Are you looking to improve stagnant sales revenues? Find out our top 7 tips for increasing sales durably in small and medium-sized businesses.
As a small or medium-sized business, you know that sales are crucial for your survival. For SMEs, the priority of increasing sales is to create a stable financial situation for growth.
Unlike large companies, you can’t afford to hire a celebrity to promote your brand on TV. Similarly, time is of the essence, and the longer you wait, the more difficult it can be to maintain your operations. Therefore, it’s essential to consider cost-effective strategies that can impact your sales figures rapidly.
Focus on new sales training trends
The global pandemic has dramatically affected the way people choose to communicate and buy. As a result, your sales team needs to be trained to handle the virtual sales process. Remote sales activities can be difficult: Over 4 in 10 sales reps struggle to manage virtual sales effectively and find the process more challenging than traditional sales. In the long term, the sales shortfall can affect the business.
Virtual training methods have been growing in popularity even before the pandemic through e-learning and online workshops. It becomes essential to arrange for dedicated digital training for your team to boost their confidence for increasing sales in a post-pandemic, remote environment.
Maximise upsell & cross-sell opportunities
According to statistics, cross-selling and upselling strategies increase revenue by up to almost a third. Upselling and cross-selling opportunities can be highly effective as part of the offline sales journey and for digital businesses. SaaS, e-Commerce, and other online ventures can increase their revenues through strategic upselling and cross-selling.
What does it look like in practice? Cross-selling focuses on promoting related products or services, such as pairing socks with a pair of trainers on an online retailer site. On the other hand, upselling promotes a better model or added features to the product or service chosen. Both strategies increase sales revenues.
Encourage customers to turn advocates
Satisfied customers can turn brand promoters for the business. Indeed, satisfied customers are more likely to recommend your brand to friends. According to figures, 92% of people trust personal recommendations over advertising. Therefore, businesses that fail to encourage advocacy are missing out on a significant opportunity to increase sales. How do you best turn a customer into a brand advocate:
- Reward customers for referrals
- Create a loyalty programme to keep customers on board
- Encourage user-generated content
- Create a customer-centric culture
- Build brand ambassador programmes with popular social media users
Build your influencer marketing strategy
Popular social media users are social media influencers. They have a large and loyal follower base. Partnering with influencers can promote brand awareness, visibility and increase sales. You may not have the budget to work with an international influencer. However, local influencers can be not only more cost-effective, but they also have a more significant sales increasing impact for small businesses.
A local influencer is a popular social media user, blogger, vlogger, or Instagrammer whose influence is localised in a city or a small region. Because they have a smaller follower base, local influencers have high engagement rates with their audience, maximising sales potential.
Improve customer experience
Two types of customer experience will leave a lasting memory for your customers: an excellent experience or a bad one. Customers are more likely to leave a negative review if they are disappointed by the experience with your brand. Unfortunately, negative reviews are harmful to your business.
A positive experience can help turn satisfied customers into advocates and attract influencer partnerships.
Run special offers
Small businesses lose 5% to 10% of their customer base every year. Offers and incentives can stimulate repeat purchases from existing customers and attract new ones, effectively replacing churn out.
Some of the most effective offers to contribute to increasing sales are time-focused and bring more value to the customers:
- Buy one, get one free
- free delivery
- x% discount for existing customers or a specific demographic
- free product or service when you buy X
- Bundle offer
- competitions
Diversify inbound marketing
Your inbound marketing strategy is designed to bring visitors in, aka drive them to your website or your shop. Diversifying your inbound strategy means you can use multiple channels and best practices to reach a broader audience.
SEO is a popular marketing tool to increase online visibility and web traffic. However, you can also consider additional campaigns, such as paid search engine presence through PPC.
Social media advertising and management can drive brand awareness to your audience outside of search engine platforms.
Video marketing can be highly effective on specific social media channels such as YouTube and Tiktok, but it can also increase brand engagement for a broader reach.
The bottom line: Not everyone uses the same platform, so make sure to be everywhere your audience is.
How we can help
At Purple Potato Software, we are a dedicated team providing cloud CRM services to SMEs in the UK and the US to help them track their customers and manage their sales.
We empower you with the tools to track existing sales and implement strategies for increasing sales.
