In the current economic climate a lot of small businesses & start-ups are dying, but yours doesn't have to.
Many of my clients approach me feeling discouraged and frustrated, believing that they have exhausted all options to boost their revenue growth.
The market for any product these days is insanely competitive, so you have no choice but to implement effective sales strategies to give you an edge, if you don't your competition will!
Sales strategies are the carefully planned long term approaches used by businesses to effectively acquire, retain, and grow their customer base. These strategies encompass a range of activities, but are always related the goals set out by wider business strategy.
Successful sales strategies aim to maximise revenue, profitability, and customer satisfaction while adapting to changing market conditions and customer preferences.
In short, sales strategy provides the overarching plan and direction for sales efforts, focusing on long-term objectives and high-level decisions, while sales tactics involve the specific actions and techniques employed on a daily or short-term basis to implement the strategy and achieve immediate sales goals.
The below 7 solutions feature a mixture of both sales strategies and sales tactics, while also aligning with potential business goals you might have.
1. Upgrade Prospecting With An Ideal Customer Profile
2. Increase Inbound Sales By Leveraging Social Selling
3. Maximise Average Deal Values with Upselling & Cross-Selling
4. Unlock Repeat Business With Exceptional Customer Service
5. Warm Up Cold Leads With Email Marketing Campaigns
6. Grow Your Audience With Strategic Partnerships
7. Analyse & Optimise With Simple (Often Free) Dashboards
How To Prioritise Sales Strategies
To increase revenue, it's important to clearly identify and understand your target audience. By defining your ideal customer profile, you can tailor your sales efforts to meet their needs and preferences.
Build an ideal customer profile using the above information and what they are trying to solve with your products/services, understand who they are (demographics, etc), where you can reach them (phone, socials, email, etc) and how you can interest more of them (solving their pain).
From here you can develop a better approach to prospecting as well as a customer centric sales process that is much more likely to convert your prospects into new customers.
In an increasingly digital world, social media platforms offer immense opportunities to reach a wider audience and increase revenue.
Developing a strong social media presence by creating engaging content, sharing industry insights, and promoting your products or services should be an easy win, this is your opportunity to display your expertise to the entire world.
Create a presence where your ideal customers are likely to be, such as; Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, or X(Twitter).
Take the opportunity to partner with other companies in your space, by including them in your strategy you can share your audiences with each other, more on this one later!
But have got to play if you want to win, social media is not optional anymore, arguably it hasn't been for a very long time. If you aren’t making yourself available in the places where you’re being looked for, you simply won’t be found.
Increasing revenue doesn't always mean acquiring new customers. Upselling and cross-selling techniques can be highly effective in maximising the value of existing customers.
This starts by listening to your customers during the sales process, and I mean active listening, part of a topic that we will cover in greater detail in a future post.
The consequences of not doing this are doubled. Because if a more complete offering is made by a competitor, you might not even win on the core product/service offering.
It seems like I’m stating the obvious, but ask yourself honestly, what intentional and repeatable steps do you take to deliver consistently exceptional customer service?
Don’t be fooled into thinking that a focus on customer service is just about reputation or a waste of time, done correctly you’ll build long-term relationships and ultimately increase revenue.
You can ensure that you provide excellent customer service with some fairly basic measures:
By providing a memorable experience, you can foster customer loyalty, encourage repeat purchases, and benefit from positive word-of-mouth referrals.
Email marketing remains one of the most effective lead generation strategies for small businesses. Build an email list of prospects that fit your ideal customer profile(s) and loyal customers. Regularly engage with them through targeted campaigns.
You might gain these prospects through your social strategy, or they might just be people you only just missed out on working with in the past.
With tools like Apollo.io there has never been a better time to easily create large scale nurturing campaigns with automation, tracking and built in dashboards.
Important: Ensure you obtain proper consent before emailing your prospects to avoid potentially violating the law in your country, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union.
Furthering my point about partnering with other companies in your space, forming strategic partnerships with complementary businesses can significantly boost your reach and revenue.
So seize the opportunity! If you haven't formed any partnerships yet, now is the perfect time to start seeking them out. The benefits far outweigh any potential drawbacks, and there is so much to gain. Don't hesitate to explore the possibilities and unlock new avenues for growth and success.
To ensure the effectiveness of your sales strategies, it's essential to continuously analyse and optimise your efforts.
You should utilise easy to implement analytics tools such as the ones found built into HubSpot, to measure key performance indicators, including but not limited to the following:
Identify areas for improvement, experiment with different approaches, and refine your strategies with data-driven insights.
This ongoing process of optimisation will give you the competitive edge and fuel continuous revenue growth.
So where should you start? Have a close look at your business and think about how well you are doing in each of the above strategies right now, grade them according to the following:
Simply focus on improving the weakest ones first for the biggest payoff, of course there are some dependencies, a lot of this will be hard to do without a Ideal Customer Profile, and you're unlikely to get much traction from partnerships if you haven't built your own individual social following.
When you implement these proven sales strategies & tactics, you will make a measurable and profound impact on your revenue growth.
if you’re not sure how to assess these areas of your sales strategy (or any other) you can book a free meeting with me on my booking page.
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