In any establishment, sales is the department that generates revenue. No matter how good your manufacturing operation is, how cutting-edge your technology is, how tight your financial goals are or how forward-thinking your management techniques are, you must still have a sales mechanism in place, or everything else is useless. Selling commonly includes face-to-face meetings between sales representatives and prospective buyers. In a consultative approach, the salesperson asks questions to discover prospect needs and then make recommendations for purchase.

People make the mistake of confusing #marketing with sales. Marketing effort creates favourable conditions for the sale to take place. But sales close the deal. In a nutshell, the marketer leads the horse to water; the sales team makes it drink. Many companies under-invest sales in their afterthought, to be handled after the managers solve the manufacturing, distribution and financing issues. The best sales forces are professional, well-compensated, supported with a strong marketing effort and empowered act, serving key clients’ interests with marketing support, money and time. They have strong personal relationships with key customers, or they learn how to build.

Sales can be a tough proposition in normal markets and even tougher in slow markets. Slow markets can be especially tough for businesses that don’t have a lot of room to cut costs therefore the obvious way to boost bottom line profits is to increase revenue through sales. Here are three tips to shake up your #business and stir up sales:

1. Offer A Deal

When you need to shake things up, a temporary discount on the price of your product may be the ticket. This helps to convince those people who are sitting on the fence to pull out their wallets and make the purchase. A modest discount that you can live with could be a great tonic to help you grow your sales numbers.

2. Get Feedback From Non-Buyers

The people who don’t buy from you can sometimes be more important that those who do. Understanding the reasons why a potential customer did not pull out their wallet might open your eyes to problems with your website or in-store merchandise selection that you hadn’t noticed before. These things are known as “barriers to purchase” in sales theory. Take a moment to contact recent prospects who didn’t buy your products. Ask them what the barriers to purchase were for them. Was your price just a bit too high? Did they not believe your testimonials? Did they misunderstand your guarantee? If you can find out about the purchase barriers in your business, you can get to work on fixing them.

3. Do something Different

Take a different approach to promote your business, through this, you may learn something you didn’t know before that can be used to your advantage in the future. If your newspaper ads aren’t working, try putting that money towards a news release instead. Perhaps you can generate some publicity for your business, which is just as valuable as advertising. Or perhaps you can pull back on your online advertising this month and put that money towards a targeted e-mail campaign. If your business is more traditional, maybe you can go door to door in your area and meet face to face with potential customers.

 

 

Tags:  business Business Development Compete Sales marketing