8 ways to increase sales - Network like a crazy person. People do business with people they know and trust. Its that simple. However, when youre out meeting new people, dont just think about ways they can help you, think about how you can help them too.
- Create a niche. Pick a specific area to excel in and tackle that. This will make it much easier to focus your efforts and beat the competition.
- Get your pricing right. Often when you start out, you wont get your prices quite right. We recently encountered this with Carson Workshops. We decided to drop the prices from $695 to $495 on our US workshops (Getting Started with Ajax & How We Built Flickr). It was a tough call, but in the end we felt it gave the best value to customers, while still retaining reasonable profits.
- Whats In It For Them? As I mentioned in my first article, these are some of the most powerful words you will ever learn. Why would someone purchase your product or service? What will they gain? Be harshly honest.
- Dont be an ass. This may sound obvious, but people like doing business with nice people. If youre friendly and kind, its way more likely people will become repeat customers (not to mention the fact its just a better way to live).
- Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Put yourself in your customers shoes. Treat your customers like you would want to be treated.
- Be thrifty with your marketing. In the early days of Carson Systems, I threw away tons of money on things like direct mail, phone calls, ad campaigns, etc. Most of the time, its just not worth it for small businesses. Things like blogs, newsletters and networking, are virtually free, whilst being very effective.
- Use a CRM tool. A great way to keep in touch with your customers and encourage repeat business is to use a customer relationship manager (CRM) tool. If you want to give someone a call and cant remember what you spoke about last time, a CRM tool is invaluable. Ive heard the 37signals crew have something up their sleeve in this area, so keep an eye out.
So hopefully youll find the above tips useful for getting new customers, but how can you deal with the inevitable rejections that will come your way? Here are a couple useful tips: 5 ways to avoid discouragement - Be realistic. Theres nothing worse than making crazy optimistic goals and then crashing back down to reality. Start off with realistic, achievable sales goals. When you hit them, congratulate yourself and increase them.
- Make daily goals. If you know you need to get five new customers a month, then work backward from that and figure out how many contacts/phone calls you need to make to achieve those five sales. Then divide this by the number of working days in the month. If you have an achievable daily goal, youll feel great when you check it off your list.
- Find someone to encourage you. I spent the first year of Carson Systems as the sole employee and it was insanely discouraging at times. If it wasnt for my wonderful wife and faithful cat (who I found myself talking to), I wouldve given up. Find someone who you can have a beer with on a weekly basis, and share your victories and defeats with them.
- Get the hard stuff over with first. If you know you hate a certain task, get it over with first. After its over, youll feel exhilarated the rest of the day. If you put it off till the end of the day, youll spend the whole day dreading it.
- Dont take rejection personally. A large percentage of potential customers will say no (and some will even be nasty about it). Just remind yourself that its totally normal and theyre not rejecting you personally
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