With the changes brought by COVID and the lockdowns, sales and business revenue were greatly affected. The normal day-to-day transactions were changed into out-of-traditional practices and mostly operated online. How are small-time businesses reacting to the sudden changes and new processes everyone must adhere to? How are sales making an impact on your brand after all these changes? We are joined today by Darren Roberts, an expert from Impact Training to help us unbundle sales and impact your brand.
Previously, businesses operated in a brick-and-mortar operations or operated with an online presence. When COVID first hit, most reacted quickly, and they made an online space. This allowed them to engage with their customers and continue to do business. After a year and a half and the stores opened and began doing face-to-face operations again, they continued their online presence.
They could sell and provide services to a wider and expanded market. The leader has to care to eliminate low-morale employees legitimately. These will give workers an open view on doing other tasks and responsibilities. With lead generation, it will rely on collaboration.
This may not have a cash basis transaction, but collaborating with other businesses will help your end sales. Choosing the type of business you will work with that is not your direct competition will be your first step. Maintaining a relationship with the alternative business that complements your business is your next course of action.
One of the benefits of collaboration is that people are open to building rapport and mutual commonality. It makes connecting easy because of a certain topic or interest between the two parties. They can be introduced to each other by a third party which will be their instant connection.
There is also what you call "professional stalking," where you use social media to gather information about the other party you are meeting with. You can learn how they communicate from their LinkedIn accounts or a previously posted podcast.
There is so much to learn with how fast a person talks, how much information they capture when they are conversing, or even their body language. This is where you will base your rapport, running it in your head subconsciously. Getting the right information will give you the preparation you need to understand better the other person you will contact and build rapport seamlessly.
Communication between the sales and marketing teams is usually severed. They often blame one another though they are part of each other's functions. Planning or doing reverse engineering of the sales process can work where the sales department goes back and trace their targets or KPIs.
From there, they find out how many contacts or leads they need to guarantee to achieve their target conversion. Once they get that number, they approach the marketing team and inform them that this is their target conversion.
The marketing team then provides qualified leads at a specific number, which should put them together on the same page. Customers buy emotionally and later justify their purchase. Finding the right approach considering what the buyers would feel is the best action to take to get the best sales response.
Finding the right conversion methods is the key in whatever business there is, may it be small or large-scale. Finding the best practice where the business solution team diagnoses the problem and marketing prescribes a solution using emotional selling. Understanding how your customers feel will provide you the best response which will translate to better sales in the end.