With lagging economic numbers indicating slow growth for the foreseeable future, the pressure to grow sales and increase profits will escalate in intensity. There are proven methods to growing sales, increasing profits and promoting customer loyalty even in today’s economy. The techniques to accomplish this task is realizing that the best customers are those who are already your customers. By focusing efforts at generating sales from already satisfied consumers, this effort will not only grow sales but have the secondary effect of promoting customer loyalty and even inviting new business hence growing sales, increasing profits and generating customer loyalty in today’s economy.
Incentivize Your Sales Program
By making your sales incentive program attractive to the sales staff, it improves their desire to sell and it renews their focus on generating sales. The reason why many successful businesses, whose primary profit is derived from sales, use incentive programs is because they are a genuine method of generating sales. In order to be effective, the incentive program must be easy to understand, have clear goals and those goals be attainable by the sales staff. The program must have realistic expectations or the incentive will cease to be effective and therefore will have the opposite effect of dampening the enthusiasm of the sales staff. At the same time, the program must be tailored to help encourage sales and not have the program itself become the overall focus. A properly tailored program will encourage the sales staff to upsell to customers, direct customers to better products, and inspire the staff to meet customer expectations, which in turn will increases sales and further generate loyalty from present customers.
Understand Customer Differences
Not all customers are created equal. There is a difference between a regular customer and one who is just browsing. While every effort should be made to entice new customers to purchase, there should be a corresponding effort to recognize regular customers. Using programs that allow these customers to be “inside the loop” such as frequent emails, notifications of upcoming sales and more, can go a great distance to generating customer loyalty and increasing sales. Customers who feel there is value in the relationship between them and the business, will in turn buy more and encourage their friends to purchase from the business as well.
Use Customer Rewards
A part of understanding customer differences is creating a customer rewards program that targets frequent customers. Regardless of the business size, a customer rewards program or a customer loyalty program can grow sales as well as promote consumer loyalty. By indicating to the customer that you both recognize and value their loyalty, the customer feels as if they are a contributing part of the business and will in turn communicate this feeling to friends and family. As with incentive programs for sales staff, there is a reason many other companies use this approach. It is due to the fact that programs such as these work and work well at generating sales.
By incentivizing your sales staff, understanding customer differences and creating and using a customer rewards program, it is possible to grow sales, increase profits and generate customer loyalty in the current economy. These methods have shown time and time again their viability in a number of different economic situations and there is no reason why this cannot not true today. By focusing on consumers that are already customers, a business not only generates new customers but it makes the current ones satisfied and staunchly loyal.
