Ten Important Hints for Increasing Sales
In these busy times, the customer’s choice to purchase may be based on how easy it is to make the purchase rather than price! Here are a ten ideas to make your product or service easy for customers to purchase:
1. Accept credit cards for payment. This is mandatory. The majority of small purchases is by credit card. However, be careful in choosing your credit card merchant provider. There are agents that are charging excessive rates and fees. As always, caveat emptor.
2. Provide a money-back, no-questions asked return policy.
3. Distribute free catalogs. (… but include a “price” on the cover, say $5.00.) The recipient then feels good about getting your “$5.00″ catalog free!
4. Get an 800 number for sales and service. Ensure the number is well attended. Do it yourself if possible! Again, as with the credit card merchant account warning above, choose your provider with care. It is now very easy and inexpensive to maintain an 800 number. The 800 number may simply “piggy back” on your existing business line, if desired. Very handy.
5. Provide a strong guarantee for your product or service. If possible, offer “lifetime” guarantees. This is a very strong selling point but statistics show very, very few customers ever take advantage of such a guarantee.
6. Give away something free (possibly in conjunction with a purchase) from time to time.
7. If you’re in the retail business, maintain store hours in evenings and on weekends.
8. Provide a delivery service (or service at the customer’s location).
9. Follow up sales to the extent possible. Personal calls for big ticket sales or a returnable post card for higher volume sales can make a lasting impression … and a return customer!
10. Have a “preferred customer” sale.
Brought to you by: World Wide Information Outlet - http://www.certificate.net/wwio/, your source of FREE Content online.
Robert Sullivan is the author of The Small Business Start-Up Guide, and United States Government - New Customer!. He frequently lectures on starting small businesses and appears on CNBC’s “Minding Your Business” as a small business expert. His books may be ordered toll-free by calling 1 800 375 8439.
Robert also developed and maintains an extensive award-winning Internet website, “The Small Business Advisor,” at http://www.isquare.com
Tools for Effective Sales “Hunting”
Sales executives are often characterized as either hunters or harvesters. “Hunters” are those that develop new relationships and open new doors for a company. “Harvesters”, on the other hand are those that nurture an existing relationship and milk it as much as possible to maximize the sales of the company’s products and services. Both are equally important to the growth of a company’s business. Arguably, however, it is the hunters that are in greater demand and hard to find.
What makes a hunter sales person successful? Well for a start they have a different personality than the harvester. They have greater confidence in their ability. They can quickly strike a rapport with someone. They are not afraid to make cold calls. They work well under pressure. They get bored doing the same old stuff again and again, and look for challenges.
While personality traits are important, a hunter sales person also needs tools to replenish the source of leads that can work on. Large companies such as IBM and Microsoft have lead generation programs such direct marketing, telemarketing and spend billions of dollars uncovering new prospect customers that a hunter can go after. However, in most small companies, the hunter sales person is expected to generate and replenish his or her own lead pool.
There are number of such tools available in the industry – some from large information services companies such as Dun and Bradstreet, InfoUSA and others from startups such as Walker’s Research, JigSaw, and Spoke.
The Incumbents
The two big gorillas in the industry are InfoUSA (www.goleads.com) and Dun and Bradstreet (www.hoovers.com). These two have created the category of business information products for b-to-b marketing and b-to-c marketing. Both claim to have millions of companies in their database and millions of executives that a sales person can prospect. While this is true, there is no assurance of the quality of the data that these companies supply. The reason is simple. The cost of verifying and updating millions of records of information is prohibitive. So typically these companies can in a given year update only a finite number of records and as a consequence the quality of information is somewhat questionable.
The Scrapers
Then there are the scrapers (www.zoominfo.com) that use Google like search tools to exhaustively through an automated process compile names and titles from company websites, old news articles, conference attendance roster, investor conferences, and other commonly available sources of information. Like the incumbents these players have a huge database (even larger than InfoUSA, and D&B), but don’t be surprised if you get three CEO names for the same company or an executive that is no longer there with the company.
The Targeters
These companies (www.walkersresearch.com or www.lead411.com) start with a different thesis. The thesis is that most sales executives do not need information on millions of companies and zillions of executives. And in any event, the millions of small companies really are not big spenders on third-party products and services. So companies like Walker’s Research instead focus on the top 200,000 companies that account for 70-80 percent of the GDP. The data is then compiled and updated on a regular basis, the old fashioned way – by human beings working the telephone. The result is a targeted list of business information and business leads that is fresh, highly accurate and available at affordable price of less than $20 a month.
Subscribe in a Reader