Businesses run through money and money flows through sales. It (sales) is the most vital aspect of any business operation. While having a robust and adept team of sales professionals can make a big difference at the bottom line, but ignoring other crucial aspects can hinder the growth of your ‘sales’. Hence, here we have enlisted few of the most popular methods that have the potential to drive ‘sales’ of any organization towards a positive trajectory.
Sell Benefits not the Features
Most people think that by pitching the different features help convert a prospect into customer. Although telling different features about a particular product or a service is a great thing but it does not help you to sell a product. Confused, right! Let us clarify.
According to one prominent study conducted by Harvard Business School, it was found that most of the products and services of all kinds sell because of their ‘benefits’ to the end user’s life and not because of some great features.
People always search for a solution for their business problems and if they find a product/service or an idea which can resolve their problem, they tend to show interest in buying it, otherwise not. Therefore, it is always better to first understand your prospect’s business, and then start pitching the product focusing completely on its benefits to your prospect’s business.
Selling benefits create a positive impression in buyers mind and force them to believe that you are more concerned about resolving their problem instead of just selling an odd item which is of no use. Such action reflects the transparency and helps persuade the buyer to purchase your services.
Lucrative Incentive Programs
Every business is more concerned about creating a breakthrough product/service and providing great services to the customer. However, many do not concern that much about the needs of an employee. No matter how great a product is, or how deliberately a client wants to buy your services, if the salesperson itself is unable to pitch the services in a dynamic fashion, chances of converting that prospect into customer remains grim. It is thus important for every company to make their employees feel that you concern about their well-being as well.
A company can make feel an employee empowered and valuable through special incentive programs.
Incentive plans encourage an employee to perform better, achieve higher goals, and get recognized for his/her work. Many studies show that a good incentive plan leads to higher motivation and that ‘extra’ salary or ‘increased’ earning makes a lot of difference in employee’s productivity and sales in general.
Not only monetary gain, but a company can also provide some merchandise, shares, trips, food coupons, movie coupons, and more which ultimately result in motivating the employees and increasing the sales.
Collaborate with other Businesses
Businesses run on contacts and collaborations. A businessperson should have connection with other businessmen who are directly or indirectly associated with his/her business. Such relationship often results in offering some extra leads for your business. For example, a company who manufactures fire extinguishers should have connections with real-estate firms. Such relationships can assist the company to sell fire extinguishers whenever new residential/commercial projects get launched and can help in increasing company’s sales.
Customer Reward Program (CRP)
Customer’s reward programs are not new. This is being used by many big businesses for long time to increase their brand value and the company’s image at the large. But what’s unusual is the mind set of many small business owners who do not see a benefit in it.
Any small or medium sized enterprise should also create some customer’s reward programs to strengthen their bond. Special discounts on customer’s birthday/anniversary, bonus points, and other gifts can help businesses to build customers’ loyalty and increase sales thereafter.
Distribute Free Samples to Customers
It is not easy to gain new customers effortlessly in today’s hypercompetitive business world. Every company of the same segment is doing something or the other to allure new clients. Moreover, when a company launches some new product, it needs some kind of publicity to promote it. Given these both scenarios, if a company approaches its existing clients and gives them a free sample of their product then it does not only trigger a free word-of-mouth publicity but makes them feel valuable which ultimately leads in increasing product’s sale.
Suggestive Selling
The key idea here is to increase sales by suggesting something new to the existing customer. In this approach, a salesperson informs the target audience about the new products and services in easy to understand and fancy phrases.
It is important here that the customer should not feel that you forcibly want him to buy something, instead pitching the product by asking right phrases can do wonder. Like “feel this fabric, isn’t it soft?” This particular phrase generates a curiosity in the mind of buyer without feeling the compulsion of buying that fabric. Approaching in such fashion can surely convince a customer to touch it and feel it and what if the customer really likes that ‘touch’. It can then eventually turn up into an ‘extra’ sale. This is what the whole idea behind suggestive selling is. For example: After taking all the monthly grocery worth 100’s of dollars, if any mid-size retailer (who makes 900 transactions in a day) suggests customer a large candy worth only $1.79, then also with only 25% success rate, that retailer can add ‘extra’ $400 a day and $147,000 for a year in his accounts books. This is what the power of suggestive selling is.
– Ashwini Deshmukh