7 Steps to Increase Your Company's Sales
1. Create or review your company's internal and business processes
internal processes
But what do your company’s internal processes have to do with sales? Apparently and directly nothing. But now think about how much time does your company waste because internal processes are not created or are sufficiently clear and organized? Do you know what you could do with that time if you had the bureaucratic procedures all lined up and well defined? Focus on the mission of selling more and increasing your company revenue.
In fact, in some cases, delays and lack of organization in the internal processes can even have an impact on the sale to the end customer, if there are unnecessary steps that the customer has to take that make him ‘give up’ on the purchase.
Business Processes
The commercial processes, as the name indicates, are essential for any sales company: they are processes that start at the first contact of the customer with his company and go until the moment of purchase of the product or service.
Now it is what happens (or should happen) between these two moments that many companies ignore, which generally leads them to obtain bad results and not to reach the sales volume they so much seek. I explain myself: many companies make the mistake of going to the selling process too early.
Imagine that a potential customer, after reading an article he promoted on his company’s social networks, decided to subscribe to the newsletter. Excellent, you’ve got your customer, now you can communicate regularly with him. And what do you decide to do? Send him the next day an offer to sell a product… nothing else wrong! This is the equivalent of having a first date and the next day asking that person to marry you: it is simply too early to make that offer and the most likely result is that the result of that request will have the opposite effect to that intended, causing the person to walk away.
As in relationships, the commercial process is longer and more complex, and it is necessary to create a more lasting relationship with your client before trying to sell him/her your business. This means you have to create business processes that allow the customer to follow this natural path of discovery of your organization so that when you invite him to buy a product, he already knows your organization.
So you already know, if your company doesn’t have internal and commercial processes yet, it’s time to create them. If it does, maybe it’s time to review or update them: just as you should never take a love relationship for granted, so the relationship with your client has to be in continuous construction.
2. Improve Your Leads
- Leads? What is it? Simple. Basically your lead is to reduce the client’s indecision time. As we saw above, as in a first meeting, when a client has the first contact with your company, he probably still doesn’t feel confident to make the purchase. It’s very likely that a number of issues go through your client’s mind:
- Do I really need this product?
- What are the benefits of this product?
- Do these benefits compensate my investment?
- Is this the best time to buy?
- Isn’t there a more interesting alternative?
- Will I know how to use this product the right way?
- And if I don’t like it, what do I do?
It is very likely that in most cases the customer will not buy any product without first being able to clarify these doubts. Your role is to shorten the time it takes the customer to clarify them, that is, the time between the first contact with your company until the purchase. And how can you do this? With an Efficient Content Marketing strategy.
The great advantage of this type of marketing is that it saves resources, is more effective and lasting: the content is available on your website, blog or social networks forever. That’s why nowadays, a sales funnel is actually composed of more digital marketing stages than sales.
3. Bet strongly on digital marketing
Digital marketing is the best way to increase your company revenue without a high cost that cancels out that profit. On the contrary, digital marketing helps to reduce the cost of acquisition while increasing profits.
But what are the main Digital Marketing strategies that you should adopt?
- Content Marketing
The main objective through content marketing is to draw the customer’s attention to your business by answering their most common questions (mentioned above).
To do this you must create a website and include a blog on it, where you put this kind of content there. It is also important to understand SEO – Search Engine Optimization – basically know how to optimize the content to your site and the content of it appear on the first page of Google, ie, reach many more potential customers!
Besides this, we also advise you to bet heavily on video content, probably the most successful content format on the internet. Two data to understand the impact that video-marketing can have on the profit you get in your business:
81% of users make the decision to buy a product or service after watching a video
Videos shared on social networks generate on average 1200% more sharing than images and text put together.
Don’t have experience in any of these areas? Don’t be discouraged, that doesn’t stop you from using this strategy. There are many coworker spaces that provide website creation services, feed you with content marketing and video marketing, at very affordable prices, which as we explained above will not, neither close nor far, cancel out the sales you will achieve by adopting this strategy.
- Social Networks
There is no need to go too deep into the importance of social networks today to reach more people. This will probably be the marketing channel through which your customers will have the first contact with your business, most likely through the marketing and content you produce for the blog and then promote on your company’s social networks.
Creating a page for your organization is free of charge and constantly feeding it is of vital importance to reach more people. It may be important, if you have the capacity, to bet on advertising campaigns (facebook ads, instagram ads, etc) to increase the reach of your publications.
Depending on the Persona you have defined, it may make more sense to bet on instagram (if you are a younger persona for example) or Facebook (if you are older).
- Email Marketing
This is another way to maintain the relationship with your potential customers. The email marketing serves to consolidate the relationship with the potential client and to convince them, through valuable content, that it is worth them investing time and money in the products and or services of their brand.
Email is actually one of the channels that presents a better conversion rate of Digital Marketing.
4. Know Your Competition And Persona As Well As Your Partner
“Keep your friends close, and your enemies even closer”. This saying has something true. To be sure that you are offering a differentiated service or product, you need to be constantly following what your competition is doing, identifying your strengths and weaknesses, in order to define a differentiating strategy that allows you to increase profits.
Besides that it is important that you know your client type – also called Persona – as well as your partner. No marketing strategy is effective if it is directed to the wrong public.
Combining a deep knowledge of the competition with a good identification of your Persona will allow you to understand what you do right and wrong, finding gaps or badly exploited paths on which you can bet.
5. Focus on Your Customer's Success
There are two essential things that a company that focuses on clients must do:
- Have lines of communication open 24/7 so that the client feels he is dealing with a professional company, which helps him whenever he needs it
- Anticipating problems: the companies with the highest profits are those that do not wait for the problems to appear, but try to predict the problems and prepare an answer even before they exist
In other words, it is not enough for the product to have quality, the support and support that the customer receives are essential not only when the customer chooses one or another brand, one or another competing service, but also to come back later, that is, to be able to start the process of customer loyalty.
6. Make Strategic Partnerships
Making strategic partnerships is another way to increase your sales, allowing you to reach new audiences and attract customers.
One of the most effective ways is known as co-marketing, in which your company and a partner who have the same target audience produce actions together and share the results achieved.
The simple exchange of experiences between companies, through a visit to another company’s office in order to understand how that company operates, can be a great help. This exchange serves as a complement to co-marketing since it will stimulate innovation in internal and commercial processes, which may generate even more profit.
7. Invest in Quality Tools
As we have seen the goal is to increase profits by reducing costs, but there are tools that can affect your profit in the short term, but in the medium / long term are essential to increase profit. After all, your main goal is not to sell more temporarily, but to have a structure that allows you to do it constantly and in a scalable way, which will imply a bet on some resources:
- Marketing automation
- CRM
- Metric Analysis and Content Planning
We believe that if you invest in these 7 steps in a consistent way, you will be much closer to be able to increase profits.
