A small business owner wears many hats, including chief salesperson. And in many ways, it may be your most important hat.
How do you improve at selling? Here is some advice from our Growbiz experts.
Start by understanding what you are selling. It’s not your product, it’s what the benefit is to the potential customer. What value are you delivering? Distinguish yourself from the pack.
Develop a lead generation system. Where do your current customers come from? This helps you know what potential customers you need to build relationships with. Document your process — and results.
Hiring salespeople is an art and a science. Know your own sales style and hire for your weaknesses. And remember, in a small business, every employee is a salesperson, so look at your training processes and teach everyone the intricacies and talking points of your product or service.
Create a marketing scorecard to track your lead generation and sales progress. If you can’t see it, you can’t improve it. Know your numbers and know where sales conversions are dropping off and fix that.
Know your customers. Ask your existing customers for referrals. Create a referral system. Keep in touch with customers via email, and look for places to upsell and reactivate old customers. Remember, it is far cheaper to keep a customer than to onboard a new one.
Find much more advice under the Marketing category of GrowBiz. Here are a couple of our favorites:
- KEEP CUSTOMERS COMING BACK: WAYS TO MAKE YOUR SMALL BUSINESS AND WEBSITE MORE WELCOMING
- IF YOU REALLY KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER, YOUR DIFFERENTIATION STRATEGY COMES INTO FOCUS
- IF YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE LEAVING, YOU NEED TO DO MORE THAN STOP THE BLEEDING
Florida SBDC at FIU has produced a number of webinars on sales and marketing. Here is a triple helping of recent webinars to help you get started:
Please send GrowBiz topic suggestions and feedback to GrowBiz@FIU.EDU