The question of how to increase sales is of interest to any entrepreneur. The greater the sales volume, the more significant the profit – the ABC of business. But how exactly can this be achieved? How to make potential customers real, and ideally increase their loyalty to the maximum?
For business development, it is necessary not only to constantly attract buyers but also to maintain a ready-made base. To induce a desire to return to you and, to use goods and services, and not to go to competitors if you offer non-one-time services is however important.
Good long-term relationships with existing customers are the basis for the stability and development of a business project. With the right business structure, work is simultaneously aimed at expanding the base and retaining old users. This will ensure success and reduce the risk of failure.
There are probably thousands of ways to increase sales and increase the incoming flow of potential customers. The problem is that there are no completely one-size-fits-all solutions. An idea that has worked for a hundred businessmen may be useless for a hundred and first. Therefore, any advertising or marketing advice on how to increase sales should be taken as a hypothesis. Considering that, here, in this article, we are explaining to you the top-notch ways to boost the customer flow and sales at the same time.
Factors that can affect sales
There are 3 parameters, from which indicators often rise or fall:
- Internal: This includes promotions and discounts, cost, loyalty advertising programs, and others;
- External: The laws and dynamics of the market, the season, the presence of competitors, to what extent customers are able to buy;
- Personal contribution: It depends on one specialist who is engaged in the project, the ability to call and deal with objections, deliver information, and the rest.
Difficulty in improving your customer flow
Retention of old customers is necessary and beneficial because of the formation of long-term relationships and increased loyalty, as well as from an economic point of view. When analyzing several successful long-term business projects, a pattern is noticeable: “Most of the company’s money is brought by old customers!”
The main problems of attracting customers
- Cost
Keeping an existing subscriber is 5-10 times cheaper than adding a new one. The cost of recruiting a new person is constantly growing due to the rising cost of advertising and the ever-increasing competition.
- Stability
The market situation is unstable, and it is impossible to accurately predict the number of attracted customers. This indicator drops rapidly during the crisis, while the income from regular customers grows based on trust.
- Value
At the beginning of cooperation, a person makes small purchases, first looks closely, evaluates the ratio of price, quality, and service. The American statistical portal provides data that a client who has been in the company for less than six months spends 67% less than one who has been working with you for three years.
- Loyalty
Attracting a new person requires identifying and analyzing the pain points, closing urgent needs, creating a trusting relationship, and confidence in the quality of services. This requires financial and time investment. An entrepreneur is already familiar with the pains of a constant target audience, and meeting requests at the first contact automatically increases loyalty.
How to increase sales and improve customer flow
Build a sales funnel
A sales funnel is the path that a person goes from the first contact with your product to the moment they part with their money. First, a person learns about a product, then begins to be interested in it, then somehow expresses a desire to purchase and, finally, buys. Your task is to break down all sales into conditional stages and track how many people have switched from one to another.
Let’s say you have a travel agency. You run contextual advertising. Your funnel might look like this: 100 people viewed the ad, 30 clicked on it and went to the website, 20 called and one bought a tour. By analyzing the funnel, you can understand which stages need to be improved. For example, here you need to work with the ad text and the sales department.
Segment your customers
The one size fits all sales model does not work. To determine a unique approach to each group of customers, to get to know your target audience better and, as a result, to increase sales conversion, you need to segment your customer base.
Segmentation helps to understand who and what to offer. The more you make a value proposition for a narrower segment, the higher the conversion into calls, requests, orders. You don’t have to rack your brains every time over how to convey your offer to customers, how not to repeat yourself, how not to turn customers against yourself with illiterate email marketing.
Expand your product line
What are your current customers buying? – What else can they buy? – Can you, with minimal costs, offer them an extension of your product line?
Oddly enough, this recommendation is rather difficult to implement in practice. Sales managers do not want to adjust the current product line for their customers, and therefore you will have to think about how to do this in practice: is it possible to change the system of motivating sales managers or inform key customers on your own ?!
Here you need to act according to the situation and consider specific conditions, which can be done at corporate sales training or individual business consultation. We recommend building a new sales team from active salespeople to work with an expanded product line, or recruiting new sales managers who will have a new product line in mind in their initial sales preparation.
Run social media ads
Over the years, social networks have accumulated a lot of data about their users – their interests, gender, age, marital status. Use this data to launch targeted ads.
For example, let’s say you decide to promote the delivery of ready-to-eat meals. Find groups of competitors on the social network, show your ads to their audience. Try broadcasting your ad to subscribers of restaurants and cafes in your area. Expand your search – add people who use local store deliveries.
You can filter the audience for display by hundreds of parameters. The price depends on the competition. You can save your advertising budget by selecting people in a way that another advertiser might not have guessed.
Include Customer Relationship Management System
A very powerful tool to increase sales is the launch of new products through the sales department in the CRM system.
A group task is the setting of a task through a specific filter by deals in a CRM system. For example, dialing through the contact base of only a certain segment.
Unlike holding promotions, when setting tasks through CRM, you will immediately see the result. You will be able to analyze the statuses by task, understand which customer made a repeat purchase, which one refused the deal, and at what stage it happened, Reducing customer waiting time using the best queue management software.
Concluding Remarks
The article contains the ways to increase the growth of sales of goods and services of the company by twice. Any of the techniques will not work miracles if they are not part of the strategy. To learn how to sell several times more, you need to understand what potential consumers want. Also, work on strategies to improve the customer experience, for instance, using waiting management software will help/
It is important to think over from start to finish what and how it will look, to potential buyers. What are the benefits and how to hide the weak points of each category? You should also think about external factors of influence – find out the presence and strength of competitors. Check whether a seasonal product is offered, whether there are legal prohibitions. Only in this way, in a complex, will it be possible to achieve success.
Do you find this article useful? Or do you have some related queries? Let us know in the comment section below. Thank you for reading!
