No matter how big or small your company is you are always looking for ways to increase your sales growth and to find new, valuable clients who you can provide a great service to and who will help you to generate more revenue.
This is exactly what we try to do here at Hike. We have our ideal customer personas; the small business who can’t afford to hire an SEO professional, the small agency who wants to offer SEO, the marketing assistant who wants a fast way to learn and do SEO, and so on.
The better we are at finding these potential customers, the faster we’re going to grow our business. These are the customers who we can really make an impact for, the ones who will get the most value from our product.
So, what is the right way to do this? In a mission to find the answers for you, I have gathered great articles from which I have picked out many valuable tips.
Don’t Waste Time
First, you need to find the right customers & clients without approaching the ones which will waste your time. Then research the most effective way you can connect with those specific customers effectively.
Sending out the right messages to them is a lot more important than you think. As soon as a potential customer receives information that is irrelevant to them, there’s a very good chance they will not be happy and ignore any emails or phone calls from you in the future!
For example, if we send the wrong email to one of our customer personas (eg an agency focused email to a marketing assistant) then we can pretty much wave that potential customer good-bye.
So what you need to have in place to target the right audience is a good marketing strategy. If you don’t have your marketing strategy in place yet, here is a great article on how you can build your strategy in 10 steps.
Alongside you not wanting to waste your own time, you don’t want to waste the client’s time either. Using your blog and posting relevant and well-written content will help to target the correct audience.
Yes, I know writing articles isn’t easy if you don’t have a PR background. But believe me, it will make a tremendous difference to your traffic and can potentially increase customers too.
We focus a lot of blogs here at Hike. Not only do they help to cement our position as experts in our customer’s minds, but it’s a great way of driving relevant traffic and increasing brand awareness.
It can even significantly lower marketing costs: check out this article where we featured a startup called Beyond who successfully drive over £20ks worth of traffic every month via their blog content.
Ask questions
The business you’re targeting already probably has someone who provides them with the product/service that you want to offer them. Before you explain your ideas, (which they potentially can take up with their current provider) you need to make sure that this can turn into a sale.
Graig Elias wrote in his article that you should ask the following two questions: ‘Has the vendor ever let you down?’ & ‘Pretend something happened to your current vendor and you said you would never do business with them again. Describe for me the kind of supplier you would look for?’. Once you have gathered enough information you will know not to ‘waste your time’.
Another good hack is to go back to your previous buyers from 6-12 months ago and ask them how has their workflow changed. Notice how I didn’t give you a typical sales tip, such as asking them: how did you enjoy our service/product.
This is great because exploring their current situation will allow you to find ways that your service/product can help them now. Your customers care about what you can do now for them to achieve their goals.
Tibor Shanto & Colleen in their articles also encourage you to go back and approach the opportunities you lost and those that have never gone to a decision. Try to learn from these losses.
Prospecting, Prospecting, Prospecting
The research you conduct when you are looking for your prospects is very important. I am going to help you to make sure that you know exactly how to nail it.
There is a good video created by Mark Hunter which explains that sales is not a destination; it’s a journey. He covers 20 different things that he found in common with the top 1% of sales prospectors. It’s great content.
Spend some extra time on learning your market and get those critical metrics in time. Collin Stewart and his team made sure they focused on that and managed to go from $0 to $40K monthly recurring revenue in just two months.
Start believing in your own data, as well as the marketing content you have. Use the information to support your sales pitches. The more facts you know, the more customer will pay attention and value your call.
This will help you to stand out from other companies who are just good at pushing their sales messages and not by sharing expert knowledge. For example use case studies, data & insights to be that one step ahead when pitching a product. Read the article by itsdevelopmental on how you can do it in 5 simple steps.
The knowledge on the current market & your product will open up doors to you for cross-selling. Usually, an effective cross-selling opportunity can represent 5%-15% of the total purchase. A great example is ‘..if the computer cost is $2,000, you may be able to sell the buyer an additional $100 to $250 worth of complementary products or services’.
Now is a good time to remind you about the first sentence of this article’s section: the research you conduct when you are looking for your prospects is very essential.
Best Tips For Making Sales
Many people and businesses do sell services that have extremely high value, but not all of them do succeed in today’s market. The reason for that which is very well described by Jill Konrath is because they fail to articulate their product in words that appeal to corporate decision-makers; they do not have a strong value proposition.
You will be surprised how much it impacts your buyer’s decision. So, how can you improve your value proposition?
Start with tackling down the three important parts first: Be the expert; reinforce value; help the customer to make a decision. Once you can confidently include those three parts in your proposition go ahead and read this article on ‘7 Ways To Sell More and Serve More’.
The article provides you with very useful strategies that you need to know in order to make those sales, which does cover those three strategies. Believe me, once you are a master at those 7 key points you will have any buyer’s attention.
There are so many different ways you can make your customers want to buy your service/product. I always say that the body language and the tone of your voice is the first two things people pick up on when they meet you.
Take control of other people’s perceptions of you. Try not to have a typical sales voice – be different. Jeffrey Gitomer teaches you the best way to make that sales call by following his 14.5 key magic elements and techniques.
The first point he makes is that you should know what you want to achieve before you even think to approach the customer or client. Smile & be funny is one of my favourite points that he makes.
This is when the customer will engage the most with you and will know that you are actually enjoying talking to them, rather than you having to talk to them.
One of the most popular complaints in the business industry is that people feel just like a number. Bring the personalised touch to your company and make the customers feel like you handle them with care. Andy Paul has written an article on how to be a ‘HERO’:
- H is for Helpful
- E is for Empathetic Listener
- R is for Responsive
- O is for Open-minded Problem Solver
These characteristics will help you to stand out and build trust with your customers. When your clients feel less like a number and more like a valued customer they will hold onto you even during a recession.
Chris Brogan explains very well how we can prepare now as a business when recession hits. It is inevitable that if you help your clients/customers and make them feel valuable to your business no matter how big or small they are, they will help you too.
A very good way to keep good contact with your clients is to send check-in emails and meaningful content. It will work even better if those emails are personalised. You can find more information on best practices for writing the email in this article.
