If you’re a business owner, a salesperson or a marketer, sales and new business should be on your radar. In fact, it should be one of the top things on your list to achieve. It’s certainly mine. Today, I’m going to share with you the top 5 strategies to increase sales that I think are the most powerful.
Strategy #1 – Hyper-Personalised Email
My first strategy to increase sales is hyper-personalised email. What do I mean by that? It’s SO personal, it cannot be sent to another company or individual. We all know when an email has been copied and pasted, and it’s never a good look.
Your hyper-personalised email needs to be researched, contain attachments that are focused, personalised and wrapped around the pain points of your prospects. Their challenges and their goals. People often ask me how they can do a personalised email when they haven’t spoken to the prospect. Here’s my answer…
You wouldn’t pick a company and then figure out how to research, would you? No, you’d create a criterion of companies where you can see something’s happening, and create paper, personalised emails to them. Don’t be afraid to use tools like Sales Navigator in your research. As well as Google searches, press releases, news releases or even their website.
Strategy #2 – Webinars
My second strategy to increase your sales is webinars. You might think that people are fed up with webinars, but that’s certainly not the case.
Using webinars to increase sales is a different type of webinar than you may think. Webinars are a brilliant way to have a ‘try before you buy’ experience of interacting with your prospects. It allows you to demonstrate your expertise and elevate yourself into an expert. If you want to do a webinar that actually helps you sell, you need to base them on goals and pain points that your target customers actually have. Ones that only you can help with. Here’s the trick, if I write a webinar about one of my customers’ pain points, it’s titled and structured around one particular challenge, I then push that webinar out through social media, email etc and they sign up.
What does that tell me? It tells me they’re interested in that topic and/or that problem is relevant to them. If I see a webinar about how business owners can grow their sales, and I want to grow my sales, I’m going to sign up for it because that’s important to me. That’s all you need to think about. Webinars focused on pains, challenges and goals.
Strategy #3 – Land and Expand
Land and Expand is the method of getting your foot in the door with a client, so you can expand the relationship. Customers have to see your value, understand your value, and be prepared to pay for your products and services. Small pieces of work, that are very focused on one particular topic, might not be the most profitable, but they get you in the door.
Here’s an example: A stationary company would sell printer paper, but they’d sell it at a really low price because people go through a lot of it. They probably didn’t make any money on the paper whatsoever, but they sold tons of it. So, what did they achieve with this? They got people to become customers. They crossed a barrier with that customer so that they could expand their relationship and sell more.
Before you embark on this strategy, here are a few things you need to ask yourself …What product or service could you quickly develop? This could be a feeder for your main offering. What could you sell that would help you close more business or open up more relationships at a low value?
It doesn’t take huge amounts of your time, but it opens more opportunities. What is that product or service? That’s a really important question for you, if you want to own land and expand.
Strategy #4 Social Selling
If you know me, you’ll know this is one of my favourite strategies, it’s Social Selling of course. Lots of companies don’t understand it and don’t really leverage it – that’s a big mistake. Social Selling, particularly since 2020 has been one of the most powerful ways to get in front of people. Most people don’t do it right or consistently, because they think it’s like a cold call on a social media platform. It’s not.
Social selling is as simple as going on a platform and interacting with people, building relationships and then creating calls with them. But, it’s not done by one message, it’s done over a few interactions. You only get out what you put in with social selling. There’s no shortcut. There’s no hack that works successfully. But, like hyper-personalised email, if you put the effort in, you can actually reap big, big benefits.
Strategy #5 – Content Marketing
We’ve made it to the final strategy that will increase your sales, content marketing. Content marketing is a brilliant way to increase sales, but most business owners and companies see it as the domain of the marketing department. I would advocate that actually your blogs, your lead magnets, all of those things should be part of the sales function because if you do it well, it leads to a conversation.
Create a lead magnet, create a blog, and optimise it around the pain points and challenges of your customer.
I use content marketing, and have back end social selling operations so when people download, a salesperson can interact with that prospect. Not to sell, but to warm them up. You see it on a lot of corporate websites, where you download a resource, and then you get an email newsletter, but you never actually hear from anybody. It goes cold. Now, I’m not saying that you get a phone call within five minutes of downloading something, that might be a little intense, but content marketing linked to the salespeople is incredibly powerful.
So, if you’re using lead magnets, blogs, anything like that, it’s important that you tie that into your sales team’s efforts. Tie your content of those lead magnets into the challenges that your prospects are facing. That’s what makes your messaging sharp.
