How to Out-Sell Your Competitors No Matter What Business You Are In

Have you been asking yourself lately “how do I increase sales?” or “how can I increase sales?” or “how to find more buyers?”  In this post you will discover proven sales tactic that work to always get more sales and profit – online or offline, no matter the kind of business you’re in or what you sell. These strategies will help you to increase sales and get more new and repeat buyers.

What are the 20% doing differently to increase sales? Read on and you’ll discover the sales tips and tricks that are responsible for only few (20%) internet marketers getting the most buyers all the time. The difference is in the selling skills and techniques.

8 Strategic Sales Techniques For Small Businesses to Get More Buyers And Increase Sales

This post will show you 8 powerful but subtle attraction marketing strategies that the top dogs implement in their business to get more buyers than your competitors, and always double sales. It’s about being there before your prospective customer ever thinks of the product, and then piling up value upon vaue to your prospective customers. Having an in-depth knowledge of your customers and their now and future needs is key to making this strategy work for you.

Increase Sales Tip #1: Have the Right Offer, Promote It To The Right Market

Do you have the right offer? If you do, is the market you are promoting to the right one? What crowd are your promotions attracting?

Being in the wrong place or selling the wrong thing in the right/ wrong place is counter productive even if you work all day at it.

Here’s how to find out if you have the wrong offer or are in the wrong market:

• Who are your customers? Is your offer something they are interested in? Is what you are offering what the crowd you are targeting wants?

If your honest answer to any of the above is No and you absolutely must sell to that crowd – change your product. Find exactly what they need and want to buy now and offer it to them.

• Who are you targeting in your marketing promotions? Are you targeting amiss? Are the people that you currently target the right crowd for what you are offering?

If you answered No, you are targeting the wrong market – your real customers are somewhere else. Fix that – consider looking for where your “real customers” hangout and go put your offer in front of them.

The cost of marketing, in cash and time, is so much that you should not be promoting a product to a crowd that is not interested in what you offer, else they will come and be frustrated that you don’t offer what they want.

If you target your ideal customers amiss, it would take you a longer time to make enough sales to cover your cost of customer acquisition. Consider what it would cost if you had a warehouse, a physical shop and staff – all these accrue costs over time whether you are making sales or not.

Even if you are a solo entrepreneur, the time value of money implies that if you are not selling fast your cost of marketing and sales would be eating into your profit.

At every point you should always think of selling more in the shortest possible time so that you are always in profit.

Lesson: Target the right market and place the right offer in front of them, then watch your sales increase. Put your offer in the face of only the people who are most likely to buy from you so that you can make sales fast.

Increase Sales Tip #2: Improve the Value of Your Products/ Services in the Eyes of Your Customers

Take a look at how the big shopping malls are driving sales and crushing competition? They give a little bit of the real thing – for free. They use free to get all the customers (including those that could have gone to competitor’s malls) into their door. Get one buy one free. Free trials etc.

Free is the main vehicle of attraction marketers. Customers want improved value on any purchase, and they want free. Top marketers give improved value for free. In addition to the products they market, they create extra information that can help extend values to the people who would buy those products.

Think – usually manufacturers of products only think of features in their user manuals while buyers always look for benefits. Until they see and understand benefits, they will keep searching.

Benefits are what stand between buyers and a product; insufficient explanation of benefits delays decision to purchase. Do what you can to remove that barrier. If you can just position yourself between the buyer and the products so that your blog is the last place customers in your niche come to find all the missing information the manufacturer did not provide, that you know customers want to get before buying.

Create a special free reports with more information on the products you market, to improve product values in the eyes of your prospective customers.

Improving product value increases the quality of a product in the eyes of customers and makes it more attractive. They start seeing the product as cheaper than usual because of added free information.  The power of free is that it gets in tons of customers into your door and more related information keeps them there – so you always have an audience for your offers.

One popular and effective method of extending the value of a product or is the use of giveaway eBooks – you can write a How-to guide that can teach your buyers how to use or maintain the product you are selling. Usually, manufacturers and product creators how-tos are not simple enough for buyers. That’s a gap that you can fill, and at the same time add value to your customers while differentiating your offer at the same time.

• For a guide on how to create your freebie eBook to give to your prospective customers, click to read: How To Create a Giveaway eBook for your customers in Just 1 Day.

Increase Sales Tip #3: Be There Before The Sale

The secret to carting away the most sales is to be there before the sale is made.

Those who are crush the market – they get more customers than others. The one who walked with the customer through the sales process wins the sale. The key is knowing that the sales process starts long before the customer even makes a purchase decision – a good reason to using blogging and email newsletters to keep your prospects engaged, educated and informed, to hold their attention so they when they decide to buy, you’re still there.

You may be asking “How can I be there before the sale”? Some of the ways to position your brand (and you) before the sale, include:

• Blogging about useful tips and information
• Building a customers list to stay in touch with your target audience (before they are ready to need or buy what you offer
• Sending emails to your list, to keep them engaged and give them a chance to know you enough to trust your future purchase recommendations
• Answering questions in online groups, forums and social sites where your ideal clients hangout (e.g. LinkedinAnswers, YahooAnswers, WarriorForum etc)
• Tweeting and social-sharing useful tips. If you tweet useful stuff, people who got value from it will follow you.
• Joining social media sites where your ideal clients are members, and start engaging with them

Put your marketing and brand information and contents out there where every possible prospect can find them. All of those 5 steps are done on the internet – one on the search engines and the other 4 on websites and blogs that have useful educative information related to what they want to buy.

At their pre-buying stage, all they are looking for is more and more information. Wherever they get lots of unbiased information they’ll go back for more, and when they enough information they’ll buy through the link which that website provides.

Your focus should be to get the attention of a buyer from stage 1 in the buying cycle so that they find on your blog all the information they ever need to make a decision about the right service or product.

Position yourself early in your customer’s pre-purchase cycle early before they need the product. Let’s take this example – a blog about pregnancy care. Some of the readers and subscribers would include single ladies who would become customers when they get married.

Think of a new category of prospects – those who are interested in what you offer, would need your product later but cannot now for some reasons. For example if you market children’s books on your blog, some of your readers and subscribers could be single women who may be engaged now or planning for a wedding. They could be following your blog and keep you in view, till when they have a child.

Increase Sales Tip #4: Differentiate and Out-Sell By Teaching and Informing

If everybody is selling the same product, how would you add a twist to differentiate yours from that of other distributors or salespeople? I am sure you are not going to sit there using the same strategies and getting few sales, are you?

The customers who are ready to buy now want more (information) before they part with their cash, give it to them. You can differentiate your business by informing and educating your ideal customers, using blogging.

Paul Zane Piltzer, in his book The Next Millionaires, mentioned that “the fortunes to be made today and in the years ahead will be made by those who are involved in teaching people about new products and services that they didn’t know existed or didn’t know were now affordable.” And he called that intellectual distribution. He further highlighted that people learn via word-of-mouth from other people.

Intellectual Marketing is the strategy that the top marketers in your business are using to out-sell their competitors. They understand that customers first want to learn more about their offers. They also understand that the internet is where majority of these customers go to search for answers. Top marketers provide the needed customer information on their websites, ready to be found.

This way, they always get the sale from even the people who were not yet interested about the offer in question, but who become interested after learning about the benefits from the website contents.

Teach customers how to use a product. Teach how to fix a problem or weakness of a product. Teach how to setup a product by themselves. If you sell makeup, for example, teach prospective customers how to use it. Teach… Teach …Teach before they buy.

Fear of not knowing how to use or fix a product is one of the objections for buying. You can upfront break that objection by teaching, and more people will buy.

Refine your marketing and sales strategy to involve teaching your prospective customers so that as they learn more about a product they want to buy now, they trust your information and intent the more and even buy from you repeatedly.

To make better of this strategy of education-based marketing, ensure to have a customers’ email opt-in list and update your subscribers on new information and updates via emails.

Teaching drives sales and is less stressful and creates a reusable salesman – your contents which stand in for you, and continue to work for you after the day you create them so that you do not need to hire (and pay salary to ) a human salesman.

Blogs are now increasingly being used successfully by small and large businesses alike, to reach their customers directly to provide useful information that leads closer to making sales to the readers. eBooks are also another medium of teaching your customers what you think would be useful to them and help break the barriers to making a purchase. 

• If you do not have a business website, you should consider setting one up today. For a non-techie guide on why and how to set up your business blog, click to read: How to Setup a New WordPress Blog for Your Business.

Increase Sales Tip #5: Increase Value by Offering Complimentary Products / Services

Create different ways that you can get money from your target customers, without deviating from the theme of your business or product. Increase your product value in the eyes of your customers.

After getting customers in the door with free offers, you should ask yourself “how can I increase the value pyramid?”; “what new services or products will buyers of my product need to help them further enjoy their experience with the product?”.

Customers like to get stuff from one single place and sometimes do not buy from a place because they’ll have to go to different places to get the remainder of items – consider creating a hub around your product line.

These could mean one of these:

• Adding some complimentary products or services. If you sold needles, throw in threads.
• Add a done-for-you-service. If you sell flowers, consider selling flower posts
• How-to books, CDs and videos
• Provide follow up with tips and tricks to help customers enjoy their products

To expand your list of complimentary offers you could ask your current customers what they would like to see you add to your product line.

Smart marketers diversify their offerings by affiliating himself with providers of products related to the needs of their target customers. That way, you do not send your customers away after they have gone through a sales pre-qualification process.

Your current customers (product users) are in the best position to tell you what additions would make them get a better experience from enjoying the product they purchased.  Ask some customers (a poll) what they would like the product creator to add to make them enjoy the product or service better. The responses you get would give you an insight into complimetary products that would sell out fast – because the customers asked for it.

That’s how you can get your customers stick to you and buy repeatedly, happily, and you make more profit as a result.

Increase Sales Tip #6: Sell More Stuff to Existing Customers

Get away from one-time hit-and-run sales and start expanding your sales funnel. That is a powerful strategy to get multiple streams of income without deviating from your business theme.

Offer them complimentary products and services to ease their challenges or increase their enjoyment with the products they have already purchased. Read step 5 (above again). What this does is that it increases the lifetime value of your customers and reduces your overall marketing costs.

It takes a lot of time, efforts and (marketing) costs to get new customers and smart marketers try to keep their first time buyers loyal and close. Remember step 5 (above) where I mentioned offering complimentary products – if you do not have complimentary products, I am not sure how you’d be able to make a customer buy again from you.

Increase Sales Tip #7: Build a Customers’ List and Follow Up Regularly

Build an email list of prospective customers – those who are interested to buy from you at some future time – and a list of buying customers.

The more people in your list, the more people to expose your offer to. Remember the saying “the money is in the list and follow-up”?

Invest in an affordable autoresponder and put up an opt-in form  on your blog to give prospects an opportunity to opt-in to your subscription list.

Send follow up emails to the people in your lists.  Make it easy for your prospects and existing customers to act.

Follow up with prospective customers and provide them more useful information and let them know about your offers that would be of benefit to them.Send follow up emails to existing customers, with useful tips and information about new products you believe would be beneficial to them.

This strategy would ensure that you are making repeated sales and new sales from time to time.  With an affordable autoresponder, all you have to do is load the messages and pre-schedule them so that every subscriber on your list gets them no matter when they join the list.

For tips on how to build a massive buyers list, click to read: 7 Steps to Building a Big Profit Pulling Email List from Scratch.

Increase Sales Tip #8: Always Be Generating a Traffic of New Prospects

When you get a stream of fresh new traffic to your blog contents you’ll always never have a day without sales. If you have great contents, simply getting people to your blog would get them to opt-in.

More Website Traffic = More People Seeing Your Offers = More Sales

It’s just a game of numbers, with web traffic.  A blog that has 200 visitors will obviously have more subscribers and make more sales than a blog that gets 50 visitors daily. As you generate more traffic you will always have an active sales pipeline.

Go out there and get traffic to your blog contents; let everyone know about your posts.  Keep leading blog visitors to your subscribers form so that you are not far from them, for when they make up their minds to buy.

• To learn how to get more visitors to your blogread up my post on 9 Effective Ways to Increase Targeted Traffic to Your Blog or Website.

Key Take Away To Get More Buyers To Your Business

What do you think about the above 8 good sales tactics to outsell your competitors and double your profits? I hope you’ll consider  integrating the above creative marketing and sales strategies into your business model so that you can quickly grab a god portion of 80% of the sales in your niche.

Here’s a quick recap of the major take- always from this post:

1. Teach them – be there before the sale
2. Teach them – Follow up after the sale, with more teaching
3. Build your business around a product line – offer good complimentary products to get repeat purchases and increase the life value of your customers.
4. Always be generating a traffic of new prospects through your blog contents
5. Always be building a list of customers

By implementing the above 8 sales techniques in your online business, you’d be piling up values upon values for your customers and all they’d be seeing is the dollar value – they’d be seeing how buying from you offers them more dollar value (more than if they buy “only the product” from your competitors).

Next Steps…

Thanks for reading . This post is kind of long because I wanted to bring you the best “what’s working now” sales tips and tricks. Remember that change only can come from taking action – knowing the right steps to take is only halfway to getting results. I want to know that you made it to the top 20% Super Affiliates in your niche.

Leave a Comment. I’d love to hear your comments, questions and suggestions or even learn from your own custom strategies of out-selling your competitors.

Share it. If you liked this post and found value in it, your friends will also benefit from it.  Click any of the the share buttons below to quickly email it, Facebook it , tweet it, stumble it, digg it…

I’ll see you at the comments side.

Yours in Success,

Stella

Photo by batintherain

Recommended Resources:

• Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive – Harvey Mackay presents tactics and Mackay 66 tool to use to get a deep insight into your customers needs – knowing them more than any competitor would is your best bet to out-selling in your market. Dig your well before you are thirsty is one tactic that Harvey teaches on how to swim to to shark (that is, get closer to your customers) that touches on “being there before the sale”.  This is one sales manual that has so many “what’s working in any business today” nuggets. You can learn a thing or two to implement in your business, from checking out the reviews and summaries.

• Dig Your Well Before You Are Thirsty Harvey Mackay’s sequel to “Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive”  – excellent principles and action items for you to out-sell in your offline and onine business using social networking strategies that deliver results.  Check out the summaries and reviews.

 

Be the First to Get New Posts in Your Mailbox:
Delivered by FeedBurner