My Hidden Secrets to Generate More Sales

If you want to generate more sales, you’re going to need more than just some hope and a prayer. You’re going to need time-tested techniques based on the successes of others, and real practical tactics to accomplish your revenue goals. Today I want to give you two of the skills I use most in generating more sales – reachability and leverage from earlier sales.

Generate More Sales By Being Reachable

It is a sad fact that most new businesses these days, even though we are deep in the information age, do not a have a phone number on their website. The usual paltry excuse is that companies don’t want to spend money on the manpower to have someone sitting on the phone all day answering calls. While, understandable from a budgeting standpoint, this mentality misses a key sales technique – persuasive conversation.

The best thing you do in your business is to have your customers in direct contact with you. These are the people paying you money, devoting their time and energy in your product or service, and possibly a long-term supporter of your company. You need to speak to them. Even if they haven’t purchased anything from you before, you need to get the people on the phone and close the sale! Persuade them, excite them, engage them.

Get A Phone Service To Optimize Your Leads

Now, back to the earlier argument against company phone numbers being broadcast across the internet. Obviously if you are a smaller business, you should not have someone working full time 24/7 on the phone. You would need like three or four people. Can you imagine the cost of that? However, there are services to help you with this particular issue. These services will answer your sales call at any time of the day, go through a script, and will then send you an email explaining exactly what the customer’s message is about, what they want, and how to get back in touch with them.

So when you get back to the office, and you look at your emails, your leads are nicely set up, clearly explained, and you can mentally organize who to respond to and in what order. The direct result of this is that you get more leads and sales, and you know what the people who are interested in your company want.

Once you get them on the phone, you can lead them through an optimized sales process. This sales process on the phone will outperform any sales letter you can write, usually. This is because you can adjust your message on the phone to what the client individual needs. I encourage you to utilize these services and begin making direct contact (whether through the phone or face-to-face) a large part of your business skills. This is especially true if you have a very specific item that requires sales persuasion and a detailed explanation of its uses.

The Results Speak For Themselves

Now I’ve found that these kind of services can give a 5-10% increase in sales alone. Those numbers indicate that these are definitely worth having. The service I personally use is only around $150 a month, chump change compared to what you’ll be getting back from it in the long-run. Imagine a day where the only time you are on the phone is an hour with the most optimized leads. Heaven.

I believe this work wonders for your business. If you look at companies like Zappos, they’re highly focused on selling on the phone, even though they’re an e-commerce website selling mostly shoes! Every business should have at least on part of the company that does this regularly. I’m personally a huge fan of calling my potential client and asking them what they’re feeling.

Another way you can do this is to hire a salesperson from Odesk. You can have the person take a whole list of “dead numbers” that have not generated sales, and have Odesk call them. On a good day, one of these salesmen could call 100-200 numbers. So, in a week or two, this salesmen could handle a couple thousand dead numbers- for you. They can set appointments with the best possible leads and your time and attention can be best used to maximum effect.

Use Sales To Generate More Sales

As the old expression goes, “It takes money to make money”. You must develop the habit using your old sales to generate your new sales. A lot of  the most successful businesses do this, and in fact, they find it kind of obvious. Crossfit making a killing doing this. They would get a sale, and then immediately ask, “Do you have five friends who you would recommend this to?”  and most of the time, people would say yes.

People who are introduced to your product through a friend are much more interested than cold leads, for example. This is especially advantageous if you have a more social leaning product such as Crossfit.

You can also do this with an online business. So, for example, if you have a product that you’ve sold, at the end you can have a little “Thank you” video that asks the exact same thing as Crossfit – do you have five friends you could recommend our product/service to? Give them an incentive to this such as a bonus for the recommendation, or a bonus for the friend who signs up, or something similar. But, don’t go too far – your whole community of buyers could just refer each other, and that would not be ideal.

Another thing you can do to increase your sales if you have a product launch or something along those line is is put a re-targeting pixel for Facebook re-targeting  (or just regular re-targeting) on your website. During your launch, everyone who goes to your page will be tagged with a pixel.

With this little trick, you will be able to target them on Facebook and other sites almost for free just because they visited your website. Specifically targeted people such as these are very likely to buy from you. I’ve personally seen sales go up by 10-20% (or even more) if this is done correctly. Of course, you can put this pixel in any part of your website. You can get people who went to your shopping cart (people who almost bought but didn’t buy), people who your “about us” section and nothing else, etc. So start building you targeting and re-targeting list to generate sales from people you’re already familiar with.