5 Basic Strategies for Entrepreneurs to Increase Sales
As an entrepreneur, increasing sales is always on your list of business goals. Of course, you expect an increase in your sales every certain period, be it weekly or monthly. You need to increase sales in order to support your business continuity, as you must set aside some of your income to meet administrative and operational needs such as occupancy costs, employee salaries, goods production, inventory purchases, and many more.
Although the increase or decrease in sales can also be influenced by the purchasing power and the current state of the economy, but you should not surrender. By implementing the right business strategies, you will be able to increase your sales over time. Here are five basic strategies you can implement right away to increase your sales performance.
1. Identify & Expand Your Target Audience
Make sure that you’ve identified your target audience. Ask yourself if you’ve been selling your products or services to those who are truly potential customers the whole time. If necessary, create a buyer persona, an ideal description representing the characteristics of your customers. Specify what their work might be, how old they are, their needs, their interests, and so on.
If you feel you’ve known your target audience very well, yet your sales have not increased, then it would not hurt to try to expand your target audience. Maybe you need more costs e.g. to send goods to your customers or meet clients in other cities. However, you may not know that your products or services have great potential in other regions. You can decide how long you want to go through this strategy (if it doesn’t work, you can always reduce your target audience).
2. Ask for Referrals
Your current customers or clients are valuable assets of your business. They have the potential to bring in more prospects for you. You can create a member-get-member program and give special offers to your current customers. You can also include their testimonials on your brochures or website so that people will have more trust and become more interested in your products or services.
3. Use Digital Marketing
You can’t always rely on direct marketing to increase your sales. In addition to requiring greater effort, direct marketing is also less capable of reaching prospects than digital marketing. Haven’t you noticed that there are so many successful stories of entrepreneurs with remarkable monthly revenue that only sell their products or services on social media? If they can, so can you!
Displaying ads on the internet has proven to be much cheaper and more effective than on TV, radio, or billboards. You can easily track impressions, clicks, conversions and other important details by setting up analytics tracking. Capture your visitors and add them to your remarketing audiences. Advertising platforms like Redirect.com and Outbrain are so easy to understand that you do not need to struggle learning about them. Also, use Facebook and Instagram to reach more prospects.
4. Improve Your Customer Service
If you want your sales to be successful, then you should never ignore your current customers. As mentioned earlier that your customers are valuable assets of your business, so you should always take care of them. Fast, friendly, and consistent service will always be remembered by the customers, so it is most likely that they will share their experiences with other people, thus resulting in more prospects. Creating a customer satisfaction survey will greatly help you know what aspects needs to be improved.
5. Have Short-Term Promotions Periodically
You may think that having regular discounts is in stark contrast to increasing sales, but this sales strategy is actually needed to attract potential customers. You can choose any promotional techniques according to your preference, for example by selling bundled products or services as a package instead of individual offerings, so that your prospects will be more tempted to buy them. I recommend you do this strategy within the middle of the month so that your revenue will remain high by the end of the month.
To help you increase sales and streamline your operational costs, you can count on a sales management software. HashMicro, a business software provider based in Singapore and Indonesia, provides some softwares that can help optimize your sales, such as Sales & Lead Management, CRM, and Marketing Automation softwares.