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How Sales People Can Look Desperate and Some Tips to Avoid It

Sales people are constantly under pressure to perform within the company’s standard. Attrition rate in the sales department is fairly high — as much as 50% a year in some companies.

Most of the time, they would resort to desperate measures in a last ditch effort to reach the monthly or weekly quota. But as we know these futile attempts made no difference other than making them look desperate.

Surviving this job requires persistent effort and a high degree of salesmanship acquired from years of experience and training.

What Persistence is Not

One of the roadblocks to becoming a successful salesperson is the lack of understanding of the customers and the sales process. In order to succeed in a highly competitive market, a salesperson should know the difference between persistence and pushing too far.

Here are some telltale signs that a salesperson has already crossed the line:

1. Salesperson does all the talking.

Sales people can become overly enthusiastic to the point where they start taking up most of the conversation. This usually puts customers on the defensive, especially if they don’t have any intention of buying the product. Some salespersons are not so conscious about it, but it’s actually off-putting to most customers.

2. Salesperson offers ‘solutions’ prematurely.

Businesses provide solutions to their customers’ ‘pain points’. If it’s something that has real value to the customer, it won’t be too hard to make the sale.

However, giving ‘unsolicited advice’ by offering a ‘solution’ too soon can be misconstrued as pushing the sale. Although not necessarily wrong, it would be much better if they would hear from the customers first before going any further.

3. Salesperson gets too ‘salesy’.

Nobody likes a pushy salesperson and people’s natural reaction is to back away if a sales person tries to tell the prospect what is good for them, even if the prospect wants what the salesperson is selling.

Be honest about your product or service and never over-promise — and definitely never lie. A salesperson needs to lead the prospect to water, not try to drown them.

4. Offer discounts too soon.

If not done correctly, offering discounts right off the bat can actually send a different message to the customers. It could mean one of two things — it’s cheap quality, or it’s previously overpriced.

Either way, customers will have a negative impression about the offer, especially those who prefer quality and value over price savings.

5. Criticize others.

Badmouthing other companies betrays a lack of confidence and could undermine the company’s reputation. However, it doesn’t mean sales people couldn’t give their honest opinion about a certain product or service. They just have to put it in context and not use it to promote their own.

Lead Them in — Don’t Push!

The notion of smooth-talking salesman has long been gone. It’s no longer just about the personality or creating a good first impression.

We now live in an era where customers make buying decisions based on facts and not just on some 30-second TV, or YouTube commercial. Hence, we don’t expect customers to just pour in or take the bait right then and there.

We need to cultivate their minds and educate them about the benefits of using our products or services instead of shoving them down their throats.

Converting leads to buying customers doesn’t have to be that hard, if we only take time to nurture them. There are 3 ways you can accomplish this:

Know your customers better. Contacting each potential customer at random will only lead to frustration. You need a tool that allows you to keep in touch with all your contacts and be able to sort them out in the most efficient way. CRM applications like Small Business Dream can make this all possible with less effort.
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Follow-up your leads. Your initial contact with your customers can give away some clues about the things that they like or are interested in. Have them fill up a quick survey and ask some basic information, or you can invite them to your mailing list for a weekly or monthly newsletter to learn more about the benefits of using your product or service.
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Be patient. Unless you’re very lucky, you won’t get the sale on the very first engagement. On average, it takes around 4 to 7 engagements before a deal is made. So be patient and wait for the right opportunity. You don’t want to annoy your prospect with your incessant calls or reminders about the offer. But if your leads are already ripe for the picking, by all means get to them and close the deal as soon as possible.

Being a salesperson doesn’t have to be too difficult with today’s latest innovation in sales and marketing. Small Business Dream simplifies the work for you, so you won’t have to sweat it out just to get things done.

Visit us at www.smallbizdream.com to learn more about our suite of tools which include sales funnel, survey engine, email autoresponders and more.

Creating a Detailed Buyer Persona to Guide Your Marketing Efforts

Businesses are always upgrading their strategies to increase ROI. The buyer persona epitomizes their constant efforts to stay relevant with their customers by creating an idealized customer to guide their marketing efforts.

The shift from generalized, stereotypical advertising to individualized customer engagement is one the most important milestones that changed the way companies and businesses market themselves to world.

Buyer Persona vs. Stereotype

Buyer persona is coined from the word ‘persona’, often associated with psychology and literature. When applied to business, it means an ideal customer with the most desirable traits suitable for marketing.

This ‘model customer’ serves as the basis for the company’s design, production, and marketing efforts from which they can generate income. Different industries can have several buyer personas, each having unique, individual characteristics that mirror their real-life equivalents.

A common misconception about the buyer persona is the old practice of stereotyping customers popular among traditional businesses. They would try to fit every customer into a category based on assumptions and generalizations.

The fundamental difference between a buyer persona and a stereotype is the understanding of the circumstances that revolve around the customer – his work, lifestyle, education, hobbies, expertise, expectations, buying habits, etc.

A stereotype barely scratches the surface and provides an incomplete picture of your target market, while a buyer persona goes deeper by creating a life-like representation of your ideal customers based on facts and research.

The Buyer Persona’s Role in Business

Marketing efforts gravitate on the customer’s ever-changing needs embodied by the buyer persona. Without a proper understanding of the customers, all efforts from production, marketing, and sales are irrelevant.

A well-researched buyer persona protects their investments by guiding them on what products or services – with their many variants and slight nuances – to provide their customers and how they can successfully market them across different channels.

Creating a Buyer Persona

The first step in creating an all-inclusive buyer persona is to collect every available information from customers through research, surveys and interviews .

Sources include demographic information of a particular area, CRM data, emails, social media, and Google Analytics. These data will serve as the building blocks of the ideal customer’s ‘DNA’.

Coming up with an accurate representation of the ideal costumer takes time. In some instances, it is necessary to create two or more personas if data points to more than just one type of customer.

What to Include

Business firms compile different information from various sources and creates a unified picture of their imaginary customer. The following information will help you throughout the process.

Demographic information
• Age bracket
• Gender
• Country/Nationality
• Language

Personal information
• Educational attainment
• Profession/Occupation
• Civil Status
• Income Level

Customer information
• Buying History
• Buying Motivation
• Buying Preference
• Average Spending

Specific Skills and Interests

Acquiring firsthand information can take time because it involves actual conversation with people and encouraging them to participate in surveys.

Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter is a treasure trove when it comes to personal information, skills, and interests about your customers. Some companies collect information about their fans and followers as part of their marketing strategy.

If your company doesn’t have a Facebook or Twitter account, consider social media marketing as a way of gathering relevant information about your target market.

You can also learn about their specific interests through your landing pages and opt-in subscriptions to your weekly or monthly newsletters. These data can be acquired more easily using ‘call to action’ (CTA) links or buttons within the page or email.

When it comes to customer records of previous and current customers, nothing comes close to CRM customer data because it allows businesses to stay up-to-date with its constant supply of data from day to day transactions.

Look for the Right CRM Service to Guide You

Small Business Dream offers a suite of tools which include customer acquisition, sales funnel, and sales and marketing automation for small business owners like you.

Learn more on how Small Business Dream can help you with your marketing efforts by visiting our website at www.smallbizdream.com.

Digital and Physical Customer Engagement, and Why We Need Both

The Internet’s rise to power in the late 90s has changed the way businesses interact with customers in an unprecedented way. Online stores and e-commerce websites started a new trend in customer engagement which enabled all kinds of businesses to link up with customers worldwide.

It leveled the playing field between small businesses and large companies by introducing automation and digital customer engagement which replaces many of their routine tasks, and lessened the impact of promotion expenses by harnessing the power of the World Wide Web.

This begs the question whether or not this movement would replace the human aspect of customer engagement. Is it possible for all businesses to be run entirely with automation in the near future?

Pros and Cons

To answer this, we need to look at the possible outcomes of using just one method of customer engagement.

Consider the following pros and cons of relying solely to one method of customer engagement:

PHYSICAL CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

Pros

The ability to communicate with customers on a deeper level. This can be accomplished personally, over the phone, or online.

Businesses interact with their clients in a meaningful way, providing answers to specific questions, issues, and concerns.

Cons

A high volume of customers could also mean hiring additional personnel to improve service. This translates to higher costs in running the business (hiring, training, employee benefits, etc.).

Slow response compared to digital customer engagement. Everything is basically a one-on-one engagement.

DIGITAL CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

Pros

Repetitive and time consuming tasks are accomplished quickly and easily through automation and CRM tools and applications.

Highly efficient and scalable. Businesses can accommodate a growing number of customers and adapt to their needs without having to hire additional personnel. This translates to lower operational costs and a better chance to compete in the marketplace.

Cons

It requires some experience and technical know-hows of customer relationship management.

Tends to be ‘robotic’ because it lacks the human aspect of customer engagement.

As it turns out, ‘digitizing’ customer engagement is not everything. There are certain aspects of customer relationship that could never be replaced by complex machines and IT services. By the same token, relying only to physical customer engagement will yield an equally unpleasant result.

Avoid Both Extremes

Relying on just one mode of customer engagement is a recipe for disaster. There has to be a delicate balance between the two and they should be used to complement each other.

There are many examples of companies that suffered enormously because of their inability to adapt to the changing trends, particularly with the way they interact with customers.

Tower Records is one example of a business empire that succumbed to the Internet’s rise to power. Online music stores slowly ate up their dwindling customer base until its eventual collapse in 2006.

A post-mortem analysis showed that they failed to anticipate the emergence of online stores like iTunes which sold digital music and music files at a cheaper price. Tower Records overstretched their resources in physical stores and outlets and was unable to come up with a digital alternative in response to the customer’s changing needs.

On the other end of the spectrum, Sears Holdings did the exact opposite with the same catastrophic results. Most of its resources had been used up for e-commerce and other online ventures and left a small portion to its brick-and-mortar business.

As a result, other companies took up that space and the company had lost a substantial market share to its competitors. In seven years time, stock price had gone down by 75%.

We Need Both to Succeed

A perfect blend of digital and physical customer engagement is the key to become a successful business in a highly competitive environment. Whatever shortcomings digital customer engagement has are completely wiped out by its physical counterpart, and vice versa.

To learn more on how you can incorporate the digital aspect of customer interaction to your brick-and-mortar store, visit our website at www.smallbizdream.com and learn how you can grow your business with our suite of tools designed for small business owners like you.

Stay in the Lead – KNOW Your Customers Better

As a business owner, spending some time to know your customers can make a big difference in reaching out to them and improving your sales. More people — millennials especially — are starting their own businesses, whether it’s home-based or a small brick-and-mortar store.

Starting up a business is never easy, much less running it. But with the right tools and know-hows on how to get the job done, you can accelerate your growth and not be left behind.

One of the most effective ways to achieve phenomenal growth in any kind of business is by taking a customer-centric approach to marketing and by putting the customers first.

What’s at Stake

Companies who fail at communicating with their customers have been known for making the worst marketing flops. They assume customers will like a certain kind of product or service when the fact is, they want something else. The result is often a totally useless product that completely misses the target market.

To make up for this, companies will try every trick in the book just to get people to like it. They would spend millions of dollars on ads and promotional materials to no avail in hopes of recouping their investments.

If all people care about is how they can take advantage of the business opportunity with little or no regard to customer satisfaction, they have to stop and rethink their strategy; otherwise they go out of business.

The key is to know your customers first and foremost, and define your unique value proposition. Spending some time to know your customers and making them your priority will always pay off in the long run.

Why Businesses Fail

The vast majority of businesses that failed are those that are just starting up. Bloomberg reports that for every 10 startups, 8 will crash and burn within the first 18 months.

In a study conducted by Peppers and Rogers Group, 70 percent of the customers leave a company because of poor service and 60 percent fail to convert into customers because they felt customer service is indifferent to their needs.

Some of the reasons why businesses fail include:

Failure to innovate

Customers can grow tired of the same old stuff. If you’re stuck with just one particular product or style, your chances for growth and expansion is very slim. When it comes to your marketing strategy, innovation is also key. If you don’t have a web portal, a landing page, or even just a social media account to your brick-and-mortar business, you’ve already lost a substantial amount of potential customers to your competitors. The time you stop innovating is the time you start losing ground to them.

Failure to differentiate

What is your unique value proposition? Customers tend to remember brands or companies because they are among the few who stand out from the rest. If you’re trying to compete with an already existing market, you’re going to have a tough fight ahead of you. Find your own niche, do something new from time to time, but try not to go overboard. Otherwise, you might actually get the opposite of what you want.

Failure to communicate

This, perhaps, is the most crucial part and where most companies would either float or sink to the bottom. The majority of traditional outbound marketing practices are just one-way communication. They don’t care if you’re listening or not; they’ll just say what they want you to hear. We all know how that turned out in some companies — and it’s never cheap.

Keeping your lines of communication open for your customers enables you to stay ahead of the competition by knowing exactly what they want and by giving them the right products and quality service that they deserve. To be successful, you need to have the right tools to bring your business closer to them and accomplish the task much faster.

Small Business Dream’s Survey Engine is an amazing feature that allows business owners to create their own customized surveys with very little effort. Or, they can interact with their customers via email, social media, or on the phone using its automated and semi-automated features.

Small Business Dream simplifies the work for you by providing a CRM designed specially for small business owners like you. We provide you with a suite of tools to know your customers better and boost your sales in ways you never thought possible.

Know What Your Customer Wants and When They Want It

When a customer comes in to buy certain goods or use a particular service, smart companies keep track of the customer’s buying habits to guide them with decision-making and predicting customer orders and purchases.

From the standpoint of a buying customer, he may notice something different from time to time, like why a certain brand is strangely low in numbers and why other brands are taking up the space that was left out.

A lot of businesses use predictive analysis to know what customers would likely buy in the future based on the current trends, i.e. what most customers are actually buying and how frequent.

However, it’s not as simple as overstocking your shelves with merchandise just because they are frequently sold. It requires careful analysis and taking every possibility into consideration.

The Role of Customer Relationship Management in Business

Customer Relationship Management tools (CRM) came in response to the rapidly-growing business industries. Back then, we only had spreadsheets and repositories to store and analyze data.

Nowadays, we have integrated, collaborative software tailored specifically for businesses. These applications are capable of handling incredible amounts of data and performing complex calculations to provide business owners with real-time analysis of their sales and marketing strategy.

Companies like KFC and McDonalds have been employing CRM tools for quite some time . Even the government uses CRM in some ways because it provides a more realistic and practical way to address the needs of its citizens.

Using CRM to Predict the Future

Making predictions is not as simple as it sounds. We need to factor in specific details like who usually bought them, specific time of the year, how much, how often, and the list goes on.

So how do smart companies make their projections based on customer data?

Analyzing customer data

Each time a customer checks out with his loyalty card, customer data goes right into the data centers or servers for processing. Without the proper tools to analyze and interpret these data, they’re nothing more than just a useless pile of customer information. CRM transforms these data into a usable format business owners could easily understand.

Loyalty and point cards are so popular with businesses nowadays. Your wallet is probably stuffed with them. If you have a loyalty card for your grocery store then the chain store is tracking every purchase you make and putting it into their CRM.

Narrowing down potential customers and repeat customers

Some of your prospects can become your regular buyers and loyal customers over time. Such information about your customer can serve as your basis when making your projections about sales.

If a brand of soap gets sold more frequently to a certain group of customers, your CRM can provide some answers and help you understand why this trend will continue on or if it’s just a short-term success.

Maintaining contact with the customers

CRM keeps track of your customers’ buying habits, interests, preferences, lifestyle, and other relevant information about them. Some even have features that remind users to follow-up with customers in a timely manner such as Small Business Dream’s Action List.

One of the best ways to maintain good relationship with your customers is to show how much you value them . Thanking them through Facebook, Twitter, email or SMS for making your company a part of their experience can go a long way.

Understanding past and current trends

Hindsight is said to have a 20/20 vision. CRM goes further by allowing you to ‘see’ the future. Telecom industries provide a classic example of how changing trends can make or break a company.

During the heyday of telecom companies like Nokia, mobile phones are regarded mainly as communication devices. Nokia had too much focus on their product line, all the while ignoring the competition and what the customers want for their mobile phones at that time.

By the time they realized it, they were on the verge of losing the market. They were too late. The once mighty telecom giant crumbled under its own weight and disappeared from the scene. The moral of the story? Don’t ignore the trends. Keep your eyes open and find out what is it that you’re missing out on.

Customer relationship management allows businesses to cut through the noise and “see the forest for the trees.” Learn how CRM applications like Small Business Dream can make a difference for your small business.

To find out more about Small Business Dream visit our website at www.smallbizdream.com