How to make selling easier
How do you really feel about sales? If you think selling is slimy or icky, or if you think it involves a lot of complexity, work, and expenditure, this is just for you. It’s time to make selling simpler.
I am on a mission to change and simplify the way you feel about selling and how you sell your products and services.
In this blog, I am going to explain the two simple things you need to do to generate easy sales.
This blog is part of my Slow Challenge series and is a summary of a related podcast episode.
Click here to listen to the tips mentioned in this article.
Before we get to the practical things you need to do to generate easy sales, I want to focus on your attitude to selling. Do you feel uncomfortable when you think about selling? Does it somehow feel slimy to you? Maybe it feels like you are manipulating your customers into doing something.
Or perhaps you feel overwhelmed because you view sales as being a lot of time, energy and work with new products or offers or complicated social media campaigns.
I am on a mission to help you challenge these beliefs! Here is a big truth.
Selling is nothing more than giving people the information they need to make the decision that is right for them.
That’s it. You are just helping people who need the solution you provide, and making sure that they understand how your product or service can help them with their challenges, problems, or their desires. You are not forcing anyone into a decision.
In fact, I often say that you are not selling when you are talking to potential customers. You are coaching them to make a decision. Though you do want to make sure that you can address their objections and questions as part of your coaching process.
I hope that thinking about sales as sharing information and coaching people to make a decision helps you to think more positively about selling. Once you are able to make this shift in your mindset and attitude, the next steps to easy sales will be so much easier!
Step 1: Describe your offer in a compelling way
So many entrepreneurs struggle with sales because they cannot describe their product or service clearly and simply. They are not able to explain the benefits of their offer or the transformation that happens when people use it.
This does not have to be rocket science. This is simply sharing the transformation from before using your product or service to after using your product or service. What results do you deliver for your customers? This is what I mean by your transformation, and you need to be able to explain it very clearly.
One other thing that you need to be clear about – who is your product or service for? If you think it is for everyone, you will end up selling to no one! Be clear about the niche you want to serve and then make it easy for your potential customers by letting them know it is for them. Make it easy for your customer to know right away that this is a potential solution for them.
To help you explain your product or service in a compelling way, I have created a free workbook to support this blog. In it, I give you a series of questions to answer about your offer and an example to follow.
You can download your free workbook here.
If you want to make selling simpler and easier, this is the first step you need to take. If your potential customers can’t understand what you can do for them, it is not that you are bad at selling. You need more clarity.
Step 2: Share your offer with your network
If you want to be able to go slow or just at your own pace in your business, there are small things you can do to help your customers find out how you can help them. You don’t have to do big launches and big campaigns to get results. Many entrepreneurs skip over these smaller things because they don’t realize how effective they can be
Remember, this is all about letting people know how your product or service can help them. Don’t overcomplicate it.
These first two actions are vital if you are starting your business and need to kick off your sales. However, when you have been in business for a while, it is easy to forget how effective these small actions can be so don’t underestimate them!
- Send an email to your network
You have ideal customers within your network. Make a list of those people and either email them, text them or direct message them to let them know about your offer. You can keep it short but make sure you describe what it is and the transformation it delivers.
- Ask your network
Reach out to your network and ask them who they know who might be interested. I want to highlight one key thing about doing this. Don’t ask IF they know anyone, ask for something specific, for example, the names of two people who might be interested.
- Free trials and offers
This is particularly important if you are just starting out in business. Reach out to as many people as possible to offer a trial product or a taster session for your service. As well as attracting more potential customers, you will also have a source of testimonials for your new business.
Offering trials or free tasters can be a great way of building your network, platform and audience of potential customers. It will also trigger word of mouth recommendations.
- Emails
Schedule a regular newsletter. Ideally, this should weekly or bi-weekly but at a minimum, monthly. The key is consistency and showing up regularly in your potential customers’ inboxes. Sometimes, it can take several months of regular newsletters before you start to see sales but your consistency is what will ultimately drive sales so keep going! You just need to keep letting people know about your offer so they can make the decision at the right time for them.
- Share your product or service
You need to make sure that all of your newsletters remind your customers about your offer. Sometimes, we are so busy creating great valuable free content that we forget to share this basic information. You can include it in every email or newsletter’s footer.
You can also share your product or service on social media. At least once a week, make sure that you share how potential customers can access your product/service and the great transformation it offers.
Finally, you can also share your testimonials to help people understand your offer. There are a number of ways you can do this. You can add testimonials to the web pages that talk about your product/service and you can also share them on social media, to help others decide about what you offer.
These are just some of the simple strategies you can put in place to make selling easier. I am sure that if you think creatively, you will come up with more.
And don’t forget that if you want to explore these topics in more detail and start making your sales easier, you can download my free ‘Simple ways to easy sales’ workbook now.
