7 Sales mistakes Small Businesses Make

Did you know almost 90% of Business Owners struggle with low sales due to lack of appropriate knowledge? Today, I will tell you seven tips on how you can increase your sales by 10-fold using the power of automation.

Don’t worry. You don’t need any hi-tech skills to apply these to your business. Let’s get started with the first one:

Make Your Customer Talk About Your Product/Service

When you deliver any product or service to your customer, do you forget about them or do you take some kind of feedback? If you’re the latter, great. But if you sell your product to someone and then just forget, then you’re missing out on one of the greatest business opportunities you can have.

Every single customer can become your advocate. If you provide them with an excellent service, they’ll talk about you with others. And if you provide them with poor service, guess what? they’ll talk about you with others. A single unhappy customer can ruin your next 40 customers as well. So, what can you do in this case?

Feedback is the answer!

Feedback from a customer can tell you a lot about your business. When your customer is unhappy, and you give them an outlet such as feedback form, instead of telling others, they’ll directly tell you what’s wrong with your product or service.?

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

~ Bill Gates

Instead of letting your unhappy customers ruin your business, you can utilise their feedback to improve your product or service. Let us briefly guide you through how you can create a simple?feedback form to share with your customers.

You can create a Google Form asking your customers to fill in their Name, Date of Purchase, Product, Quantity, Ratings and additional remarks. Whenever you sell a product to your customer, share this form with them and they’ll gladly fill it up. When they do, you’ll get a notification and you can check and find out how you can improve.

Automation can help you speed up this process and create a proper flow via WhatsApp, website and even email. This way your customers will automatically receive the feedback form and you won’t spend time asking every customer for feedback. If a customer is happy, you can call and thank them. You can even ask them for referrals, testimonials, public reviews and ratings. Happy customers are always ready to tell their friends and family about the things they love.?

If they’re unhappy, you can call them, apologise for the service and ask for their verbal feedback. This way they will feel happy because you showed that you care about them.

Track Your Inquiries

Research says that many business owners do not immediately respond to inquiries. They leave it for later and then forget about it. If you depend on your memory or a notebook, it may work for a few inquiries a day. But what happens when your business grows and you start to get tens and hundreds of inquiries a day? You don’t expect to depend on that excel file or notebook you’ve created? Do you?

It is of vital importance that you track every single inquiry you receive, no matter how trivial. Whenever you get an inquiry, either from a call, a text message or from any other means, that inquiry could lead to a new customer and possibly more through his/her referrals.

You can do this by having a Google Form on your mobile phone. Whenever you get a lead, you fill the form along with that inquiry and it will go straight to your Google Sheet and CRM. You can?join our upcoming webinar ?to know how you can set it up. You can even update the status of your inquiry every time you have a discussion with a specific client, like if the lead is in the proposal stage, meeting stage, or sales stage.

If you’re not tracking your sales inquiries, all your marketing efforts and tactics will be in vain. You will be randomly going here and there, wasting your time instead of focusing on those people who are already interested in your product or service.

Avoid Missing on Follow-Ups

As per Grant Cardone, one of the biggest sales trainers in the world, the biggest rule of sales is taking consistent follow-ups. Most business owners are not consistent in taking follow-ups. Whenever the client gives another date and time, we either forget or just let it pass. This not only shows your unprofessional behaviour but also shifts the client’s focus to a different company, most probably your competitor.

Let’s be honest. No matter how strong your memory is or how capable your team is, you cannot expect to remember everything about every client. That’s why you need to use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. This not only lets you create follow-ups but will also remind you through emails and WhatsApp messages about every single meeting, event or call you have to attend.

We have provided a complete and fully-featured tool to our own students (business owners), and guess what, they’ve literally doubled their sales in just four weeks.?Join our live webinar ?to know more. You will not only save time and money, but your team will become more productive and efficient.

Work on Objections

The fourth thing that you must have in your business is a a list of objections. Imagine your client is asking what features and benefits you offer or what other clients have you worked for and why should they choose you? What will you do?

Customers Objections are the concerns of people, which stops them from making?the final purchase decision. Customers always comes?up with some problems coming out of lack of need, lack of urgency, lack of budget?etc..

You can create a list of the problems they are currently facing and they may face in future, and share the pre written solutions with clients over email or WhatsApp or even?on calls. The document can also be used to?train new joiners. You can also add a FAQ section your website or social media.?This will make you look professional and knowledgeable in your business.

“The more prepared you are, the more confident?you sound and the more confident you sound,?the more you sell.”

Build a Sales Team

Do you want to scale your business to new heights?

Then, first, you need to find out what is the bottleneck in your business. By bottleneck, I mean you need to find what’s stopping your business from growing. Do you know what that is?

It’s you, yourself.

If the sales of your business is dependent on you, then you are the biggest limiting factor in your business. Building a sales team that is not dependent on you will passively work to get you more clients. You don’t have to spend hours and days exploring the market looking for clients.

We always think that we can do the best work for our business ourselves, but that’s a misconception. There are always people who are skilled in certain areas, like sales. Recruit them into your business and see for yourself how your sales will increase.

You can hire one person, train them and take them along with you for the first few sales meetings. Then allow them to lead in one meeting and see that they’ll do better than you.

Do you know why?

Because they’re sales personnel. You’ve taught them how to work as per your company standards however, they will also have their own skill, knowledge and tactics. They will perform better than you and you’ll be glad to let them build a full-fledged sales team.

Create a Portfolio

A lot of business owners are on a spree of finding new clients, but they don’t have any documentation of the work of their existing clients. When a new client wants to come on board, he wants to see what work we have done in the past, how was it and what did that client say about us. For that reason, you must always build a portfolio.

A portfolio is a page on a website or a document in which you showcase what you have done for other clients. It has solutions to the problems your clients were facing and how you solved them. It also contains existing case studies and testimonials from your clients.

When you show this kind of portfolio to a prospective client, his trust in you in increased. He understands you know what you’re doing. It also gives you an edge in client meetings when a client asks you about your work. You can just share the portfolio and let it speak for yourself.

This is one of the most important tasks in any creative work. Nowadays, more and more businesses are opting for creating a portfolio because they know how important it is. It is like a backbone in your industry which gives you an edge over your competitors.

Want to know how you can build your business portfolio? Join our Business Masterclass and you’ll realise how many areas you can improve.

Increase Sales By Providing Value

Let me ask you something. Have you seen businesses offering discounts, festival sales, or general price cuts? Do you know why they do that?

Of course, you do! To get more customers! But they’re forgetting something very important. The customers of the 21st century are very smart. They know that the quality of a product is much more important than quantity. People nowadays prefer good quality services rather than cheaper ones. If you start doing the same thing, you’ll just be another small cog in a machine doing the same thing as what others are doing.

Instead of increasing sales, you should focus on increasing the value of your product or service. By value, we mean the quality of your product as well as its features and benefits.

This is what is currently separating Apple from Microsoft. Microsoft offers budget-friendly software like Windows Operating System so that they could gain more customers while Apple offers quality products like iOS and MacBook so that their existing customers stay more loyal to them.

Guess what? In January 2022, Apple crossed $3 trillion mark in market value while Microsoft was at $2.3 trillion. This shows us what people are preferring nowadays. Discounts or price-cuts is not as important as the value of a product or service.

That’s it for today. We’ll continue to bring more value to you and show you how you can enhance your business and scale it. So, keep in touch with us by subscribing.

You can join our upcoming?live webinar ?to know more about how you can automate your business with free tools provided by Google.