Are you struggling to find the right business strategies to accelerate your business growth? Let’s face it – we’ve all been there, and developing the right business strategies to grow your business efficiently is hard. It takes a lot of trial and error, ups and downs, and most importantly time and money.
Especially the beginning can be quite rough. Your team might be small, and everybody tries to do everything to improve each area. From sales and marketing to customer satisfaction, product quality, and much more. At the end of the day, you’re still making progress, but there might be things you’re missing out on. Things that might generate more income in the short-term, so you could hire an additional person/employee to just focus on one specific area, which feeds the cycle of growth and keeps the momentum going.
You see, we might not see the solution in the eye of the storm. That’s why it’s helpful to talk to somebody outside of the storm. Somebody, who has been through those scenarios successfully. Somebody, who is specialized and experienced in a certain area.
We’ve written this article for you to help you figure out what those areas and strategies are, summarizing the five most efficient business strategies that you should focus on to accelerate your growth, with the help of Darius Saee – Sales expert and founder of the COLDCALLSYSTEM.
1. Improving your Sales Strategy
While there are a lot of areas in your business to work on, the most rewarding probably lies in your sales strategy. Don’t get it wrong: Product quality and customer satisfaction are key to keeping customers happy, making use of “word-of-mouth-marketing” and generating sustainable revenue. But to afford the best quality in all those areas, you need to make the right amount of sales, have the right price, and the right amount of conversion happening.
Here are our 3 most important practical approaches when it comes to improving your sales strategy.
- Clarify your mission
To improve your sales strategy, you need to fully understand your product and customers first. What do you do the best? Who is in need of your product or service? Where do you find these prospects, and how do you best approach them? How much are they willing to pay?
- Specify controllable goals
What are the actions that you can specifically target with concrete goals? Depending on your clarified mission, this could be having a certain number of calls per day, sending out a certain number of mails per day, or anything else you can actively do to get closer to your mission. Focus on actions you can take. Secondly, which results would you like to achieve? This could include sales per month, profit per sale, number of sales, team growth, etc. The more specific, the better!
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Specify your goals and break them down to actionable steps. If you need 40 sales per month, this could roughly be estimated with 10 sales per week, which translates into 1-2 sales per day. Imagine thinking of your 5-year-goal, having 10000 sales with a certain amount of revenue. 10000 sales might sound like a lot. But breaking it down to your daily goals makes it sound more achievable, resulting in you being more confident and motivated to reach that big number. Now it’s your turn. Depending on your product and employees’ skills, what’s the average conversion rate? One sale every 10 calls? A controllable action goal would then be 15 calls per day, with the result goal of 1-2 sales per day. Eventually resulting in the desired monthly goals.
3. Optimize your sales positioning
Now that we figured out our mission, goals, and action steps, we have to take care of our conversion rate. But for that, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Look at the big names in your niche. What are they doing to directly attract and convert their target group? To summarize it broadly, this usually comes down to optimizing for customer need. How do you either attract or convince them of the need? Be creative here. Focus on your product or service benefits, or use a problem-solving-approach.
2. Cold Calling
Now that we figured out the fundamentals of a good sales strategy, it’s time to grab the phone and make some calls, right? But what do you say? How do you get the appointment? How do you measure progress? And how do you become even better, or help your team to get better?
While it is important to look for individual strengths, it’s also important to have a measurable approach to things you can control. The experts in measuring controllable aspects are probably scientists. In scientific approaches, the two things focused on are firstly numbers, and secondly factors. Numbers as in having a lot of “test subjects” or trials, and secondly factors, as in keeping everything the same, only changing one factor, to directly monitor progress. That’s why most cold calling experts have calling scripts, which take you by your hand and help you by having a clear guideline and structure in your calls.
Some extroverted people shine by their charismatic and more human approach in calls, but as not all people have developed the needed social skills yet, a cold calling script is a recommended thing to have.
While it can be a great experience to figure things out on your own, it can also be quite frustrating and inefficient. That’s why we’ve partnered up with Darius Saee, sales expert and founder of his own calling system, here to save you a lot of time, emotions and energy, and most importantly: To save you from losing lots of clients in the first place.
If you are looking for the perfect cold calling script to nail down the appointment with your right contact person on the first call, this is for you. Even better, you will also learn how to build up a full sales pipeline, having a step-by-step instruction on how to build up and boost your sales with cold calling from scratch. And most importantly, convert those into revenue! Sounds like something you might need? Click here and get the combination of all of that! You will be directed to Darius Saee – Founder of the COLDCALLSYSTEM – “How to generate more customer appointments, opportunities and sales pipelines as you can possibly handle.”
You see, the key point here is to have a proven plan that you can easily follow, taking out the guesswork in your sales strategy.
It’s a skill, so you need to practice those scripts with your team. Focus on making it sound natural. Humans are not machines, so things will go wrong or complicated. While practicing, feel free to go into extreme scenarios, make up the biggest and most stubborn objections, and find out what the most convincing benefits and values of your product and company might be for different objections. Sum those up in a “Top 5 sales objections” area in your cold calling script.
3. Lead Gen
Lead gen could be one of the most important areas in your business growth plan. While there is the classic approach of networking and being around the right people, connecting and scheduling your calendar full of calls with potential leadsl, there are also more modern, and sometimes even more efficient ways to generate leads.
With the development of the internet and our modern media, it’s as easy as never before to generate leads, even for introverted people. Generating leads simply translates into getting a possible buyer’s contact. That’s exactly what most modern ad agencies focus on. If you’ve never dealt with the way ads and lead gen work, here is a little 3-step-guide.
- Create content that attracts engagement and leads to conversion
This could be an article on a page, a high-quality video or a click funnel page, or even a survey. Anything that people can click on and consume or follow through.
- Optimize your content on clear and easy-to-follow-through language
While it’s great that you can spend thousands on ads to advertise your content, it’s usually not smart to start with. You have to find a way to communicate efficiently. Make your content easy to digest. If any tiny thing in your article or video is confusing, sounds strange, or creates mistrust, your ad will not work. It might be time to invest in learning a skill like copywriting, or hiring an expert.
- Start small, and scale up once you got it right
There is no pressure to go all in right away, right? Start small. Test things. Hire different content creators to see which one fits your company the most, and which one converts the most. Read up on terms like “sales funnel”, “sales copy” and “conversion copy”
While all those need some time, money, and trial and error to be successful with, there might be an easier, quicker way for you to be more successful.
4. Strategic Partnerships
Strategic partnerships are probably the most efficient, sustaining way to rapidly grow your business. This strategy is a new strategic focus for companies to grow and stay ahead of the competition. This includes the business model itself, products, customer experience, and branding. Furthermore, for strategic business development, it is rudiment to search for new income streams that could be targeted with the current resources available. Mostly as a way of win-win-relationships, making use of each other’s products or buyer groups. Don’t worry, we will jump right into two examples. The first one showing a more traditional way of strategic partnerships, the second one a modern way.
The traditional strategic partnership
Probably the easiest way to make use of strategic partners can be found in the field of lead-gen and affiliates. As an example, imagine your local town’s music store. Hopefully, your town’s music store is full of instruments to try out and buy. But most of those instruments are probably not self-made by the owner. With exceptions, most of them are made, produced, marketed, and sold by big brands. A world-known example could be Yamaha’s pianos. Usually, for every piano sold, the music store gets a commission, that can vary from store to store. In that way, Yamaha doesn’t have to care about a direct way of selling, hiring sales assistants, taking care of a store, and the music store can make use of Yamaha’s brand name, high quality of products, and make easier sales because of that. Win-win.
The modern strategic partnership
The most known modern strategic partnership might be also the easiest. Making use of each other’s email list. This goes especially for businesses with blogs and newsletters. Imagine having a partner with 10.000 potential readers. Even with a low conversion rate around 5%, you would still have made 500 sales, just by sending out one mail. But what if your partner doesn’t have a working mail list?
Let’s look at an example with just customers, where you might be able to skip the newsletter list. For that, we are having a look at the cooperation between the digital accounting company Lexoffice and the fintech bank Penta. Penta has a big customer base of entrepreneurs and companies who will need a reliable accounting program. Penta offers the accounting solution in its banking dashboard to its customers. Whenever a customer registers through Penta with Lexoffice the banking company most probably receives a lead fee. This strategic decision shows that a new lucrative income stream can be generated with a relatively low investment of resources and time by understanding the customer and its needs.
5. How to deal with sales objections
While there are thousands of objections that you might get, especially when you’re trying to get the sale too hard, most of them can be solved in a similar way.
Exceptions included, most sales objections are based on either not having enough trust in the product, people or service yet, or simply gambling around to see if the price is negotiable.
Let’s have a look at one of the most used objections: “It’s too expensive.”
Does this mean that your price is too high? Imagine how much people are spending monthly on coffee, clothes, drinks. Or to go more in the high-end route: Why would somebody, who buys the newest apple products, think that your offer is too expensive?
In sales, we have to differentiate between the actual value and the perceived value. While certainly some people can’t afford your product, most people can. They are just not convinced of the value or the need for your offer.
It might be true that you are the town’s best wedding photographer, but all I need is a new haircut.
You see, sometimes it’s just not the right time to make the sale, and there is nothing you can do about it. Putting your prices down to make your offer more appealing might work, but will only hurt your perceived value, and with that hurt your reputation.
So what can I do differently?
Great question, I’m glad you asked. There are certainly smart ways to communicate your offer in a better way. To do so, you have to focus on the needs of your customer, and his pain points. The main problem is, you only have so many tries to get it right. Maybe your next lead is exactly the person you need, but you are not ready yet with your level of sales skills to convince him of the need to work with you or sell your product to his list.
Well, good news. We’ve partnered up with Darius Saee to help you to skip the most common sales mistakes, and learn to deal with sales objections.
In his COLDCALLSYSTEM, you will learn how to have an ongoing sales pipeline, so that missing out on a lead or two simply doesn’t matter, and you can focus on building up your reputation, instead of being known for getting your price pushed down.
Yes, learning skills on your own is possible. But especially for us driven people, time is the most valuable, most scarce thing we have. So why not reach out to a helping hand, and save some time? Always remember, what you plant now, you will harvest later.
