Module 11: Sales

11.1. Sales campaigns

11.2. Your sales pitch

11.3. Lead generation

11.4. Pay per click advertising (PPC) and selling online

11.1. Sales campaigns

A sales campaign is a great way to boost sales at particular times. A campaign uses a

planned strategy to market a particular product or service of your business through a

particular sales channel or several channels. It’s aimed at likely prospects with the intention

of turning a good percentage of them into customers and increase sales.

When planning a sales campaign, think it through fully

before you launch it. You need to do some figures to

see if the potential return will be worth any investment

you need to make. What sales channels will you

implement it through? Your own premises? Your

website? Your social media platforms? Direct mail? In

conjunction with other business partners or suppliers?

For example, a hair stylist could run a campaign

offering a particular product at half price with every

appointment booked during a particular week and the manufacturer of the product might

cover or share advertising costs. A makeup artist and image stylist could partner to offer their

joint list of customers a styling and make up session for less than the separate cost of each.

Estimate how much you will need to spend to roll out the campaign and the potential sales

you think it will generate, taking into account your reduced sales price. Will the profit be worth

the outlay? Set a goal for the level of sales you intend to reach. This gives a focus to work

towards and strive hard to achieve as well as ‘claiming’ that figure from the universe.

A campaign usually runs over a limited period of time. This is part of the strategy – to give

a sense of urgency to the consumer and motivate her to buy. Offering something at

better value than normal and restricting its availability has a proven psychological effect of

encouraging people to take the advantage while they can. It’s essential, then, to pitch the

campaign so your customers recognize the value on offer and you entice new customers who

also recognize the good deal.

Sales campaigns are a great way of winning new clients who will stay loyal if they like what

they get and experience from you. Decide before you start how long the campaign will run

for. If sales go particularly well you may be tempted to extend your time limit but, for credibility

and reputation, it’s better to finish the campaign when you advertised it would and run another

in a month or so to capture that willing audience again. In the meantime, take advantage of

the interest to build anticipation for your next one.

11.2. Your sales pitch

Like all aspects of doing business, things have changed dramatically over the past couple of

decades and a ‘pitch’ is probably no longer a good term to describe the attempts to sell of

your service or product. Gone are the days when a sales person just ‘pitched’ information to

a prospective customer.

Selling is now done with the intention of creating an interactive engagement with a potential

customer. It’s a two way conversation during which you ask questions, listen, answer queries

and problems, show understanding and offer solutions.

What hasn’t changed is that first impressions still matter. Great salesmanship comes with

plenty practice but it’s always based on being good with people and having the right mix of

politeness and friendliness. The tone is one of informal engagement with respectful

boundaries. You need to be skilled in capturing and holding the attention of your customer or

audience.

Some tips that may help:

1. Know your customer. The more you understand the needs and wants of your target

audience, the better you can outline the benefits you know answer those needs and wants.

2. Know what you’re selling really well. Memorize relevant facts or statistics that prove its

worth. Mention well known satisfied customers. Most importantly, keep engaging the

customer.

3. Focus on a particular problem in your customers lives and shoe how you offer a solution

and help make their lives easier.

4. Be prepared for the common objections you’ll get and have your counter arguments ready.

Know how to differentiate your product/service from competitors. If the objection is budget

related, show how you save them money.

5. Make sure you allow enough space and time to listen to your customer. That’s the key to

finding the problem that you can offer the answer to.

6. Have your call to action ready at the right time. Encourage your customer to commit now

to doing a deal. If he’s not ready now, arrange a follow up meeting.

11.3. Lead generation

With such easy availability of all the knowledge, products and services people want now at

the click of a few buttons, the buying public is savvy and up to date with what they can have

or do. They no longer respond to the old approach of ‘being sold’ something. As a result, in

the digital age, the focus on generating sales is shifting to facilitating purchases.

What this means is you need to be thinking about facilitating your customers to buy when

compiling all the information you put into your marketing tools - your website, social media,

brochures, etc and also when building your brand. In fact, right through this course we’ve

been showing you how to generate sales by creating a business persona that makes it not

just easy, but enticing for your target customers to buy from you.

It can take time to build the relationship with your customers that inspires enough trust and

loyalty to turn into robust sales figures. But we think by now you’re more than ready to get

your business off to a great start that has a clear vision for success. Keep portraying you and

your business in the way customers want to engage with and buy from, repeatedly. All

valuable content and engagement draws people closer to having you at the forefront of their

minds when they want what you offer.

Lead generation software is a system that focuses on the online behavior of

prospective customers. It tracks actions from the initial engagement through the education

process on what’s being searched for and identifies the typical behavior that indicates when

they may be ready to complete a sale. If you think this would be relevant and useful for your

business and worth the investment, do some research.

Of course, the traditional methods of generating sales also apply – following up interest with

a personal phone call, sending mails to potential leads or cold calling. When using these

methods you have the benefit of referring prospects to your online presence which will further

support your efforts.

11.4. Pay per click advertising (PPC) and selling online

Pay per click advertising is when you pay for a listing in search results. These paid for

listings appear along with results which aren’t paid for. You bid for a listing for a particular

keyword your customer would use to search for what you offer. You’re bidding against any

other businesses that also want to bid for that keyword. The highest bidder will come up

highest in searches. You pay only when people click on that keyword and land on your site.

We recommend putting in a lot of thinking and learning about PPC advertising before you

spend, if you do at all. As you’ve learned in this course, there are plenty, effective ways of

increasing your SEO that don’t incur ongoing costs. PPC may not suit your business. If you

think it does, here are a few basic guidelines.

PPC advertising is instantaneous; you could actually see results straight

away. Choosing broad, general keywords would naturally mean that many other businesses

will also be bidding for the same ones and push up the price, but the predictability of the word

means lots of people will use it in searches. Choosing a word that’s more specific to your

business narrows the field of bidders and will cost less.

Don’t get distracted by other eager bidders and think

you have to keep increasing your bid to get ‘up there’

in searches for the particular search word or phrase

you want. This could end up costing you more than

you can afford and also more than it’s worth to you in

conversions.

Study the results of any PPC you invest in using

analytics and only continue if you see tangible, bottom line benefits. PPC can be most useful

to boost a specific campaign over a short period, rather than on an ongoing basis.

If your business sells directly online, your visitors are already potential customers and PPC

could give you the visibility and traffic to boost conversions and sales. If a conversion to you

is a visitor clicking on a sales inquiry form, downloading free information or signing up to your

email list, you’ll need to look closely at the percentage of these potential leads that converts

to a paying customer to decide if it’s worth paying to bring them to your site. Your investment

must return you a measurable, usable outcome.

To post a PPC ad, you’ll need to write a couple of short phrases that describe what you’re

advertising. Make sure spelling and grammar are perfect and they accurately and positively

describe your product or service. Check the rules – you’re generally not allowed to use

superlatives like ‘best’, ‘greatest’ etc. or capitalization.