5 SALES TIPS TO INCREASE REVENUE IMMEDIATELY

As business owners, marketers and sales people we are always looking for ways to increase our sales numbers and revenue. There are obvious ways which involve paying for more traffic and brand exposure by spending more on Facebook Ads, Google or Traditional media but these all obviously come at a cost. We’ve compiled a list of 5 ways that your company can increase sales overnight without spending a cent more. Here they are:

Call – don’t e-mail:

One of the biggest mistakes we see sales people make is emailing leads back. Nothing loses sales quicker and more effectively than emailing leads back rather than calling. Yes, there are for sure customers that prefer to interact over email rather than over the phone and yes there are some products which are too complex to explain fully over the phone, BUT every new lead should get a phone call first up, even if it’s to say that you will email through all the details. Trust us, it makes a MASSIVE difference.

10 Second Call Back:

Once you have shifted to calling rather than mailing, the next step is to improve your speed of response. Calling back quickly almost always increases conversion rates drastically, and by quickly we mean IMMEDIATELY.

When we mention this to customers, they gasp in disbelief thinking that it is truly impossible to call a lead back immediately (every time) and yet it is one of the easiest changes to implement. It often just takes buy-in, in terms of the effectiveness, to overcome any implementation obstacles.

When a potential customer sends you a mail or completes a contact form on your website, your chances of closing the deal are increased tenfold (this is not an exaggeration) just by responding immediately. All you need to do to respond immediately is to either:

• Ensure the person who handles your incoming queries knows they must drop whatever they are doing to attend to the lead OR
• If you don’t have a dedicated internal sales person, link the incoming mail to your phone so that you can respond immediately.

We usually suggest people try this process for 1 week and see the difference in the results for themselves. You will be astounded at what this small change can achieve.

Conversion Optimization:

Investing in proper conversion optimization is the cheapest way to get more web leads without spending another cent on more traffic. Every day, the majority of your website visitors comes to your website and leave without ever becoming a lead. Conversion Optimization is the process whereby you analyse the activity of your website visitors and optimize the look and feel and UX of your website to increase the conversion rate from visitor to lead.

The average website converts only 2% of web visitors into leads (i.e. 98 out of 100 visitors coming to your website never engage with your company). By investing in Conversion Optimization (either by using a tool like Hotjar, Lucky Orange or Optimizely) you can see dramatic improvements without increasing your ad budget. Have a look at our article about introducing trust elements to your website to increase conversions. (Best Tips for Conversion Optimization)

Invest in Lead Generation over Sales:

The number one reason we see companies fail to scale is because they believe adding more sales people will automatically result in more sales. What we find, more often than not, is that adding more salespeople results in only a marginal increase in sales numbers.

The reason this typically happens is because very few sales people are effective at prospecting. There is this illusion that sales people will be able to find business and sell to it and whilst this is sometimes true (for the extreme outlier) what inevitably happens in 90% of cases, is the same amount of leads generated by the company are now just shared amongst more sales people resulting in more or less the same number of sales on an ongoing basis. Almost always the best way to increase sales numbers is not to hire more people (closers) but rather to invest in better and more effective ways to generate more leads for your current sales team to tackle.

Increase Pricing:

People often scoff at this suggestion, thinking it is an obvious option but that it obviously doesn’t apply to them as they couldn’t increase their prices as they are in a competitive industry. We have heard this argument tons of times and almost never seen it to be true.

The truth is, it is far easier to charge 20% more for one’s product or service (without losing sales volumes) than it is to find 20% more customers.

Below we show an example of how we came to choose our pricing for our domestic coffee machine offering in our coffee business (Aquaspresso) and how we raised our prices by 20% without any loss in sales.

Firstly, a note on pricing:

There are three ways to price one’s product:

1) Competitive Pricing

Competitive pricing is the most common form of pricing used. In a nutshell it involves looking at what the market charges for your product or service and pricing your product in the same ballpark (slightly more/slightly less or the same). There are two reasons why you DON’T need to price your product the same as your competitors:

• • Your customers don’t have close to the same understanding of the market and the related prices as you do. It is often more important to be found first rather than to be the cheapest option.
  • Only commodities need to compete on pricing. To price your product, the same, as your competitors essentially communicates the fact that there is very little between your two products. Mercedes and Kia both sell cars to take you from A to B, but Mercedes of course sell based on the extra value that their cars give (because of their extra features and greater quality). Most products and services can offer great value or even frame their offering in a way which is perceived to offer greater value and therefore charge a higher price.

2) Cost Plus Pricing

• In the old days before the internet and before information was at everyone’s fingertips people used to price their product by adding a margin (say 25%/50%) onto the cost of their product to get to their selling point. The reason why this is no longer an effective or efficient way to price one’s product is because:

• The cost of your product has no relation to the value which your product provides to the customer
• Services (which involve man-hours) are hard to quantify and price.

3) Value-based Pricing

The best way to price one’s product is value based pricing. It is actually the most obvious way and, yet it is the least used pricing method. Value-based pricing essentially entails pricing your product at what it is worth to your customer. Makes sense right? Charge customers what they feel your product is worth…The question is how do you know what that magic number is. Well the only way to know it, is to test. Whenever we launch a product we always run a Facebook test where we show our product or service to similar but different audiences at different prices and then analyse their response. Below is a test which we ran in our coffee business Aquaspresso.

Overview: We launched a domestic coffee machine for rental and we wanted to see how much our customers valued it at. We couldn’t go less than R500 as this was essentially our cost price.

Test 1: We started showing the following Ad with the base price of R590. After running it for a month we received X number of leads and from these leads we converted x/3 of these leads into sales.

Test 2: We then changed ONLY the price in the Ad from R590 to R690. After running it for a month we received almost exactly the same number of leads and converted these leads again into x/3 sales or customers. Overnight our new price became R690 as we learnt that our customers valued our offering at R690 just as much as they valued it at R590.

Test 3: We kept on going! We then changed ONLY the price AGAIN in the Ad from R690 to R790. After running it for a month we received 1/5 of the number of leads as we did previously and even few sales as a percentage. We discovered that our customers no longer saw value in our offering. That’s how we determined that our price needed to be R690 as that was the value that the maximum number of customers saw in our product.

Pricing Conclusion: We now test our pricing on all our products before settling on an end price as you never know how much money you are leaving on the table or how many sales you are losing out on because you have priced your product to highly or too low. 

Parting Thoughts:

We have seen each of these 5 methods above increase sales and revenues in almost all companies and all industries and the best thing of all, is they are all incredibly easy to implement. If you want help in selling your product or service or want to try out our outsourced sales service please complete your details below and we’ll get in touch!