If the first half of this year is anything to go by, then this year will be a doozy. Companies have had to close their doors, shift to remote work, change their policies, adapt their hiring strategies, completely alter their content output, and they will need new sales strategies to help close more deals.
Sales, unless you’re selling toilet paper and similarly popular essentials, have been significantly lower. It turns out, none of our marketing forecasts and sales goals from last year accounted for a pandemic. Go figure. As we’re still reeling from this difficult event, companies need to get creative when boosting sales.
Sales Strategies to Close Deals
Whether you’re an e-commerce business or you sell subscription services for an app, the principle is the same: you need to improve your strategy and adapt it for the next several months. In a sea of potential roads ahead, you need to define yours that makes the most sense for your industry and that gives you enough flexibility to retain your brand consistency while you still run a profitable business. Here are a few sales strategies to help you be successful for your business.
Put more Emphasis on Retention
Even in regular circumstances without a health crisis hanging over our heads, customer retention has proven to be a more lucrative sales strategy than customer acquisition. Of course, this by no means implies that you should ditch acquisition completely, it just allows you to have a unique perspective of where your sales budget will lead to the greatest results.
For starters, if you already have a base of satisfied customers, you know that they have the potential to come back to your store, or your brand, for more. Their reviews will serve as a perfect strategy to expand your customer base, but you can also use their feedback, search preferences, and browsing history from your site to personalize their journey and inspire them to make another purchase in the future.
Let Your Support Team Cross-Sell and Up-Sell
If a customer comes to you with a question or even complaint, try to treat this as an opportunity to land a sale or prevent a problem for the future. At this point in the journey, the customer is likely fairly familiar with your brand, and your support team can leverage that connection to make more sales or increase the value of the existing purchase. A sales training program can give your support team the skills they need to make sales without coming across as pushy or greedy.
Instead of individual communication systems, however, why not use a unified online system? Make your support even more effective and productive and use your VoIP communication platform to put calls, texts, emails, and other features to good use.
While some customers want to enjoy the benefits of a phone conversation with a support agent, another would rather interact via email. That way, everyone can reach you in a way they feel most comfortable with, and your agents can use the chance to cross-sell, up-sell, ask for feedback, and collect crucial data to boost your sales for other customers, too.
Collaborate with Influencers
Includes critical areas of sales and marketing:
– Marketing Plan
– Marketing Tactics
– Product Management
– Sales Process
– Sales Admin
Just like with your customers, your influencers are your brand’s key assets in increasing your sales potential. Their vouching for your brand and the quality you ensure is more than enough to rouse more interest among your target audience. In the current situation, they can even give your target audience a unique perspective as to the usefulness of your brand and the purchase they’d make.
However, if you add alluring offers such as discount codes and other perks, you’ll see that more of their followers will flock to your pages for a purchase. These collaborations are a long-term marketing strategy with brilliant sales potential, as long as you know how not to overdo it, but rather use the increasing awareness to inspire more sales.
Rely on FOMO
The fear of missing out, or FOMO, is a psychological phenomenon that people experience when they want to take part in something they perceive as exciting or relevant – and they don’t want to lose out on the opportunity to do so in a limited time frame. The same feeling is elicited when we know that there is only a handful of items available until the collection sells out. Or perhaps the discount will no longer be valid after a certain amount of time passes.
FOMO is a powerful sales tool for your website and social media selling platforms, because it generates that urgency among customers to buy now and not delay their decision any further. Another form of FOMO is utilizing social proof – the evidence that others are interested in your brand and buying from you. With a simple tool on your site, you can generate notifications whenever someone makes a purchase on your site – and thus entice your visitors to make their decision more quickly and inspire them to trust your business.
Sales Strategies to Close More Deals
Some sales strategies have a timeless quality that will make them relevant years from now, while others will resonate with a small portion of your target audience today, and perhaps not too far in the future. It’s up to you to find ways to adapt, use these strategies, combine them in meaningful, purpose-driven ways, and sell more effectively as a result. Hopefully, the listed tactics will make your sales strategy more effective for the rest of 2020, and we can only hope to greet the next year with new challenges ahead sans the pandemic.