Innovation is essential to your business because it helps you stay ahead of the competition and retain customer loyalty. Innovation keeps your sales team engaged in the sales process, eliminates stagnation, and provides new opportunities to achieve objectives.
The ultimate goal for any business is to gain new customers and close sales. There are several techniques that your sales team can use to achieve just that and so much more. Soft selling is a selling technique that subtly persuades clients to buy your products and services. A soft selling tone should be conversational and ensure that you keep prospects engaged throughout.
You can leverage soft selling to build networks and relationships. Be keen not to dive straight into business on your initial engagements with clients, but rather foster a more relaxed and casual style of networking. Here are four good techniques to boost your sales efforts.
1. Offer Freebies
Consumer needs keep on changing due to technological advancement and the dynamic nature of the marketplace. Customers now want to go where they are appreciated and where they feel valued.
As your business grows, you may find yourself contemplating between focusing more on how you make customer appreciation or on scaling, processes, and acquisition. However, simple techniques such as offering freebies like a free eBook in exchange for an email address to promote your products and services can help boost sales and improve customer loyalty.
Offering free webinars can also help you build relationships and have real-time conversations that could translate to sales in the future. With webinar software like RingCentral, you can host a wide range of live events, meetings, and online training sessions. It can also be an effective add-on to your marketing mix.
2. Educate Prospects
To get people to buy your products or services, you must solve their problems. Your client acquisition journey should be all about helping prospects buy from you rather than sell them a product. Before selling a solution to your customers, understand their perspective as a valuable resource and emphasize a positive customer experience.
Education can be a powerful tool in content marketing. Place priority on educating your prospects and existing customers through coming up with remarkable content to build trust, develop relationships, improve conversations, and generate leads.
Customers need and want information that can help them learn, grow, and improve in some way. Education through content marketing can be in the form of tutorials, theoretical (diving into brand-specific subjects), or product information and features.
3. Create a Customer Loyalty Program
An effective customer loyalty program can enhance the overall value of your products and services. Loyalty programs can motivate repeat customers to make more purchases, and in doing so, you can maintain your sales levels, sales margins, increase loyalty, and induce cross-product buying by your loyal customers.
A well-executed loyalty program builds an emotional connection with your customers and can help drive profits. A host of third-party promotions such as access to cinemas, restaurants, spas, or retailers can create a community and a perception that will help connect customers emotionally to your brand.
A relevant customer loyalty program is a brilliant engagement strategy. Customers will enjoy discounts and offerings that touch their needs and preferences, while your brand enjoys more organic acquisitions and high profitability.
4. Run a Social Media Contest
A social media contest can be an excellent way to increase engagement on your social media pages. Social media contests can attract new and relevant fans and can help increase engagement—comments, shares, likes, pins, and retweets.
Customers spend more time on Facebook, Twitter, and the likes now more than ever. When you carry out a social media contest properly, it can be a great way to boost your business awareness and connect you to your audience.
As a business owner, you’ll agree that building a community in your local neighborhood takes time. A social media contest can help you easily achieve that by constantly urging contestants to tell their friends and family about the contest and ultimately spread the word about your brand.
Get Creative and Foster Growth
In today’s highly competitive business environment, you need innovation to boost your company’s success. Customers are constantly becoming demanding and savvy, and innovation can help you develop a competitive edge, boost productivity, and achieve growth.
Failing to improve your products and services puts you at risk of losing customers. However, when you invest in innovation, your customers will notice and appreciate the extra value you bring to them. To improve sales and customer relationships, start conducting regular surveys to identify product improvement needs and set up a team that will spearhead your efforts.
