Our guest blogger today is Jason Morris, the founder and CEO of Profit Engine with tips to effectively boost sales for a small business. For close to a decade, Jason has been helping online businesses owners grow their organic traffic and reach through search engine optimisation. He shares what he considers to be the three most important tool sets for a business looking to increase its sales today.
Three most important tool sets for a business looking to increase its sales today.
To beat your competition and succeed in today’s aggressive business world requires a combination of winning business resources and flawless exploitation of those facilities. Integrating key business tools and processes correctly into your business model increases your ROI and gives you an edge over your competitors.
Here, I describe a simple approach that entails optimising sales using a blend of proven tools and smart implementation of core business processes. The three main sets of tools and software that I describe here are:
- Customer relationship management (CRM) systems
- Marketing tools
- Sales management software
Business tools and key processes to scale up your sales
With so many business tools designed to optimise the elements of a typical business it can be difficult to choose the most appropriate solution when need arises. Here I’ll help you to narrow down your options by outlining the must-have tools you require to grow your sales.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System
One of the most effective approaches to increasing the ROI of your sales and marketing efforts is to create a sound customer support strategy. A good place to start is to ensure you know your product or service in and out, and if you have staff, train them so they have excellent knowledge of the same as well. Additionally, try to listen and ask for feedback from your customers to identify possible areas of improvement. Finally, remain friendly to your customers at all times and resolve their issues as quickly and amicably as you possibly can.
Want to do more than the usual customer management tasks? Consider acquiring a solid CRM tool to help you with the more advanced tasks like collection of prospect data and automation of customer messaging for more informed business decision-making.
To achieve higher results when using a CRM tool, it’s important to automate all possible key processes as this helps to take a substantial workload off your shoulders.
Picture this – adding a contact to the Salesforce CRM takes less than ten minutes. This tool then automates your contact management, providing you with crucial data like your prospects activity history and discussions. Use this information to learn more about the tastes and preferences of different contacts as this is a good starting point for successful selling.
Marketing tools
There’s no shortage of marketing approaches you can adopt today, and this depends on factors like your target prospects, available budget, and the size of your business. The basic marketing strategies you can include to help make up your lead generation and sales campaigns are SEO, email and social media.
SEO: You will always find ways to improve and optimise your website for the search engines by implementing simple but effective tasks like keyword research or setting up a Google My Business page if you are into local selling. TLD is great with helping to guide you here – and I am there in a consulting capacity.
Email marketing entails sending targeted email campaigns to a group of prospects with the aim of nurturing and ultimately converting them into buyers. This starts off a chain of processes that culminates in lead generation, management, nurturing, and maturation to customers.
Social Media Marketing: When it comes to social media marketing, the idea is to promote and increase the visibility of your business on social channels like LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Automating social media and email marketing strategies saves you a substantial amount of time while at the same time boosting your sales without unduly increasing your expenditure.
Sales management system
Sales management is the third and final aspect in this 3 part strategy. It entails tracking a customer from the moment they place an order to the point their order is shipped; this includes sensitive processes like invoicing. To minimise human errors and enhance the efficiency and speed of managing sales, you might want to consider using proven automation solutions like Salesforce, Pipedrive, Exponea and Hubspot. Other free or highly affordable CRM tools on the market include Zoho CRM, Agile CRM, and ActiveCampaign.
Of these options, I prefer Salesforce because of its outstanding data security functions, ease of use, and the huge potential for customisation. Those who use this software also love that it easily integrates with a wide range of popular business tools. For example, this Salesforce ActiveCampaign integration is good news for anyone looking to harness the power of the two tools (ActiveCampaign for marketing and Salesforce for sales/CRM). By integrating and syncing data between these systems, you’re able to enjoy a host of benefits like stress-free compliance with GDPR policy, improved performance tracking of digital campaigns, and more effective messaging through personalised mailings.
Conclusion
With competition for customer attention now higher than ever before, it pays to invest in and learn how to use technology that enables you collect crucial customer data and speed up your day-to-day response and follow up. And no, you don’t have to break the bank to use most of these tools.
For example, I have an offer for a 30-day free trial offer given by Salesforce to determine if the tool is right for you or not.
Gaining an edge over your competitors could be as simple as implementing the three set of tools and systems that we’ve described in today’s post. While it takes some effort to learn the ropes of operating a tool like Salesforce, one week of practice is enough time to set up at least one working campaign that brings you effective results in the long run.