plan.
Based on your A, B and C tiers develop a plan on how often each of tiers should get a visit from yourself or your salespeople. This will strengthen or improve the relationship and help to keep competitors at bay. The goal should be to have not just satisfied customers but LOYAL and satisfied customers. The frequency of visit depends on the type of business you have but as an example:
- A Class must be visited at least 4 times year
- B Class must be visited at least 2 times per year
- C Class must be visited at least once per year or at least proactively contacted by phone
4. Go back in time.
Go back through your records and do a comparison of sales from 2008 to 2009 (calender or financial year, whichever is appropriate). Are there customers that have reduced their spending? Are there customers that stopped spending with you?
Just because they haven’t bought from you last year, doesn’t mean they don’t need you this year. Pick up the phone, make an appointment and get back in contact with your old customers
5. Never underestimate face to face time.
Although we live in a time of technology, where just about everything can be done without meeting face to face, never underestimate the value of sitting in front of people. It may seem like a time-consuming, costly exercise but I can just about guarantee that sales will be made (and quicker) when you sit in front of new and existing customers.
It might seem easier to email a proposal but how many times do you play phone tag, wait for them to cal you back and suddenly two weeks has gone by and your still waiting to talk to them? When you sit in front of someone and present your solution in person, you have their complete attention, you can answer any questions and determine their readiness to buy. It really does improve your conversions (quote to sale ratio) and speed up the sale.
Contributed by
Karen Andrews.
Karen Andrews is the Director of Shine Sales Solutions, a Sydney based Sales Coach and Sales expert, that works with businesses to increase sales and increase sales confidence through strategy development, sales management, sales coaching and mentoring. Since its inception in 2003 Shine Sales Solutions has been assisting businesses to manage and motivate their sales staff to achieve success and increase profits. P: 02 9437 6500, E: kandrews@shinesales.com.au Twitter: karenandrews.
Over the week-end you may have read about the KPMG report that was commissioned to review the role of the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency. The report is currently being considered by the Federal Government.
One of the recommendations seems to have grabbed attention – it’s the one about workplaces being encouraged to have a voluntary 40 percent female representation at all levels within a three to five year period or wear a penalty.
So it’s back to the old argument of quotas vs merit. It’s extremely difficult to find a group of collective women at the top who would agree with quotas and after all who can blame them, they’ve done the hard yards and so can everyone else. But in the end the fact is that if it was all fair and even we would already have 50 percent representation. So what gives? How does this stalemate of low levels of participation by women in senior roles ever progress forward? And, more to the point, will any Government in Australia ever be prepared to go to war with employers on this matter? Can you imagine?
Mind you, overseas countries where Governments have taken the road of quotas as a fix-it tool, the business community seemed to very quickly find extremely talented women to appoint to senior management roles and boards. These women didn’t just suddenly come to light, surely? Might have had something to do with pulling out all guns to identify and attract the right women (not a token woman) or else be penalised with a hefty fine and outed as a poor performer on published lists. Amazing what you can find when you put your mind to looking for it!
Why have an offer? Offers (or incentives) are imperative because they make people sit up and take notice. Offers should stop the reader dead in their tracks and make them say “I want that!” If you don’t have an offer, it’s too easy for the reader to turn the page and move on. Even if they’re interested in your product, they won’t stop to do anything about it because they’re just too darn busy. They’ll probably say, “That looks interesting – I must get around to getting one of those.” And of course, that day never comes. So how does it actually work?
The principle behind ‘Offers’ is very simple:
1. Offers stop people from moving on.
2. Offers force the reader to take action.
Once you have intrigued your reader enough to keep them reading until the end of the ad, you need to get them to DO something.
This could be any one of the following:
Fill out a coupon/form
Make a telephone call
Click on a website
Send an email
Go to a store
What they all have in common is that they involve an action. That’s our objective – to get our reader to do one or more of these things.
But the big question is:
How do we get the reader to be sufficiently inspired to want to take action? Well, we need to motivate them.
How do we do that? It’s simple. We think about who they are, what they need, what’s important to them and come up with an idea that’s relevant, timely, interesting and genuine.
Here are some examples:
A carpet cleaning business may offer a 4th room cleaned for free
A fitness centre might offer a free dietary consultation or a free personal training session upon joining
A florist may offer free chocolates with every Valentine’s Day purchase
A hairdresser might offer a free 15-minute head massage with every colour
A hotel might offer a free meal in the restaurant with every weekend package purchased
An interior designer could offer a free booklet about colour co-ordination for the bedroom
The secret to creating great offers is to offer the reader something interesting and relevant to their needs.
There’s no point offering a free carpet cleaning with every gym membership sold, or a free 15 minute head massage with every bunch of flowers sold. Neither of these offers are targeted or relevant to the consumer.
You’ll also notice that all the offers listed above cost very little to provide, yet have great intrinsic value to the customer.
How to make a customer choose your product over the competitors:
In many cases, what we’re trying to do is convince the customer to come with us; to buy our product. There are other competing products out there, bursting to get noticed, so all we have to do is offer something that they’re not offering, and we’ve won our customer over.
Sometimes it doesn’t take much to convert a customer over to another supplier but there always has to be a reason for them to do so.
Providing a great offer can help bring that customer over. What’s more, it doesn’t have to cost a lot to create a compelling offer.
Example:
Including a few chocolates with the Valentine’s Day flowers may cost under $5 but the value of the entire purchase of flowers could be well over $100.
The gym membership offer of a free dietary consultation may cost up to $30 but the gym membership could be worth well over $500 per year, or more.
People love to get something for nothing, no matter how small the offer might be.
If you haven’t already got an offer listed on your Home Page, have a think about something that’s inexpensive, relevant and provides great value you can provide your readers. It’ll be the best investment you’ve made in generating new leads and building your all-important database.
Do you start your morning by visiting numerous websites to find the latest information and updates? Do you find it annoying trying to remember lots of different log in names, user names and passwords? RSS feeds can help you eliminate this time consuming process.
So what is RSS anyway? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. In its simplest form RSS can be described as a list of a web site’s new or updated content. It is a format for delivering regularly changing web content straight to your email inbox. Read the rest…
Mary is a typical small business owner, she keeps herself busy doing the ‘hands on’ work. In her case it is doing beauty treatments and she told me she keeps doing this because she really enjoys it. Her clients constantly told her how great she was, which made her feel appreciated. However it trapped her into staying ‘on the tools’. Read the rest…
You are reading a business style blog right now - but have you thought about creating one for your business? Blogs create marketing opportunities that allow businesses to interact with customers like never before. As the blog has evolved - and because it is an interactive medium where readers can comment on the articles, or ‘posts’ - businesses have embraced the blogs ability to build rapport with customers and humanise the business. Read the rest…
It is critical, particularly during challenging economic times, that business owners recognize their employees for all their hard work. If you can reaffirm and re-enforce your team members’ value and contribution while your organisation is coping with the global downturn, you stand a better chance of retaining your best people when the economy turns around and opportunities to leave become plentiful. Read the rest…
Taking the time to formulate an emarketing plan is time very well spent. Your plan should consist of broadly:
Frequency of messages and target group/s
Type/s of content to be included in each message
General plan for which content to be included in each message, mapped out for at least 6 months
But this post is actually about how to make sure you actually execute your plan [if you don't have one, and you don't know how to start, stop reading this now, and check out my step by step process for creating a email communication plan, then come back here and keep reading!] Read the rest…
Most people have an email address and use it either for work or keeping in touch with family and friends. You can use email to send regular updates to people interested in your work.
Sending a regular email or enewsletter is a great way to share your stories, it can also be a powerful marketing tool providing useful information to the reader while indirectly promoting your art. Read the rest…
When you run a small business and don’t have sales or marketing experience it can be often be very frustrating when you want to increase your sales but you’re not sure what to do or where to start. For many people the mere thought of sales makes them go weak at the knees, so it tends to be the first thing that is avoided and the last thing to do; yet it is critical to the success of your business.
Here are 5 quick tips anyone can use to get you motivated and taking the steps toward increasing your sales. Read the rest…
