It’s fair to say that, in the current climate, most small service-based businesses are experiencing greater challenges in winning new customers. Potential customers are taking longer to make decisions and they’re more worried about spending money. The market is getting more competitive, and prospects are less inclined to engage with marketing and sales outreach.
In short, sales are getting tougher.
However, there’s some good news. There are a number of simple things you can do as a small service-based business owner that will show a noticeable uptake in your sales performance.
- LEAD THE CONVERSATION - You instigated the sales process with your prospect, so it’s your responsibility to lead it and stay on top of it. It’s your job to guide the prospect through your sales process and make it easy for them to buy. It’s not the job of your prospect to make it easy for you to sell to them.
- FOLLOW UP - Most small business owners don’t realise just how powerful the ‘follow-up’ is. It’s naive to presume that prospects will call you back if interested, or, for that matter, that if they don’t call you, they’re not interested. Most people are simply busy or get distracted, and you’re probably not that important to them, certainly during the early phases of engagement. Always set up the next meeting or conversation before completing the current one.
- DON'T HIDE BEHIND EMAIL - It might seem very old-fashioned, but you’ll have far more success in sales getting face-to-face or on the phone with your prospects. It’s easy for your potential client to miss, forget, or ignore your email or DM correspondence. I hear many small service-based business owners telling me how they’re constantly getting ‘ghosted’. This is far harder to do and less likely to happen with direct contact.
- DON'T HIDE BEHIND MARKETING - Service-based business owners are rarely natural salespeople. It can be tempting to try and let your marketing activity do your sales for you. The notion that if you put enough content on social media or build a ‘good enough’ website, that ‘they will come’, is rarely, if ever, the case.
- DON'T WING IT - Have a sales process that you hone and improve over time. Use your experiences with your sales, both successes and failures, to build a sales process that delivers repeatable results. Going into each sales opportunity with a new approach or making it up on the fly will deliver unpredictable sales performance.
- SELL - Having a great service offering and a willingness and ability to help your prospective clients is not enough. Small service-based business owners typically don’t come from sales backgrounds, so selling rarely comes easily or naturally to them. It’s likely you’ll find sales uncomfortable. The more you do it, the easier it will become and the better you’ll get at it.
- PULL THE TRIGGER- You’ve done all the hard work of finding a prospect and engaging with them. You’ve uncovered their problems and shown them how you can help. And then you walk away hoping they’ll contact you if they’re interested in moving forward. I’ve seen this scenario so many times and witnessed many lost opportunities. I know it can be uncomfortable, but once you’ve done all the hard work, you must ‘close’. It opens up the potential for rejection and many business owners shy away from that. Be brave, ask them for the sale and get rewarded for all your hard work in getting a sales opportunity to this point of the process.
- DEVELOP A SALES MINDSET - Sales shouldn’t be an ugly word and, if done with authenticity and integrity, it shouldn’t make you or your prospect feel uncomfortable. At the end of the day, you are simply leading them through a process of uncovering their problems and working with them to discover whether you can help them. If you can, you owe it to them, and your business, to assist them to buy from you.
The sooner service-based business owners realise they need to step up into sales, the sooner they can realise their ambitions. At a time when sales are getting tougher, you can’t afford to cut corners with your sales approach. Fortune favors the bold and the brave in sales, but it also rewards the tenacious and meticulous.
Take a look at our PDF & video below going through The Consultative Sales Process.
