How to Increase Sales? Follow These 10 Tips

effective sales funnel management
Yesterday, I wrote a post titled as a how to increase sales. The lesson from the post is that you need to take actions if you want to succeed.

You need to try to experiment with different approaches and different offers to your customers to see what have the biggest potential in selling more.

You need different experimenting with different approaches because your business is unique.

Now, let’s talk about top ten tips that will help you in your effort to sell more.

Increase Sales Tip #1: Know Your Current Customers?

As an entrepreneur your primary goal is to sell more to your current customers.

Do you have enough knowledge about your current customers? Do you have and maintain quality demographic data as population, age, income levels, age? Do you have knowledge about their psychographics? What about their buying patterns?

What about recency and frequency of their purchasing habits? How much money they are spending in your business? Do you use RFM analysis to mine data for your current customers? It’s powerful way to find hidden knowledge in your own database. The results of such an analysis will give you well-defined strategy on how to back your lost buyers, retention of your best buyers and where and how you can improve relationships with some of your current buyers.

If you want to sell more to current customers and with this approach to increase sales in your business, you need to have a better knowledge about them.

Increase Sales Tip #2: Understand Your Ideal Customers

Do you know who is your ideal customer? You don’t wants to lose your time and money with efforts on the customers with low potential for your business.

If you target high-potential buyers for your company, and they are your ideal customers, you will improve overall business potential energy in your company.

Again, you need to maintain a database about everyone that can be a part of description of your ideal customers. If you want to make them your buyers, you need to have knowledge about their problems, their needs, desires and habits.

The knowledge will help you to make irresistible offer created specially for them, and you will sell more to them.

Think about following questions:

  • Who are your ideal customers?
  • Where are they?
  • What they are doing where they are?
  • What’s about their family?
  • Who are their friends?
  • What they want?
  • What’s are their biggest problems?
  • What’s are their biggest desires?
  • About what they are dreaming?
  • What’s are their biggest frustration?
  • What is the language that they use in communication with others?
  • What means of communication they are using?
  • How much time they spend on different places where you want to meet them?
  • How they are spending their time there?
  • How you can approach them?
  • How you can make them your buyers?

Increase Sales Tip #3: Build Community

Another strategically way to improve the results of selling is building community around your company.

If you want to have a strong base of potential customers for your business that easily can become buyers who trust you, you need to build strong community around your business.

To succeed you need real community with the real persons, enough large that will support your company and quality community.

Here are some of the basic ideas that you can use and implement:

  • Connect with your current and potential customers and invite them to become a part of your community. Show them the benefits that they can receive if they become a part of the community.
  • When they become part of your community start with helping them. Become a dependable friend.
  • Your community is not a place where you will try to sell and nothing else. Your community goal is to educate the members about your business expertise, value and offers.
  • You need to build everyday communication with the community members. You want they trust you. You want they believe you. You want they buy from you, then communicate with them.
  • You need to build your own community platform where all community members will be kings of the Kingdom.
  • You need to listen to your community if you want to sell more for your company. The community members will tell you what they want, what are their problems, what solutions they try to find… You only needs to deliver what they tell you. But, how you can deliver if you don’t listens to them?
  • You need to learn from your community members if you want to deliver what they want.

Increase Sales Tip #4: Generate More Leads

Other tactics that will help you is generating more leads into the funnel. If you have more leads, with the same conversion rate, you will have more buyers who will generate more sales for your business.

Try different approaches in your cold calling, improve your Web site, start with blogging, use affiliate marketing, use different advertising approaches…

There are plenty of possibilities that can help you to generate more leads. What you will use will depend on your own entrepreneurial creativity and your own analytical skills to find what’s right and what’s wrong for your business.

Increase Sales Tip #5: Sell More to Existing Customers

Very often times we forget a tactic to increase sales with selling more to existing customers.

Your goal is to try to sell two products instead of one, $1000 value instead of $700. The end results of your efforts with this tactics can be huge for your company.

Again this tactics will depend on your creativity as an entrepreneur. For example, you can make bundle products, use up-sell, cross-sale, give a free samples, use customers reward programs, different value based discounts…

Increase Sales Tip #6: Motivate Your Staff

Many thing in the selling process will be dependable on your staff. You can have the best ideas, or the best designed processes, or the best designed marketing campaigns, but, at the end buyers come in direct contact with your staff. If they don’t succeed to sell more, your efforts will be for nothing.

One way is to use different sales incentive programs to motivate your staff to sell more. You need to encourage your staff to up-sale in each possible situation when they are into the selling process.

Another way to improve the motivation of your staff to sell more is to educate them. You are entrepreneur, you build a systems, you know what works what not. Why not educate them and help them to improve their own work.

Encourage your staff to share experience with each other. In such a way different experiences is the basis for better learning and improvement of the approaches that they use.

At the end never forget to reward your staff if they really succeed to sell more.

Increase Sales Tip #7: Check Your Pricing Strategy

Sometimes prices can be the crucial element in increasing or decreasing sales.

The process of setting up prices is the science on one hand and the art of other hand. You need to balance with many variables if you want to be sure that your prices are worth for the value that your business deliver.

Overpricing and underpricing is dangerous for your business.

Be clever, use scientifically approaches to set up your prices, listen to your customers, and analyze your numbers, they will tell you what you need to do.

Increase Sales Tip #8: Offer Great Customers Service

Great customers service is something that can open you possibility to sell more for your business.

If you deliver great customers service that’s more than the basic value in your products or services. That’s something can build your credibility and trustworthiness of your business.

Increase Sales Tip #9: Ask for Referrals

If you already have built your credibility among your customers, you are trustworthy person and business, then your buyers can become one of the greatest assets of your business. Asset that can increase sales.

On the other side, if you don’t ask for referrals from those satisfied customers you will not use the full potential of what they can bring to your business.

Ask them for referrals and you will see how huge impact it can have on your business.

Increase Sales Tip #10: Strategic Alliances With Partner Companies

Probably there on the market exists similar companies as you with the similar customers database, and compatible offers.

One of the possible ways that you can utilize for your business in the efforts to sell more is to make strategic alliances with such a companies.

This partnership can have huge impact on the sales numbers for two companies. Why not using the potential?

On the other side, such a partnership and strategic alliances only will increase the value of the overall offer from two companies. That’s a principle of synergy where 1 + 1 > 2.