Boost Your Sales And Attract New Customers

Above all, the best thing you can do to attract new customers is to spread the word as far and wide as possible about your business. Depending on your target demographic, that may mean advertising online, in newspapers, or even on billboards. If your budget is too tight for that kind of expenditure, social media offers a great way to reach lots of consumers for free.

Boost your sales and attract new customers

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These days, word-of-mouth advertising is really word-of-internet. Reach out to your personal social networks and let them know about your business. Ask them to follow your business on social media and spread the word to their friends and beyond. Keep up an active social media presence and use it to stay in touch with your customers.

In a similar vein, keep an eye on review sites like Yelp. Encourage your customers to leave good reviews to boost your ratings. You should also address any negative reviews; that may involve apologizing or offering a refund or a free product or service as compensation. That shows them and everyone else on the site that you care about your customers.

Wondering what to bring up? I usually ask something I actually want to know that's too short to include in the agenda, such as, "What percentage of your revenue comes from channel sales versus direct?"

The good news is that the same rule applies if you focus on the things that have already worked. One way to reinforce that mindset is to reach out to your current customers and ask about the things that got them interested in your offering.

I see far too many reps pretending to be unbiased in an effort to sound "credible." The buyer, who is both educated and experienced, expects sales reps to be biased. In fact, nothing you say will make a customer forget that ultimately, your job is to get them to buy your product.

When potential customers see that your product or service has been vetted and approved by an outside source, it adds credibility to your brand. The boost in popularity may also help convince them to buy.

Encourage your existing, happy customers to share their experiences with their colleagues, friends, and associates. As an incentive for bringing in new business, you can offer them a discount or additional services for each referral they bring in.

For online sellers, abandoned carts come along with the territory, but you do have options for encouraging customers to complete their purchases. Abandoned cart software is a tool that can help you figure out why customers are leaving your site before completing purchases and can also help you convert them to get more sales.

In a perfect world, you would have an unlimited budget to market your business in order to find new customers and increase sales. You could buy lots of online and offline advertising, run promotions to build traffic in store and online, and launch a proactive public relations campaign to increase your product or brand's visibility and awareness. But this isn't a perfect world. Realistically, most small businesses and even many mid-sized firms have more great ideas on how to peddle their wares than available resources. So where do you start if you are looking for more customers? Learning to generate new sales leads is an essential skill for an entrepreneur. Even if you don't consider yourself a salesperson in the classic sense of the Willy Loman character from Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman, you need to understand that the possibilities for finding new customers range from cold calling names from the phone book to buying lists of potential customers to using newer Internet techniques like search engine optimization to drive new business to your website.The following pages will delve into how to conduct market research to understand your target audience and their needs, how to determine which lead generation techniques are best to broaden your sales horizons, and how to increase sales by following several strategies to sell additional products and/or services to existing customers.How to Find New Customers and Increase Sales: Understand Your Target AudienceBefore you can find new customers and increase sales, you need to understand who your customer is, what value proposition you offer to customers, and what your competition is currently offering in the market and where there are gaps for a new entrant. In other words, you need to do some market research -- whether that means hiring an outside firm to do the legwork or trying to do it yourself. There's an underlying disconnect between your motivation to increase sales and your customer's motivation to solve their problems. "Attracting more customers is really about listening to their needs, not being a solution looking for a problem," says Paige Arnof-Fenn, founder and CEO of Mavens & Moguls, a strategic-marketing consulting firm whose clients include Fortune 500 companies as well as early stage and emerging businesses. "There are many existing problems out there that need to be solved that customers are willing to pay for today."

In order to develop a marketing plan to reach new customers, you need to better understand who you're already selling to. "If I'm trying to expand sales, I have to find out who my existing customers are. What are their demographics? What do they look like?" says Jerry Osteryoung, director of outreach for the Jim Moran Institute for Global Entrepreneurship at Florida State University. "That means doing market research."Market research runs the gamut from very simple qualitative research to in-depth quantitative analysis. It can be done very quickly and inexpensively by sending surveys to your existing customers using one of the many online survey tools, such as SurveyMonkey or Zoomerang. You can also get to know the target audience by looking at existing sources of information -- from the U.S. Census Bureau or other government agencies, from trade associations, or from third-party research firms. But depending on the questions you are trying to answer and your research budget, your market research can involve more extensive interviews with customers and qualitative studies on how target customers feel about your business, its products and services. Certain products and services may appeal to one audience but not to another, so understanding the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in your target market is critical. You can get to know your customers and segment the market any number of ways including by:

Use the information about your existing customers to develop a target audience for your business in its drive to win new customers and increase sales. "While there are core customers you are trying to reach, often there are other markets that are also important to address," Arnof-Fenn says. "Make sure you know who the gatekeepers and influencers are; they will affect the decision makers and you will most likely need to sell to them differently than to the end user." For example, parents might be the gatekeepers for products targeted to children or technology managers might hold influence over a company's decision to invest in new software.Determine which key messages, features and benefits matter to each potential market. Tell these customers how your business can help them solve their problems. "In order to have a customer go to your online shop, you have to find a reason why these customers want to come to you," Osteryoung says. "The value proposition has to be spelled out clearly."Next, you need to figure out where to reach these customers and whether there should be a marketing or advertising plan that goes along with that outreach.

How to Find New Customers and Increase Sales: Generating Sales LeadsThere are a variety of age-old staple techniques and newer tools you can use to find new customers and increase sales. It's best to understand the range of choices you have in order to determine which may best help your business reach new customers. Newspaper readers may not be moved by Internet-based sales techniques. Similarly, business people who are accustomed with hiring only people they know may be better swayed by meeting you at a chamber of commerce meeting than accepting a blind invitation to connect on LinkedIn or Facebook. "It starts with good people," says Peter Handal, chairman and CEO of Dale Carnegie Training, the sales and leadership training organization. "If you're a one-man shop, it's one thing. But if sales people are really important, you need to hire and motivate good people and you want to give them an upside, such as sales on commission. The motivation is not just money it's also helping them overcome the fear of prospecting."Here is a rundown on the techniques available:

How to Find New Customers and Increase Sales: Sell More to Existing CustomersIn order to increase sales, many businesses believe the only way is to find new customers, but a number of experts say that this strategy leaves out an obvious potential source of new sales. It's much easier to get an existing customer to buy from you than to convince a new customer to take the plunge. "They're forgetting about low hanging fruit -- their existing customer base," says Osteryoung. "If I want to expand sales, the number one place to go is the existing customer base. They already trust you." Here's how to increase sales with your existing customer base:

Macaulay explains that for liquor store chains like Total Wine, a product pitch should focus on education. Customers at Total Wine usually consult with the salespeople on the floor, so Macaulay and Burey focused on explaining exactly what Duke & Dame is and how salespeople can help customers explore a new type of whiskey.

Burey says that having direct consumer engagement from these kinds of events will ultimately drive sales. \"If people are introduced to your whiskey and have the opportunity to sample and engage with your whiskey at an event, they are more likely to purchase the whiskey the next time they are at a liquor store, or tell a friend or family member about the amazing whiskey they tried,\" says Burey. 041b061a72