Building a Predicable Revenue Sales Stack - Part IV
17 Reasons That You Have No Excuse Not to Triple Your Sales Now.This is the final installment on Building a Predicable Revenue Sales Stack blog series. In this series we'll discuss a bunch of specific tools and techniques for speeding up sales. First let's summarize what we learned how to do in the first three posts:
You must have a sales process, and to get one, start by describing the stages a lead goes through in becoming a customer - your sales funnel.
Next describe the objective criteria that defines which stages a lead is in - qualifying criteria. Use these to develop a process to move leads from one stage to another.
Manage your funnel using a CRM or other sales tool like HubSpot Sales, Pipedrive, ZohoCRM, SugarCRM, Salesforce.com. Measure each stage of the process and look for ways to optimize.
Build your lead funnel using Spears (direct outreach to likely customers), Nets (Marketing Campains), and Seeds (optimizing word-of-mouth referrals by building an amazing product with delightful customer service).
Ask yourself and your team, “What is stopping us from tripling our sales?”
"We don’t have enough leads entering the funnel," then:
then use list generation and spear-fish everyone on the list,
initiate and/or increase
advertising,
email marketing,
referral programs,
engage lead-gen contractors,
improve your content marketing activities. Educational and helpful content is best.
improve your sites' SEO. Free tools like WebSiteGrader, and BrandYourself tell you how well your web site will perform in Google searches (SEO), and what can be improved to make it perform better.
"We have lots of web site visitors, but conversions are low," then: try a higher-touch approach (direct emailing, social media outreach and calling) to selling to find out what is keeping people from converting.
"Everyone is signing up for freemium or free trial, but few become paid users," then: chances are the issue is that you don't yet have great enough product/market fit. A startup just going to market has to pivot many times to find the right audience and the right product. Don't waste a lot of money on sales and marketing for a product that is not right. Do spend a little (enough) on advertising on each variant of your product to test whether you've got the right offer and the right target market. Direct customer interaction is crucial at this stage. It's the only way to find out your customers' worst pain points and sense of urgency in an area where you can provide a solution.
"We can’t get meetings with the key decision makers", then you are probably selling features and benefits instead of business value. Executives don't listen to product pitches. You have to be able to translate your product's benefits into business value by understanding how your product will be used and what its use will translate into in terms of your customers' increased sales, reduced costs, better customer engagement, or some other metric that matters to the key executive decision maker.
"We’re doing OK getting people to sign up as customers, but there is not enough growth in the account after the first sale," then you must tinker with your product's value proposition, pivoting as necessary until you find a winning combination.
Measure the conversion % of each stage of your marketing and sales funnel. Start with the weakest link. For example, are conversions from clicks through to your website less than 10%? Less than other conversion rates? Start here. Next are several suggestions to try to improve these conversions all the way through to revenue.
When optimizing your sales and marketing funnel, remember: All sales and marketing funnels have weak points. As soon as you remove one, the weak point will move to another place the funnel. Weak points often represent places where you hope your customer will take an action but they actually don't have adequate motivation to do so. Spend your time analyzing your customers' concerns and find ways to mitigate them.
Succeed in a niche first, then generalize. Pick a large niche market and make yourself indispensable to that specific group (e.g. Amazon first sold harder-to-find books to avid readers). After you've built a real business in your niche of choice you can expand into other markets.
Make sure you have a specific, personalized landing page for each and every marketing campaign. Studies show greatly increased conversions from landing pages designed to speak to the specific benefit for the exact user you're targeting in the campaign. Also, having a unique landing page makes it easier to track campaign performance for optimization.
Make your landing pages convert better. Try offering an e-book (you can get someone to write you one on Fiverr if you don't already have one to give away). If your offer is more complicated, or expensive, you'll need to give a LOT more information on the landing page. This is where an explainer video can come in very handy.
Mark your best-selling option as such with headings like "Best Value" or "Most Popular". This provides social proof to your buyer.
Turn No's into Yes's by down-selling. If a prospect gets all the way to the final close and says No, you've already made a pretty big investment in getting the lead that far. Ask why and write down all the objections. Sometimes you'll be able to convert a No to a Yes by offering a lower-priced option. Make the effort.
Test price-elasticity of demand to optimize revenue. Simply put, if you can raise prices without sacrificing growth, you're foolish not to. Find out through testing. Sometimes raising prices accelerates growth. Go figure!
Turn Yes's into "Yes and's." Upsell to optimize the revenue of each order. When someone is buying from you, see if you can sell them something extra to increase the size of the order.
Make sure your site is mobile-responsive. Make sure your site looks good and works well on mobile!
Put a phone number prominently on your site. You can get an 800-number cheaply from evoice.com or ringcentral.com. A phone number adds credibility. Very few customers will use actually it, but it helps conversions nonetheless.
Include reviews and testimonials from real customers. Include logos of prominent companies you've worked with.
Encourage customers to share their purchase on social media.
Anyone who doesn't buy right now, may still buy later. Use drip marketing with tools like Intercom.io., HubSpot or getDrip.com.
List Generation:
Find the right people using advanced search on LinkedIn. You can scrape these into a spreadsheet using the Chrome plugin Scraper, or use Profile Hopper to automate the process.
Search for decision-makers in target companies, and join LinkedIn discussions in your customers' groups. You can use Quora, Reddit and other platforms the same way.
Use data-mining tools like Jigsaw (Data.com), Rapportive, InfoUSA, Hoover's and Sales Genie.
Analog sales: Exchange business cards at networking events, speak at professional meetings, and keep your 10-second elevator pitch handy at all times.
That's a quick 17 things you can and should do to triple your sales. What then, you ask? Triple them again, I say!
Done all that?! Well then let's kick up the volume (literally) with these force-multipliers:
That's a quick 17 things you can and should do to triple your sales. What then, you ask? Triple them again, I say!
