Social Media Is Not The Solution

I have seen so many business owners out there talking about the fact that they can market or advertise and get more people looking at their product or service, but they’re not getting more business out of it. 

The problem is not always the marketing. The problem might be your sales cycle. Are you closing business? 

Maybe the problem isn’t the marketing. Maybe it’s you. 

So how do you close business? 

I talked a little bit about the importance of reviewing your sales cycle in an article a couple of weeks ago. 

That sales cycle will determine whether or not you can actually scale your business. 

Social media for social media’s sake will not help you. This comes down to you and what you are doing in order to actually get people to purchase from you.  

It’s far less expensive to close a higher proportion of the business that is already coming to you with interest than to spend the money on marketing to find brand new people who know nothing about your product or service. 

How do you actually close more business? 

1. Review your sales cycle. Identify every point where a customer has a choice: to continue on the path to a purchase, or to leave. 
2. If possible, review your data on where you are losing those prospective customers. For example, if you are selling a product online, do customers get as far as loading items into their cart, but never hit the checkout button? If you don’t have this data, start collecting it.
3. Identify the places where you lose the most potential customers. These are the pain points that will give you the biggest return for changes that you make. That is, these are the areas which should be easiest to make slightly simpler or less painful for your customers, and you will see the biggest growth in sales by making small improvements in these areas. 

Rather than spending more on marketing, spend money on making the process as easy as possible for the customers who are already interested could give you a more efficient boost in sales.