Empowering Your Sales Growth in COVID Times
During COVID-19, many companies are turning to business mentors for advice on boosting their revenues during an economic crisis.
Here is some advice for boosting revenues by empowering sales.
First things first: Instil mental toughness
Resilience is “an essential sales skill,” this distinguishing quality will help businesses thrive through the crisis. Millions are affected by a pervasive sense of loneliness. It helps to reframe the experience as a shared phenomenon and practise gratitude to maintain a positive mind set.
Strategic use of downtime
Moving on to more action-oriented steps, entrepreneurs can capitalise on their increased downtime to devise and deploy marketing strategies for their business to remain top-of-mind for their current and potential customers.
“History tells us that economies always come back. When it does, will you be ready for it?”. The effort put in to push your company’s messaging will pay off when consumers eventually regain their buying power.
Don’t hit pause on business development
It is a myth that there are currently no clients out there. Businesses should appeal to their clients’ emotions by demonstrating empathy and compassion, as opposed to relying on traditional hard selling methods, to attract business in the current era.
Demonstrate value to potential customers by sharing how your company has helped similar clients or other valuable information (e.g., news about relevant digital innovations or global industry trends), asking current clients for referrals and wooing away competitors’ smaller clients who may feel neglected.
Keep solving problems, making sales
Businesses neglect the ‘why’ of their products and services and do an inadequate job of drafting sales plans when they solely focus on their products’ USPs, and not features and benefits in their marketing activities.
As some business mentors on the Jupiter Platform would tell you, Human behaviour is motivated as much by emotions as it is by logic and reasoning. Loss aversion is also a major driving force for our actions. Expanding on this idea, he said that people work twice as hard to avoid a problem than to achieve a positive outcome.
Therefore, it is crucial for businesses to study their potential customers’ pain points and focus their marketing efforts on how their products and/or services can alleviate those pain points. Businesses are more likely to earn clients, even in these cash-strapped times, in this manner.
Navigating the cost-cutting culture
With most companies paring down expenses and rival businesses slashing their prices in response, it appears to be a difficult time to make money as a business. However, the current business scenario, the desire to save personal careers rather than business money is the primary motivator when engaging a new contractor or agency for a job.
Buyers are 8 times more likely to hire a company if they believe that the decision will reflect favourably on them. When pitching corporate clients, it is thus necessary to subtly emphasise how your business can help them advance their own career. Ask any sales mentor or business consultant and you will get similar advice.
About price concessions, discounts can be part of a sales strategy but a business must always know and remember their walk-away price during negotiations. Offering deferred payment plans instead of discounts would be more beneficial.
Is it the time to diversify?
Whether product diversification is a good idea? The decision depends on the nature of the business. If the business operates in a thriving sector, such as e-commerce, then expanding is a good idea. If it only supports short-term business goals, such as quick cash, then the investment put into the product development and launch should reflect that.
A match with the core business is key, as the introduction of the new products should not dilute the company’s image. And when launching new products, it’s very important to communicate to customers the exact needs fulfilled by the new product.
Get adept at virtual communication
It may be some time before sales teams can meet with clients face-to-face. COVID-19 has forced sales professionals to develop a whole set of new skills in order to effectively win over clients using video conferencing tools.
In the absence of the “luxury of social connection”, where neither body language nor spoken and unspoken cues can be observed, sales teams also have shorter timeframes for establishing rapport with clients and discovering their pain points.
Research is more important than ever, and using social media is critical. With lots of information about clients available in the public domain, sales professionals can develop a more targeted line of questioning for uncovering their pain points while also finding it easier to match their personality style.
Whether you are an individual or a corporate enterprise, you can benefit from advice on sales for your business besides financial advice, and risk management consulting to help you reboot and take you through your post-pandemic revival.
About Author : Jupiter Business Mentors (JBM) is a platform dedicated to fostering the start-up community and small & medium business enterprises with an access to experienced executives and industry experts from various areas of business, in the UAE and across the Middle East region, with plans in pipeline to have global mentors listed on the platform. You can reach us on jupiterbusinessmentors.com
