8 Easy Ways to Increase Sales. Every company wants to increase sales. Unfortunately, many people wrongly believe that selling more always entails working longer hours. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here are eight easy (and relatively painless) ways to increase sales: 1. Think about your product as a verb. Suppose your company makes glue. If you think that you sell glue (a noun), you'll talk about features and functions. 2. Contacting more potential customers usually doesn't create proportionately more sales, because you spend time with people who aren't likely to buy. 3. Decide from the start that you're absolutely not going to sell anything that the customer doesn't really need. 4. When speaking with a customer, don't give a pitch about what your product can do. 5. If you spend more time selling (especially to qualified leads), you'll make more sales. 6. The shorter your sales cycle, the more you can sell during any given period of time. 7. 8.
How to Write an Elevator Pitch. If you're like most entrepreneurs, you think an "elevator pitch" is a one- to three-minute sales pitch that you could presumably give during a very long elevator ride. If that's what you think, I'm sorry: You've been completely misled. Let's start with the basic fact: Nobody listens to sales pitches. (Do you listen to them? I don't. Especially if they are coming from some bozo I just met.)
To make matters worse, when most entrepreneurs give their "elevator pitch," they talk really, really fast so as to cram as much as information as possible into a short a time as possible. In professional sales, this is known as the "spray and pray" method. That being said, you're crazy if you don't have an elevator pitch, providing you realize that it's not a sales pitch, but a way to turn a casual conversation into a sales opportunity. What It Should Really Be The original idea behind the elevator pitch was to have something that you'd say to a potential customer whom you happen to meet by chance. 1. 2. Cold Calling: How to Get Past 'No' The purpose of cold calling is to begin a dialog with a customer. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, customers are often reluctant to have that conversation. This does not mean that customers shouldn't actually have that talk.
In fact, one of the major reasons that customers don't want to speak to a solution provider is that they're in denial about the problem. That denial often takes the form of an "objection" to having a conversation. So these objections do not mean that the customer is uninterested or does not need or want what you're offering. Quite the contrary. If your product really were of no interest, the customer would merely hang up. 7 Objections (& How to Respond) With that in mind, here are the seven most common objections, each with a list of possible responses that will keep the conversation going long enough so that the two of you can determine if there's really a good match.
Note: These lists come one of world's top sales trainers, uber-guru Barry Rhein. 1. 2. 3. 4. Cold Calling Script: Make a Call That Works. This is part of a package on cold calling. Read the next post: Why Your Cold Calls Aren't Working. While there are other (and usually more effective) ways to generate sales leads, many companies still depend on cold calling. I've covered cold calls before, but here's a great cold-calling script from one of the world's top experts on cold calling, Keith Rosen, author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Cold Calling. This script was created by a cost-reduction company for use with C-level executives and can easily be adapted to virtually any product or service.
By the way, the most important part of this post is the final word of warning--so be sure to read all the way to the bottom. Here's the script, with explanations of each element: Hi, John. Identify yourself immediately, or the contact will hang up on you. Did I catch you at an OK time? This question demonstrates respect for the person's time and an understanding that your phone call is not the only thing on his or her plate for the day. Increase Your Online Sales With This 5 Part Article Series. Understanding the sales funnel.