Sales Best Practices to Grow Your Business.
Seek new markets to grow your business with effective prospecting.
How long does it take your people to follow up on every lead your business generates? You need to create a company policy as a standard for all of your salespeople and customer service staff to adhere to. Be sure to ask all of your leads how they heard about your business. You need to do this, to determine which of your marketing investments are paying off for you. Use campaign specific reference codes that your prospects have to reference, when they respond to your promotions and advertising. You need to do this, in order to determine which marketing campaigns are generating responses so you can adjust your marketing programs on a constant basis.
Apply unique telephone numbers for each of your campaigns, in order to track your results. Utilize a lead capture / contact management system like SalesForce.com or Zoho to keep track of all your marketing campaigns, prospects, leads and existing clients. Develop a strategic networking plan to identify the specific industry events that you and your team are going to attend on a 3 month schedule/calendar. Do you have a policy or standard for the percent of prospects that you convert into qualified leads and then leads into existing clients. If you don’t…you should!
Do you have a defined “BEST Customer” profile that you use to define the specific details around what your ideal customer looks like? If you don’t have one, you need it. This will help you to show your salespeople what your company’s best client LOOKS like.
Launch a “Give to Get” referral strategy that rewards your clients who refer new clients to you. Referrals are simply the BEST source for generating new business for startups, entrepreneurs and small businesses. New business comes into organizations in the following 3 ways:
50% of referrals are generate though your existing relationships. 35% come from referrals, and 15% are generated from your advertising efforts. that means 85% of all your business comes from personal referrals.
Use your website as a prolific lead generation channel
Your Website is an invaluable resource for generating business. This assumes your website is maximized and you’ve done everything in your power to use your website as a sales channel 24x7x365.
Following are some very successful strategies to leverage your website to generate sales:
Every page on your site must have a link to a Lead generation (contact us) form. Have you translated your website into the languages that are spoken by your primary target segment(s)?
Do you have a significant number of appealing success stories, testimonials, and case studies to make your site interesting and relevant to your visitors? People who come to your website must see how you have helped others whose problems or challenges resemble their own so they have proof you can help them. Do you have a specially designed custom landing page that you drive prospects to, for each and every promotion you run? You need specific pages that are designed to highlight the special offers, or feature-specific information you wish to convey about products or services that you are promoting in your different campaigns.
Is your website easy to navigate? If someone can’t find what they are looking for in 1-2 clicks, they will abandon your site and are likely never to return. Do you update your product information continuously? If you don’t make editorial changes constantly, people will wonder why they should keep coming back to your website. So they won’t.
To be continued in our next blog.