The salesperson is arguably the most valuable person in any organization. In today’s highly competitive business landscape, every company (specially startups) needs to step up their revenue growth in order to keep the company moving forward. And in this changing industry, whatever strategies worked a few years ago may have already become irrelevant for today’s standards. Here are 6 strategies to increase your sales growth in today’s market:
1. Improve customer communication
It is important to make sure you are reaching as much as customers possible and communicating effectively with them. Market your product the right way. Remember, you are not selling a product, but a benefit or experience. Effective marketing should lead to people finding value in purchasing your product. Take full advantage of social media and keep track of all statistics.
Another great idea is micro-marketing, where you personalize your messages to individual customers in light of their online shopping activity.
2. Proper differentiating & positioning.
It is important to make sure your customers understand what you are offering with your product is unique as well as valuable. This cannot be achieved if your market offering is not positioned properly amongst your competitors’ products. Market positioning is something that will determine where your product stands in the market. Differentiating your product will mean developing your competitive advantage and showing why your product is better than others.
3. Proper customer segmentation.
Knowing who you’re selling your products and services to will help you understand your customer base better and enable you to develop strategies for your target customer groups. These groups can be differentiated by reading into the different methods of segmentation. Select your target segments, be it demographic, geographical, depending on who you are searching to sell products to. This way, you will be wasting less time and money trying to reach a market segment that will have no returns.
4. Using coupons.
Essentially everyone responds to incentives. A person may see your product and decide to not purchase it immediately in hopes of finding a better alternative. You can stop your customer from leaving by giving them added benefits if they buy from you. Customers can subscribe to your newsletter in exchange of which they will be offered with discount coupons they can use when they buy your product. Send sales representatives to hand out value coupons to people in conventions or events. You can use couponing sites like Piucodicisconto.com and Retailmenot.com to promote your offers and even reach new customers. Also, give them further incentives by promising better offers with greater purchase. This will help build customer loyalty.
5. Expand product line.
In many cases customers may choose another product over yours because they find the alternate to have some particular features not offered by your product. Adding more items in your product line will give your customers more options to choose from, that varies with taste and preferences.
6. Charge the right prices.
This has to be done by understand your product as well as your market. Use data collected from your customer base and understand the range of prices people are willing to pay for a product like yours. Depending on your market strategy, choose the kind of price you want to set for your product. If you are targeting a more frugal end of the market, charging high prices may not be the best idea. On the other hand, if your product differentiation proves you are offering better quality features, charging higher prices will correlate with people who are willing to pay more.
With proper understanding of the market and all factors affecting it, you can boost your sales growth. On the flip side, boosting sales is not an overnight process. It takes time for a successful entrepreneur to figure out the right blend of decisions. As a parting tip, you have to be patient with your decisions while you follow these 6 basic steps, and sales will be your friend.