You are probably “Covided” out. It’s exhausting keeping up with the reports on the ever-changing restrictions and recommendations. Hopefully you, your family, and your friends haven’t gotten sick, and if you have, it was with mild symptoms. Either way, right now you might be craving some simplicity in your life. To sell to customers this year, my advice is to keep it simple.
3 simplicity tips to sell to customers this year
Growing top line revenue is survival. Without setting the table, you have no chance to make a profit, or even just stay in the game. With so much hype around the Internet and social media, more established forms of marketing are being discounted. Yet the elevation of social media as an end all, be all strategy does a disservice to those who must plot the direction of their company’s marketing efforts.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in small business where owners and managers are bombarded by sales pitches for different types of tactics. Some owners will be swayed by a good pitch and buy the tactic. Others will not feel comfortable and will not do anything. If neither of these persons has identified their customer, neither choice is helpful to their business.
Who is your customer? That is the single most important question you will ask in your business life. If you’re smart, you’ll ask it again and again because the answer is always changing. Most owners never ask it. The majority answer “anyone.” You can’t market to ‘anyone.’
Have you ever tried to make someone like you? Turns out, relationships evolve over time. Seller attempts to accelerate the process can be awkward because sales is a profession buyers generally don’t hold in high esteem. When calling at executive levels, sellers may feel a buyer’s time is worth more than theirs. Taking Al Franken’s approach can be deadly — “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.”
Given the long-standing stereotype of buyer-seller relationships, many salespeople hope buyers will like them. This contributes to sellers failing to view themselves as equals because buyers aren’t making any efforts to get sellers to like them.
All salespeople know how to sell. Sometimes, though, they sell themselves on ideas that just aren’t sound. It’s time to stop kidding yourself about your selling.
Sales Truth #1: Know who is and who is not a true prospect.
Start by being honest with yourself about who is and who is not a true prospect for you. Unless you are going to change something about your product, your process, your delivery, or you, you can expect the same results you’ve gotten in the past.
Lots of salespeople seem to have forgotten, or perhaps have never even learned, the many ways they can improve not only their sales performance, but their life performance as well. The future of your sales career may very well rest on the frame of mind that you have in your daily life. Here are several tips that may help you improve this frame of mind and your future.
For a brand, nirvana is when your good name is so widely endorsed that it enters the language. “Pass the Kleenex.” “Google it.”
As a small business owner, I’ll bet that you sometimes begin to wonder…how am I ever going to get my marketing message out? With all the choices out there, such as newspapers, magazines, radio & television…how do I make the “right” decision? All these choices can cost you an “arm and a leg” and just exactly what do you get in return? A full page ad in a local magazine will set you back $10,000.00. Not bad if you have the money. But once the reader turns the page, you’re not in his/her mind anymore…how many new customers will you have to get in order to re-coup your $10,000.00 investment.. I’ll bet a lot.
People will tell you if you advertise on the radio, your commercial must be consistent and it must play at all hours of the day and night. Just exactly how much will that run you? Probably a lot more then you’re spending on marketing & advertising right now. It’s all so expensive. What’s a small business owner to do?
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