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Welcome to Igneous Marketing the resource for SME's around the country. We will provide workable advice and tips on how to improve the marketing of your business
Showing posts with label Small Business Sales techniques. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Small Business Sales techniques. Show all posts

Saturday, 25 June 2011

6 Things to try to improve sales

Things that can be done quickly to improve your sales today!

So a quick blog today on how to make a few tweaks to your sales and marketing approach which can result in some major shifts in fortune. So here are the Igneous Marketing top tips for today!

1. Your Website’s navigation
There’s little point having lots of wonderful, valuable content on your website or blog, if people can’t find it.  Many sites have pages within pages and information on the same subject, which is scattered all over the site.  Keep your site clean and clear.  Make sure it loads nice and quickly and that all your links work.  The easier your prospective clients can navigate your site, the more likely they are to find what they are looking for, and get in touch with you / buy from the site.

2. You need to make it easy for people to contact you via your website too.
That DOESN’T mean a contact box on a contact page, where you tell people they have to give YOU their email address, name, company name etc – just to get in touch.  Many people (me included) will not do that!  If that’s the only way for people to contact you, I can assure you 100% that it is losing you business inquiries.  To be easy to contact, give people your phone number, email address, social networking accounts and if you want people to trust you, I suggest you put a postal address down too!

3. The benefits of using your services need to be easy to understand.
This means short, information rich content that’s written in plain English.

4. Make it easy for people to trust you.
Use testimonials from named people, who had great experiences with you.  If you have won an award or reached a certified level of achievement within your industry, make sure people can easily see it.  You need to mention associations and affiliation to breed trust

5. Let your Personality shine through
If you use your blog or social networking accounts as a way to broadcast what you think, rather than engage people and communicate, you will attract very few inquiries.  Prospective client’s find it a lot easier to email or call a potential provider, if that provider is personable and approachable. Be human and make it easy for them to see the real you.

6. Make it easy for people to call you.
This means never, ever using a premium rate phone number or cell / mobile number as your contact number.  No one wants to have to pay you, via a premium rate number, to find out about your services.  Many small businesses use non-standard numbers because they want to disguise where they are located, in case it puts people off.  That’s nuts.  I suggest you use a normal number.  Mobile phone numbers, when used as the only contact number, make you look less stable.  As a consequence, this will reduce the number of calls you receive and by extension, the number of inquiries you get.

Don’t forget to visit our brand new marketing bundles page – everything you need, every month for one low monthly payment – talk about ROI!!

Monday, 23 May 2011

The Small Business Sales Strategy

How to get it wrong
Traditional, and hence flawed, sales is often about…
  • How great you are
  • How fabulous your company is
  • How wonderful your products are
  • How much better you are than your competitors
In other words…
  • ‘Me, me, me and me’
Ordinarily each statement in isolation is not particularly harmful, however when such statements are presented as a whole it tends to suggest that the sale has completely the wrong focus.

The focus needs to be on the customer not the seller

To quote the lyrics of a song from legendary mod outfit; The Jam, which is it…

“The public gets what the public wants”

It is not what you can say to a potential customer that necessarily matters, it is what they can tell you and how you can in turn make them feel. In other words you need to think in reverse, for when you change your focus a whole new world opens up to you.

So…
Forget the sales patter and standard descriptions of your products, instead discover what makes your customer tick and get inside their mind.

Your mission is to help them buy from you, not sell them something – this is a subtle yet profound difference …and is at that heart of successful small business marketing strategy and thinking. This includes your webside too!