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Practical Advice to Help You Get More Customers,
Boost Revenue and Enhance Your Profitability

Every business wants to maximize their sales and revenue, but this is easier said than done. When it comes to growing your business, there are plenty of approaches you can take to boost demand for your products and services. Although there’s no “one size fits all” solution, we’ve gathered some of the best advice to give you some practical, powerful options for maximizing your sales.

Get These Basics in Place Before You Start to Improve Your Sales

Before you start trying any of these techniques to enhance your sales, it’s important to get some basics in place.

Baseline, Measure, Record and Improve Sales

A key part of making improvements to any part of your business is measuring, analyzing, improving and recording results. That way, you can understand the impact your changes are having and whether a particular approach will create a good return on investment (ROI).

First, establish and record your current sales and what you’re forecasting for the future without any further changes. Use this information as a baseline, then make one change at a time to see what the impact is.

Talk to Employees and Streamline Sales Processes

Before you start boosting your marketing and other efforts, it’s important to make the entire sales, onboarding and revenue process as fast and easy as possible. Talk to your employees about how the sales process does and doesn’t work.

Create better links between your sales, marketing, onboarding and operational teams. Explore each part of the sales process and look for opportunities to streamline and optimize. Pay particular attention to bottlenecks, delays and other points that can cause frustration for the end customer.

Implement Strong Lead Capture and Client Relationship Management Software

You need a way to prospect leads, follow up on potential sales and manage relationships with your potential and existing customers. The easiest way to do this is through effective customer relationship management (CRM) software.

This tool can help you identify leads, market to customers, track responses and much more. Look for CRM software that can integrate with your various marketing, sales, operational and revenue processes so you can track clients through the whole cycle.

Know Your Existing Budget, Costs and Profit Margins

If you want to start boosting profits and adjusting prices, it’s vital to have a solid understanding of all your costs, margins and everything else that goes into running your business. Take a deep dive into every business expense, product cost and more so you have a well-rounded and deep understanding of your organization’s finances. That way, if you decide to change pricing, you’ll know how that will impact profit.

 

Start Collecting Potential Client Contact Information

Email, phone and address lists are an extremely powerful and low-cost way to market your products and services. From day one, you should be collecting contact details from potential customers (with their consent, of course). You can then use these contact details when marketing to them. The time to get an email sign-up form on your website is right now!

Make Changes and Improvements to Existing Products

Before you look at new marketing opportunities, it’s worth exploring what you can do with your existing product and service lineup.

Experiment With Different Pricing and Structures

Because you know your profit margins, you know how you can adjust your pricing (and how it will impact your profits). Use this knowledge to experiment with different price points and variations on your key products and services. For example, you can adjust the price up or down by 10 or 20 percent and see the effect that has on sales. Another powerful way to enhance sales is to provide different versions of your offerings. For example, you could provide a more basic version at a lower cost, or offer one with more features and functionality at a higher price point. This will allow you to meet the needs of customers with different expectations and budgets.

Incentivize Customers to Try Your Products and Services

Incentives, trials and free samples are all good ways to encourage new users to try out your offerings and hopefully convert them into paying customers. Here are some of the options you can use:

  • Provide a time-limited free trial so customers can try before they buy
  • Offer a limited-feature version of your product or service for free
  • Give clients a free initial consultation
  • Incentivize customers to advocate and refer your products to their friends and family

Cross-Sell and Upsell Your Products

If you have multiple products, look for common ground between them. Then target your existing customers with cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Provide them with discounts if they order more than one product, and be sure to point out the benefits of how your offerings work together.

Understand Customer Needs and Develop New Products

Over the longer term, it’s a good idea to continue developing new products and services that solve real problems and meet consumer needs. Talk to your existing and potential customers to learn what they need. Then, prototype and share potential products so you can get feedback on what works and what doesn’t.

Promote Your Products to New Markets and Through Additional Channels

Once you’ve tried these other areas, it’s time to focus on marketing and promotion. We left this until last, because it’s often the most expensive option. This means it’s vital you have a way to track your ROI, so you know how the money you’re spending on marketing is driving sales.

Social Media Marketing

Social media can be a very effective way of finding new customers, especially if your products are consumer- or lifestyle-focused. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social networks allow you to drill down into exactly who you want to target.

Pay Per Click Search and Display Advertising

Google and Bing both have solid pay per click (PPC) search advertising products, and Google also provides extremely robust display advertising options. The downside to PPC is that in competitive markets, keywords can be extremely expensive — you'll need to be very careful when you target search terms to ensure you get the best return on your spending.

Referral Marketing and Customer Advocacy

Referral marketing is a great way to reach the friends and family of your customers. You will need to provide great customer service, spend time building brand relationships and offer a powerful incentive to existing customers for referrals.

Content Marketing and Search Engine Optimization

Content marketing and SEO involves creating optimized, useful content on your website. The idea is that as people search for keywords related to your products, your website will appear in organic search results. Content marketing and SEO is definitely a longer-term investment, but the returns can be extremely good. You should use content marketing as part of your “sales funnel” and share truly useful information with your potential customers. This will help to build trust in your business, products and services, making it easier for customers to buy from you when they take the plunge.

Outbound Marketing Via Telephone or Email

Use the potential client lists that you’ve gathered for marketing purposes. Write or call people with special offers and incentives to get them to try out your product or service. It can also be useful to create a “lead magnet” as a reward for people who sign up to your email list.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketers are other individuals and businesses that will promote your products and services in exchange for a commission, either at a flat rate or as a percentage of sales. There are plenty of affiliate networks out there, and they can be a great way to get into marketing since you don’t pay them until you get a lead or make a sale.

Traditional Advertising Via Print, Radio or Television

There are still plenty of people who react to advertising in more traditional media. The downsides of print, radio and TV? Tracking your ROI can be very difficult, and these advertising channels are quite expensive. As you can see, there are plenty of ways to boost your sales and revenue. We recommend trying one of these techniques as a time, tracking the impact it has, then re-baselining and trying a new approach. That way, you’ll be able to optimize your sales over time and get the revenue you need to grow your business.

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