Tips for Improving Your Approach to Sales

Whether your company is business-to-consumer or business-to-business, sales is an essential part of your success. If you’re not able to sell products and services to clients, you’re not making money. Your organization’s performance is impacted by several factors like quality of products and services, value provided to customers, and marketing strategy, among others. Your company must develop a strategic plan for raising sales that focuses on improving the way you conduct operations. Here are some tips for your consideration.

Understanding Customer Wants

It’s important to frame your understanding of your business in terms of solving a customer’s problem. Thinking that you can create a demand for your services through the right kind of advertising is not the approach. As customers become savvier and sometimes, more critical about marketing and seeing through promotional fluff, it’s important that you make the case for your business as solving a critical need that will improve their lives in some meaningful way. It may be worth surveying your customers to see if their needs are being met.

Measuring the Competition

No business is an island. As you take a closer look at sales, you need to understand how you rank against the competition. A SWOT analysis is a great approach to helping you assess four parameters to see where your organization stands:

• Strengths – Advantages that your company has over its competitors
• Weaknesses – Characteristics of your company that put it at a disadvantage to the competition
• Opportunities – Factors in the business environment that your company can exploit for an advantage
• Threats – Factors in the business environment that can be problematic for your company

Prepare a 2 x 2 matrix of the internal characteristics (strengths and weaknesses) and external factors (opportunities and threats) and honestly assess your organization and market. This analysis can help you identify business practices that push you toward or pull you away from your goals, especially improved sales.

Understanding Business Relationships

When it comes to sales, it’s critical to understand the type of relationship you have with your clients. Do your customers trust you to steer them in the right direction when it comes to recommending products or providing services? Are you just another provider to them? Ideally, you want to cultivate a relationship where they come to you not only for their current problems but future problems also. It’s necessary to figure out what activities to engage in to establish and deepen your connections to clients. Understanding inside sales vs outside sales and the corresponding business practices can help you figure out where to focus your improvement efforts.

Leveraging Social Media

As a business, there are many tools available to help you improve the way you execute, especially when it comes to marketing and advertising. If you have a consumer-facing organization, you should know that social media can be one of the most effective ways to reach the people who need their problems solved by your services or products. While you can certainly pay for promotional advertising, the word of mouth that comes from the millions of shares on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, maybe some of the most valuable, yet inexpensive advertising available. Does your company have a social media strategy? Is it effective in terms of driving customers to you? You should answer this question as you analyze your current sales strategies.

Adding Value

At the end of the day, it’s not enough to solve a customer’s issues. Your clientele needs to feel confident that they’re getting good value for your products or services. Analyzing your audience as well as your market will help you figure out whether you’re providing value. When you understand how you are viewed by customers and what drives the demand, you have a better sense of what steps need to be taken to improve overall sales and market share.

Boosting your sales is a continuous process that involves the steps provided above as well as others not listed here. It involves the investigation of internal business practices as well as outside market considerations. A solution-focused mentality gets to the heart of your customers’ motivations and makes a great starting point.