Strategies for Sales Success

This blog post has been authored by Stand Out Online Member Sinead Norton, Strategies for Sales Success

Three shoestring budget strategies to help you gain sales success and take you from BROKE to BOOKED.

These are the 3 methods I used to take my wedding business from 0-100 bookings in our first year and more than 300 weddings in our second and third year and over 400 – 500 weddings a year after that!

Be booked in advance and CONTROL how to get your bookings! No cold calling or nasty tactics involved. In fact, these strategies help you build good relationships in your industry and install good customer services practise in your business.

What kind of business can benefit?
• Wedding Businesses
• Beauty Businesses
• Service Based Businesses
• Holistic Businesses
• Therapists and Coaches
• Hospitality based businesses.

Strategy One
Use your customers as salespeople and referrals!
If you have already provided a good service to your customers, they are normally willing to be your “word of mouth” advertisers. You can ask them for
• Testimonials.
• Photos of your items in their world (customer photos are always more popular than your own.)
• Refer a friend with or without an incentive for them or their friend. (Details in my masterclass)
Objective: People trust people who have already bought from you and who have been pleased at the results. They are more likely to buy as this is not an advertisement or cold sale. There are many ways that you can put this in practise in person. This strategy helps you connect with a whole community of customers who are repeat customers and who pass your business details forward. It is much easier to sell to people who already trust you.
Result: This accounted for a lot of our sales especially online, where customers shared our social media profile with friends. We also hosted yearly competitions on our website where we got family and friends of our customers involved. This was less spammy than like and comment competitions on Facebook and a lot cheaper than paid advertising. And it helped build our new audience base.

Strategy Two
Make Peer to Peer Connections!
Make connections with other business owners who have the same customer audience as you do get to work on sharing audiences and customers.
• Share their posts and they share yours.
• Offer a joint offer product.
• Leave incentives for them to give out your details and offer to reciprocate.
Objective: It costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time to build a customer base. By joining forces with other businesses, you are reaching their audience immediately and gaining the trust of their followers, and vice versa. You are connecting with people who may not have found you otherwise, but who are a sitting audience interested in your values and ideals.
Result: We build strong bonds with other people in our industry who became our support system as well as referral system. It meant that we worked together with customers on many projects. It was easy to work through these projects as time went on as we were used to our working systems. We were able to streamline our systems, save money on advertising and build our reputation in our industry.

Strategy Three
Use Influencers in your industry to reach new customers!
Who is a go-to business in your industry? Can you partner with them so that the customers find you first? Surrounding yourself with people of influence can boost your business immensely. Is it a blog, magazine, community group, business network? Can you be featured online?
• Place an editorial in a leading industry magazine or blog telling your story.
• Feature on as many directories as you can.
• Offer a product incentive to influencers.
Objective: You are being endorsed by a brand leader. In some cases, this may cost you a little in the form of advertising, but you are being projected directly to an audience who has already been built to suit your products. The secret to being successful in this is to be an expert and offer value and advice to attract the followers to your business.
Result: Many customers who follow industry leaders are higher end customers, and therefore, bigger spenders and more serious customers. Once we were associated and aligned with market influencers, more opportunities opened, and higher end customers booked. This increased our profit, strengthened our reputation, and guaranteed us visibility that we otherwise could not afford.

Sinead, from Northern Ireland, mother of 7 kids, has been self employed for over 15 years. Sinead built up an award winning wedding business, and decided to share her successes, and struggles with other women in business, like herself. The Mums at Work Network was born, to support, advise and to connect like minded women. The focus of our network is to help women save time and money, keep up to date in their business, and to connect them so they can support and refer them to others who like, know and trust them.