The sales and marketing efforts create customers. Hence hire sales professionals with a pleasant and positive attitude. Hire for attitude and train them for aptitude. We need a good team of sales and marketing professionals to create customers.
If we are having huge number of enquiries/leads, we should focus on eliminating the suspects and if we are having less number of enquiries/leads, we should focus on extracting the prospects. An equipped or trained task force in this discipline can make the elimination/ filtration easier.
See your prospects as partners for a Win- Win. Hence care for your prospects, consider them important and ensure that they are feeling SAFE. S- Secure, A- Accepted, F-Free from Fear and E- Enthusiastic.
Our prospects or customers hate to see the changing faces/personnel. Customers develop friendships, relationships and get to know sales professionals on whom they can depend. Customers/prospects tend to move away from organizations where the roster of sales professionals is ever changing.
Make the customers feel that they are really important. Make them feel special. Customers go where they feel invited and return where they feel appreciated. Reward and recognize your customer as per the demands of the situation.
Know that the best customers are the ones that you already have. Hence, we should not allow customer attrition. Think about the customer life time value and get back to customers and be with them even after their repeated sales. One customer doing repeated sales at several points of time is far better than getting a new customer.
Don’t be pushy with prospects, because they may tend to hate people who try to sell. Prospects look out for professionals who can help them fix their problems, give them solutions and understand their wants, needs and desires. Understand that sale is about helping people.
Each and every customer is different in his own or her own way in terms of interests, passion, hobbies, needs, wants, desires or aspirations. The buying decisions are based on a plethora of other factors like possibility, differences, uniqueness, purpose, value for money, brand perception etc. Hence, we need to customize to the core to win customers. The trend of customers demanding customization is on the high. Hence the mantra for winning customers could also be customizing to the core.
Research your competitors and find out their approach towards prospects and customers. Develop a strategy and approach towards prospects that offers you competitive advantage. Execute those strategies and win customers.
When connecting with a lead or prospect give them a trail to follow. It could be in terms of address book, desktop calendar, logo, cards, brochure etc. Leave something for them to get back to you, so that when they get back, you can ensure closures.
The elevator pitch or speech is something that needs to be scripted and mastered. Learn to tell people in 60 seconds as to why people should buy from you. An excellent elevator pitch could just be sufficient for leads to pop up and trickle conversion.
Do not forget the value of net promoter score or NPS, which depicts on a scale of 1- 10, 1 being the least and 10 being the highest, the level to which your customer will recommend the services to his friends and relatives. With customers giving an NPS of 9 and beyond, we can expect referrals which once again can be considered for creating more customers.
