Sales Strategies For Entrepreneurs: The #1 Way To Skyrocket Your Sales This Year
Completely grasp the power of the Best Buyer Concept and you will double your sales within the next twelve months. The concept is easy to understand, yet powerful: There’s always a smaller number of ideal buyers, compared to all the possible buyers, so ideal buyers are cheaper to market to and yet bring greater rewards.
A magazine used this strategy to double sales in 15 months flat. Here’s what they did:
They took a database of 2200 advertisers and sent promo-pieces to them each month. After learning this strategy, they did an analysis and found that 167 of those 2200 advertisers bought 95% of the advertising in their competitor’s magazine.
This concept is called “The Dream 100 Sell,” a concept where you go after your “Dream” prospects with a vengeance. This magazine sent the 167 (best buyers) a letter every two weeks and called them four times per month.
Since these were the biggest buyers, the first four months of intensive marketing and selling brought no actual reward. In the fifth month, only ONE of these Dream clients bought advertising in the magazine.
In the sixth month, 28 of the 167 largest advertisers in the country came into the magazine all at once.
And since these are the biggest advertisers, they don’t take quarter pages and fractional ads, they take full pages and full color spreads. These 28 advertisers alone, were enough to double the sales over the previous year. The magazine went from number 15 in the industry to number one in just over a year.
Lesson learned: Market to your best buyers
Now you’re probably thinking to yourself, who are my best buyers? If you sell to the business-to-consumer market, chances are, your best buyers live in the best neighborhoods.If you are a dentist, accountant, chiropractor, R.E. Broker, financial advisor, restaurant, or even a MLM professional you should consistently go after the folks who live in the best neighborhoods.
They are the wealthiest buyers who have the money and the greatest sphere of influence. If you send them an offer every single month without fail, within a year, you’ll have a great reputation among the very wealthy.
If you sell to the business-to-business market, it’s usually fairly clear that your best buyers are the biggest companies. So what are you doing, every other week, no matter what, to let these companies know who you are?
There’s no one you can’t get to as long as you constantly market to them, especially after they say they’re not interested. People will not only begin to respect your perseverance, they will actually begin to feel obligated.
This doesn’t happen right away, but even the most hard-bitten and cynical executive or prospect begins to respect you when you refuse to give up. The publication I mentioned earlier went on to double sales two more years in a row. They consistently marketed to the best buyers and much more aggressively than they did to the rest of the buyers.
A company selling to manufacturer’s used this strategy to target the 100 biggest manufacturers in the country. For the first three months no one responded to any of the calling or phoning.
But after three months executives started saying: “I just have to meet you. I’ve never had anyone continue to call me so many times after I said no.” Within 6 months they had gotten in to see 54% of those they targeted.
The secret is to NEVER give up.
Just keep going after those companies again and again. Or if you sell to consumers, commit to sending a promotional piece every single month to those wealthy neighborhoods. Eventually, all the wealthy people in your area will know exactly who you are.
Now the question is: Who are your DREAM prospects and how committed are you to getting them as clients?
Effective Sales Letter Writing: 7 Tips To Make Killer Sales Letters
Letters are among the most popular means of communication throughout history. People loved exchanging messages through letters especially those that come far away. By now, letters were given new and different functions, most notable of which would be in business.
Among the most popular type of business-related letters is the sales letter because it is a very important tool for reaching customers and prospects. This is why sales letter writing has been deemed to be a very important aspect in marketing.
Many entrepreneurs have observed the power of sales letter writing in capturing a significant portion of the market. As such, many businesspersons went their way on writing their own sales letters.
Alas, not all of these aspirants were able to succeed with the materials they wrote. Some of these letters were not effectively written and were seen not to work as well as the others. It is thus important to know what makes of a good sales letter before writing one.
Here are some useful tips in sales letter writing:
- Gain Your Readers’ Trust: When your readers receive your mail, they should be able to put confidence in you so that they would feel safe to establish some business relations with you. The most common technique of doing so is by putting testimonials in sales letters to let people know of others who swear by your offerings. You may employ other tactics to gain people’s trust, what is important is for them to bank on what you say.
- Show That You Are Credible: Trust is just one step for people to give you some of their time, you also need to show them that you have something truthful to say to them. You should be able to show them that what you offer delivers its promise. Good means of doing this is by including scientific studies, successful stories and other materials that exhibit the truth in what you say. You need to show it more than you need to talk about it.
- The Letter should be Memorable: You can almost always expect people not to pay attention to your sales letter immediately. They simply might not need your product at the time they receive your letter, or they might not just be interested. However, this does not automatically mean that the sales letter is a failure – people can still respond to your sales letter after days, months, or years as long as they would remember it. If you can make your sales letter memorable, chances are the reader would be able to remember your products when the time comes that they are needed.
- Catch Attention: While looks are usually underestimated, it is important to make your sales letter writing very attractive whether you use visuals or not. It is not at all impossible to catch attention with mere words alone. Use bold statements that tickle your readers’ fancy. A boring letter would just end up in the trash with other junk mail. Be sure to make your sales letter writing upbeat and interesting so that your prospects would be enticed to read on and know more about what you offer.
- Give Clear Instructions: Winning trust, appearing credible, making your letter memorable, and catching attention is not enough for effective sales letter writing. It is important for your readers to be informed what they should do next by giving them clear instructions on how they could respond to your sales letter. Be sure to include how they can contact you and make it easy and convenient for them by leaving a mailing address, email, website, fax, or phone number where they can reach you easily. Of course you have to make sure that these are working well so you would not miss any customer.
- Give Rewards: People love bonuses whenever they purchase something. You can offer gifts, discounts, and other promotional offers to your customers. You can also give rewards to those who respond immediately so that you can easily reap profits from your sales letter writing.
- Reach Your Reader Personally: It could be very tempting for you to just hit the mail merge option of your word processor. However, they can make your sales letter writing very detached and unappealing. People like to be addressed personally and it is best to reach them as individuals.
Good sales letter writing is essential for today’s business. With it, you are several steps toward profitable success.
Sales Training - Making It Stick!
Communication is often touted as the most important aspect of sales training, but the most important thing about sales training is whether or not it brings about results. Why is it that when you simply repeat your requests in memo after memo or yell what you need changed, the change in sales training that you are hoping for doesn’t come about? Because what is going to happen if they don’t implement the new training procedure? Another memo? Another yelling session? For most, this is not enough motivation to make a change, especially a change that they are not inspired to absorb.
A child does not stop repeating bad behaviors and adopt new ones because her mother is disappointed in her. She stops because she quickly learns that there are repercussions for her actions. In sales training, an effective tool that is often downplayed is the idea of consequences. You can effectively communicate the sales training techniques, share this effectively communicated sales training softly or loudly, repeatedly in memos and meetings and trainings, but still not have the desired outcome.
The problem comes in when you don’t follow through. For example, you have spent a great deal of time encouraging them to learn the sales training techniques that you’ve designed because, ultimately, it will make their jobs easier and more fluid. However, learning these new techniques may be more difficult or time consuming than they may have thought and, for them, their job is not made easier with this new responsibility.
You may have communicated quite efficiently to your employees that you would suspend anyone who wasn’t implementing the new sales techniques by a certain date, but that date came and passed without suspensions despite the fact that many were still using the old ways. This may be due to an overwhelming work load or an inability to do the actually suspending, but whatever the reason, your lack of follow through communicates to your employees that you probably won’t follow through with these new sales training techniques either, so why bother?
Along with working out how you will communicate your new sales training, decide what consequences, or incentives, you will put into place. When an employee successfully learns and implements the new training, there should be a benefit or reward. When an employee does not learn the new training or does not put it to use, then, too, should there be a consequence.
These consequences should be very personal to your employee they should not be benefits or drawbacks for the company. For example, the benefit should be a monetary bonus for the individual employee instead of the airy concept that profits will soar for the company and that this will trickle down into raises for everyone. The drawback should be a suspension for the individual employee or a cut in hours rather than the general threat of bankruptcy for the company – or even the threat of layoffs in general. Just like sales to the customers, the way to sell your new sales training techniques to your employees is to make it personal.
Simply put, repetition or angry tirades do not back up effectively communicated sales training strategies. Instead, put your time and energy into creating and backing up consequences for jobs well done (or not done). Plan casual meetings during the a work day to get input on how things are going, to see if anyone has questions, concerns, or needs help. In this way, you will create an environment of trust and a foundation of follow through that will not only help you implement your current new sales training ideas but future ones as well.
Jeff Blackwell is the founder of SalesPractice.com a vibrant online Sales Training community that offers sales and marketing professionals free access to a comprehensive range of high quality sales training resources.
