Proven Ways to Sell More – 11 Really Effective Sales Tips
You have a great product. How do you convince people to buy it? Here are some proven sales tips that’ll help you make friends, influence people, and make more of those all-important sales.
Don’t sell the features – Sell the benefits
People don’t buy products. They buy what the product does for them. You don’t buy a car, you buy the opportunity to travel freely from A to B whenever you like. You don’t buy chocolate, you buy the pleasure of eating it, the joy you get from savouring that unique flavour and texture. Too many marketers try to sell a product’s features. It doesn’t work. Pin down the benefits of your products or services and you’ll find it a lot easier to sell them.
Be crystal clear
You have to create a clear and unambiguous sales message. Choose the top two benefits of the product or service you want to sell, state them clearly in your headline – or your conversation – so people know exactly what your product is going to do for them. And be as specific as you can. If you’ve broken your audience into segments, you can create a different targeted message for each segment, a specific message they can personally relate to.
Know your audience
Who is the most likely to buy your product? People over 60? Teens? Everyone who loves the colour blue? People who live in cold places? Can you flesh out who they are by adding details like their age and gender, whether or not they have children, their income, their level of education? Many products and services have such a broad appeal – think toilet paper, for example – that everyone buys them. Others appeal to a more specific, targeted market. Once you know who they are, it’s much easier to make sales. And you don’t waste time, money and effort trying to convert people who are unlikely to buy.
What pain point does your product or service resolve?
Pain points are great. If you can identify the problem that your products or service solves for people, you have more useful clues about how to sell it. Sometimes the pain point isn’t very clear, other times it’s blindingly obvious. But one thing is certain – if the thing you sell doesn’t resolve a person’s problem, they won’t buy it.
Create your own competitive advantage
What is the main reason why people buy from you instead of someone else? What can you deliver that your competitors don’t, won’t or can’t? To create a useful competitive advantage you need to carry out detailed competitor research, especially when you’re entering such popular, already super-saturated markets as Hong Kong or Dubai. Business directory or market research provider could be a great help.
Harness content marketing and social media marketing
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn… they’re all free to use, and they’re all great platforms for sales. Where does the audience you’ve identified hang out? When you build strong relationships with customers and prospects on social media, your potential audience size increases dramatically. You can access more people than ever, and that means more qualified leads and lower customer acquisition costs.
Handle cold calls like a professional
Cold calling prospects can be terrifying. But you might find you have to knuckle down and get on with it. If so, you could use the 100 Calls Method, created by the respected sales training expert Brian Tracy. What you do is call 100 people as fast as you can. The results don’t matter. The people you talk to matter. And doing it that way makes you feel a lot less fear, because you’ve taken the sales pressure off. All you’re doing is having friendly chats. It’s remarkable how powerful it can be!
Get your price point right
It makes sense to research your competitors to reveal the right price. If your competitors are selling the same product or service for a lot less than you, your job will inevitably be harder. On the other hand sales aren’t always price-led. And price isn’t always about actual value. It’s often about an item’s perceived value. If you can make yours sound more valuable and desirable than theirs, you’re onto a winner… and you can charge a higher price. Other than that you may think of having more customers to increase your sales. If you are running a business on Instagram, then you may buy followers on Instagram to increase your online visibility.
Learn to negotiate
Unless you make a deal that pleases the buyer as much as it pleases you, they won’t come back for more. It’s your job as a negotiator to find a solution that makes everyone happy. And that means negotiation. The best negotiators ask a lot of questions to find out exactly what the prospect needs, are well prepared for every eventuality, and make inspirational presentations.
Give away desirable free stuff
Can you give away a free sample? Can you create a video that reveals exactly how brilliant your product or service is? How about a targeted blog post that answers all their questions? Can you let them have a sneak preview of a new product? The better you can meet people’s needs, the more you can inspire them, the more likely they will be to buy from you.
Remember a customer is for life, not just a one-off
A purchase is only the start of what can be a beautiful relationship. Make sure you maintain that relationship to generate more trust, keeping your customers happy and satisfied.
Get all of these tips under your belt and your life in sales should be a whole lot more enjoyable, profitable and productive.