Driving Sales in a Recession
Sales are the key focus in the current turmoil. We’ve all experienced a drying up and gotten more than a little nervous about it. The normal channels are not working. I myself have found that cold calling is no longer any good for short term sales but is a mechanism for initiating contact with a view to building a relationship. This is where all short term sales seem to be coming from.
Once contact has been made and your prospect has indicated some level of interest in your offering then you have him on the hook. The reel in is going to be a slow one. This is where you can differentiate yourself from your competition. The immediate reaction of just about every sales person is to pursue this lead with amazing vigour. This happens because there are so few leads that anything they get they pounce on. We both know that doing this is going to frighten away 95% of the possible sales. The other 5% you were going to get regardless of what you did or didn’t do.
What we are after is that 95%. This is where the gold is and if treated right will sustain your business through to the next boom. There is an air of nervousness around these prospects. Hell it’s around all of us. Even though we have the money to invest in a new product or service we have to justify its expense and that takes time. In order for us to align ourselves to this new buying cycle, as sales people we must adopt new strategies.
The prospect will be ready to buy in their own time. Our job is to be standing in front of the customer when they are ready to buy. In the background we should be steering the customer in the direction of the sale with each communication.
And it is here we hit the heart of the problem. Communication. We know we have probably quite a few possible customers who have indicated interest from our cold calling trench digging endeavours. All of these are potential sales in the future and we need to be in constant communication with them to ensure we’re first in line when the decision is made to buy. We need to be constantly jostling to the front of queue in an ever increasing barrage of noise at our customer. This takes quite a bit of work. Or does it?
In order to make this job easy and less time consuming you need to have a system. A system which will allow you to easily target all or some of your prospect base for phone call, email, newsletter, upgrade, update or to let them know of some new widget you have to offer. It should be easy to use and make the job of communicating with a large number of possible customers as effortless as possible. It should also track every communication and possible piece of information about those prospects so you can easily personalise any correspondence. These systems are expensive because of the amount of sales they generate. Ask any of the airlines or supermarkets who pound you with offers and new products.
Imagine that you in a SME could harness that power on a much smaller level. You don’t have €50,000 euro to invest is such a system or the IT people to maintain it. Well you can. Profits.ie have found such a system and here is the kicker. It’s FREE. Yes the software is FREE. You could be keeping in contact with all your prospects on a regular basis and making it look personal even to a base of 300. They will be impressed and more to the point they will have your name in their head when the sales decision is made. All the while you’ll be helping them make that decision.
Uncategorized | admin | May 6, 2009
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