Have you been thinking about launching a business and selling your products or services? What does it take to become successful at sales? What’s the common denominator in the process? In our modern online world, you need to find your unique way to succeed, use and be good at Google advertising and various social media platforms.
So what are the key elements to master your way in this virtual advertising space? Does it sound familiar, if I say, success comes from standing out?
Whenever a new product or service is launched or advertised, chances are, what serves as a hook is always its novelty. Every commercial encourages you to buy new things and research has also found it to be the most catchy word in adverts. When, in reality, we aren’t that fond of new things. Psychological studies show that we prefer familiar things as opposed to novelty in the long run.
If you just look at your favorite movies or songs. You perhaps enjoy watching the latest blockbuster movies or listening to new hit songs, but do you also tend to return to your treasured movies, series, or songs? Why do we do so? Familiarity possibly breeds a feeling of safety.
So if you want to come up with a great business idea, you should ask yourself, how to harmonize familiarity and enchantment in a way to create something that people need and want to buy?
The Contradictory Human Mind
People usually make choices based on two contradictory tendencies. On one hand, we love exploring new things, but on the other hand, we are afraid of new things. Therefore, if you want to create a successful product, you need to come up with something between the two extremes.
How to do this? If you want to sell something people already know, you have to add a touch of wonder to it! But if you want to sell something surprising, you have to make it something people already know.
How can you recognize the truth in this? If you take a closer look at our history, especially education, technology, society, or politics. If you think about technological inventions, they are a perfect example of coming up with something new that can create a big shift, yet people are unfamiliar with such tools. Hence they can become a success if something familiar is added to them.
A good example of this is when Spotify was created that initially provided 30 new songs to listen to on Mondays. When a bug got into the system, some old songs were also added. When they fixed the bug and kept testing its usage, it turned out, when some older songs were also shared, much more people listened to them.
So, to promote something new, they needed to make it more familiar.
Similar Trends in Fashion Preferences and Other Choices
If you look at recurring trends in fashion, such as wearing some types of hairstyles, platform shoes, or the same cuts of jeans, you will recognize some interesting patterns. Similar preferences keep reappearing sequentially. Why? Because of the same reason.
A lot of familiarities coupled with a bit of novelty. This is especially true in the history of first-name choices made by parents. In the same year, many identical female or male names were given, often changing popular well-known names just slightly, to add something new to the already known.
Useful Tips on How You Can Sell What you Create
1. Study and understand your niche
Who do you want to sell to? What do your prospects’ daily challenges look like? How could you make their lives easier through your products or services? Knowing the best solutions for these challenges can enable you to make tremendous changes in your clients’ lives.
This can also help you communicate what you offer in a way that would better resonate with them. Besides offering your best-tailored services, make sure you are also familiar with what your competition is offering. When you examine that, you can come up with something unique, which is a bit different.
2. Pay attention to potential customers only
Besides being willing to provide outstanding service, you also need to consider, who are the best clients for your business? If you identify their characteristics, it can save you a lot of time and money which you could otherwise waste on people who are not the best match for your company. To make this work, you should first identify your buyer persona after thorough research.
Try to include your ideal clients’ position, work title, seniority, and wage. Add a short description of each of your client’s challenges, and how your products or services can help solve their problems.
3. Prioritize correctly
Every marketing personnel, provided you have any in your business, is working for the successful vision of the company. The marketing department is supporting the sales department, in which the sales reps work to achieve their best for the company’s future.
So what does the right order of priority look like? If you want to have a thriving business, your customers should come first, your company second, your team third, and yourself the last one.
4. No matter what, always listen to your clients
Even though we live in a self-centered culture where our time and energy are very limited, one thing is for sure. As salespeople, we have to find sufficient time to listen carefully to our customers’ needs. Why is this crucial? Because this is the foundation to build trust and turn your potential prospects into long-term clients.
If you try to build client relationships fast and in a superficial way, chances are, they will sense it, and you could end up wasting even more time like this, making you feel disappointed. Therefore, try to do your needs analysis, and respond to your clients’ needs to make a smart closing.
5. Use your content to strengthen trust
You could do this through any channels you communicate with your clientele, such as your blog content, webinars, even bits of information in well-crafted adverts, or live videos. Inspire them to learn more about how they could benefit more from your service before selling them anything. This allows your customers to learn about you and your business and enables them to make their decisions. It builds a trusting relationship between you and them, and when they trust you, it is a great foundation for a prosperous collaboration.
If you don’t just send your blog, video, or webinar content to clients, but also provide the relevant content offering, your business could seem a lot more genuine.
6. Concentrate on helping
That’s why it is so important to identify your clients’ buyer persona. When you find out, you know what hardships and challenging points you should focus on. Then it will become more clear how you can make that person’s life a bit easier.
You should list the benefits of using your products or services before pitching them to your clients and convincing them to choose your business to help them solve their challenges.
7. Finish your meetings with concrete action
Instead of aiming to follow-up on actions after a meeting, you can accelerate the process by taking action and coming up with the next steps right there. So, following your sales call, it is best to decide on a concrete step. You could agree right there on the next meeting’s time when that action and its solutions will be discussed. This ensures a more effective action plan with faster results while maintaining motivation as well.
So always strive to set up your next meeting just before leaving a sales meeting! Even better if you set up your meeting while your prospect is still there.
8. Know your clients’ preferences
When you can see how your clientele interacts with your content, and what they are most interested in, it gives you a huge advantage. Seeing what blog posts or pages they have visited the most, and which emails they have read can help your business gain clarity in targeting the right customers.
Again, using software that helps identify the most liked content, can support you in identifying the pain points and challenges of clients in which you can help them through your service.
9. What’s helping you close more deals: your metrics and marketing funnel are important
They can show you which things work and which don’t. Even though data analysis can be a lengthy process, it is worth your time and effort. If you are not used to measuring your sales achievements, you should start with detailed and in-depth biannual reports. When you get good at this, try to switch to quarterly reports. Although they are usually more simple than the biannual ones, they still include detailed metrics.
When you feel ready, try to create monthly reports, these are the easiest types. These three versions should examine different perspectives. By looking at different angles and trends, you can improve your decision-making, thus your long-term results.
