In my last post, I had made some submissions how to enhance your income by effective selling of your products/services. Unless you concentrate over the sales of your products/services and try to increase them, you won’t be able to enhance your income. You may perhaps go into red and deep red if you neglect this particular part of your activities. Let us try some more steps in this direction.
Making Yourself Important.
You are sure that your product is useful, but why should your target customers/clients buy from you? Why are you better than the competitors? You have to inform your customers that. You have to tell them why you and your product are better for them than what the competitive market is selling. If you do it, you may assume that you have started on this already.
You are stamping your specialty at that point itself. But now you have to put that more in your customers’ faces. Make them see what’s so special about you. Speak of your special expertise in the area. Speak why you are better than the others – maybe it is the creativeness of your product or an added feature that makes it unique or maybe even your better support system.
Be as transparent to your public as you can be. In the baby boomer generation, it was all right if companies kept everything about themselves secret. People still bought and, in fact, in those days, the more enigmatic a product was, the better it was – this was the general feeling among the public. Use forums and blogs to sell yourself. If you don’t have a blog yet, make one using Blogger. People can then interact with you. They understand you are for real and that you have answers to their apprehensions. They get more convinced about you as a person. They don’t mind buying from you.
The best thing is that this helps you to come above your competition. In today’s day and age, this is the most important thing you can do to enhance your products’ selling prospects.
Creating need of your products/services.
Make people understand that this is so great an offer that it will not persist for long. Ask them to act fast. Give them a limited time discounted offer or something. This sense of urgency brings in better sales. You will have to create a sense of urgency in the minds of your target consumers.
If you have seen any sales pitches lately – any at all – you will have come across this doomsday mentality that they create. A great ad for a great product for a great price will end with “This offer is only for 3 days. Rush!” The smiling blonde on Home TV will demonstrate a product that you absolutely want for your house and then say, “These prices are only till the next full moon” or something like that. Even the nerdy geek who puts his picture on the sales page creates an Armageddon scenario by stating that his prices have been dropped from $127 to $27 only for the next 24 hours. The truth is probably that his product was never anywhere above $27.
But when you tell people that they are getting a bargain, they are always interested, even if the price after the bargain is more than the original price of the product elsewhere. Humans are sticklers for bagging steals and it panders our ego to understand that we have got a bargain.
What really improves a bargain situation is the sense of urgency. The feeling of get-your-credit-card-right-out-of-your-wallet-and-buy-this-schmuck is what gets them every time. Of course, when you know there’s just 36 minutes to buy something at half price, you will probably buy it. Even if that thing isn’t useful to you right now, you will justify yourself by saying, “If I have to buy this tomorrow, I will have to pay a lot more.” Chances are that you will buy that thing and it will keep gathering dust till the real Doomsday happens!
But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t use this gimmick as well, considering that even the big name malls and supermarkets are putting ads for their hourly discounted sales. If you promote your offers well, you will get a good number of buyers. However, there are a few rules:-
- Your product needs to be good.
- The bargain has to be attractive. If you just knock 50 cents off your price, it isn’t going to mean anything.
- The time you give them should be short, even if they have a few days on hand, they will procrastinate.
- At the same time, the time shouldn’t be so short that they think your offer is a scam. Remember people have become much more discerning now.
Giving Gifts
If you give away free gifts, it might set you back momentarily. But it can be a great thing for you in the long run, ensuring continued sales. Give and you shall receive. There’s no greater truth than that when it comes to salesmanship either!
When you give away things for free through your sales page or wherever you are promoting your stuff from, you are doing several things that directly benefit your prospecting game.
- You are giving people a sampling of your quality. If your gift is really good, people somehow think that the real thing will be good too.
- You begin a channel of communication with your people. Because you have given them something for free, the ice is already broken. You could now start making these people interested in other things.
- You stamp your credibility. People understand that you really have some products that are probably made well too.
- But the most important thing is that you are sending them on an emotional trip. Giving something away is as good as telling them, “You took something from me for free. Now, it is your turn to pay back by actually buying something.” If the person was thinking about who to buy a particular thing from, they will think about buying it from you just because you gave them something for free earlier.
Stand committed to your clients/customers.
Make your clients/customers understand that you will be there for them even after you have sold the product/services in case there is any need/query/problem etc. This will ensure them a guarantee.
People who want to buy from you want to make sure that you will be there for them. They want to see your commitment. No one likes fly-by purchases in which they buy something and then lose all contact with the seller. This might work if you are selling something for a dollar, but for most things that people buy today, they want to see the seller remain involved even after the sale has been done.
There is reason for that. They want to make sure that if anything goes wrong with the product, there is some remedy for that. Only the seller can ensure such a remedy. That is the reason people are promising so many money-back guarantees. Take a look at a sales page and you will find that there is almost always a money-back guarantee. Sometimes these guarantees extend to up to 90 days. This is the period in which customers are free to buy the product, use it and check whether they will work for them or not.
You must also provide a good money-back guarantee. It should be of an ample time so that people are convinced that could nicely check the product and return it if they are not satisfied with it.
Most likely, they will never return your product. People are already very discerning when they buy and if you make everything quite clear on your sales page, they will know exactly what to expect. Be honest there, and you will have no returns of your sold products.
But what people want more than the money-back guarantee is a support system that continues after the product has been purchased. Most people are not technical-minded and if your product requires the customer to use some kind of technical knowledge, you must be there to guide them. You have to promise your unstinting support even after the purchase is done.
Be honest and upfront about these promises and deliver them. This ensures long term selling prospects for your business.
We may further discuss how to enhance the income further in the next posts.
Be Happy – Enhance Your Income By Effective Selling.
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