Mobile marketing tips for small businesses
Posts tagged tips for mobile sales
Bizness CRM Tip: Build Your Sales Pipeline!
Aug 14th
There are two approaches to sales:
1) systematic, regular, and self-correcting
2) not
Many businesses can get by without ever evaluating their sales efforts and developing a formal ongoing sales program. These businesses, however, can get rusty when current business is sufficient, and they miss out on the opportunity to improve sales programs over long periods of time.
The result is a business that is somewhat unprepared for tough times (when sales hustle is needed), and a sales team that is underdeveloped. A better approach is to maintain an ongoing sales pipeline. The flow can be increased or decreased as needed, but the important thing is to keep a formal structure in place that allows the sales team to stay sharp and keep improving in good times and bad.
That way, when you really need them (e.g. when a big client goes away unexpectedly), they’ll be ready. To help get your business on the right track, here’s a sample sales pipeline that’s easy to understand and implement:
Step One: Gather Leads
This can be done in a variety of ways. Some people rely on ads or their website to bring leads to them. Others do research to find prospects, or purchase lists for cold calling. And others use a simple tool like Bizness CRM that can find all the small business leads in a given area.
However you meet prospects, this is the starting point of your sales pipeline. Once you’ve got the contact info of a party that is interested (or may be interested) in your product or service, your sales team can take action.
Some owners might be saying, “Stop right there. I have enough business now. Why should I still be on the hunt?” Even if you don’t want to grow, you might be surprised what kind of business is out there. Every business can rank their current customers in terms of profitability or other characteristics. By prospecting, you may find better replacements for your least-favored customers, and improve profitability without having to grow at all.
Step Two: Follow Up and Close
Once you’ve got contact information, it’s time to reach out to your prospects. Whether you do this via email, phone, or in person, it’s important to take notes and keep a detailed schedule. A program like Bizness CRM can help you seamlessly select a prospect, reach out, take notes, schedule meetings, and collaborate across team members (noticing a pattern, yet?) That way, the ball never gets dropped, and everyone can keep tabs on evolving relationships.
Follow up regularly until you’ve got a response one way or the other. It’s important to keep active when pursuing a sale. Try not to irritate people too badly, though!
Step Three: Track and Analyze
This is where things get interesting. Your note taking and data gathering (you were using Bizness CRM to track everything, right?) can now reveal ways to improve. If your CRM tool has a report-generation function, you can easily understand your sales efforts at-a-glance. Now you know which types of customers to focus on, when to reach out to them, which sales angles were the most persuasive, what the most common objections were, and more.
Armed with powerful info like that, it’s easy to see what you need to change.
Step Four: Get Better
Now you can design some policies to help your sales team get better on the next go-round. Be sure to track key metrics like conversion rate so that you can compare from month-to-month and seller-to-seller. In time, you’ll see black-and-white improvements that will directly translate to more revenue and profit for your business.
Sound like a lot of work? It isn’t, if you have the right tool. You know where we’re going with this… we have just the right tool to help you implement a simple, cost-effective pipeline, and you can try it out for free to see just how powerful it is.
Steps for App Resellers Selling Mobile Marketing to Niche Small Business Markets
Mar 20th
Niche markets, despite the lack of large numbers of targets, can be incredibly profitable for app resellers. If you develop the proper offering, and really hit it out of the park, you’ll face almost no competition, and will enjoy the benefits of an incredibly loyal and tight-knit group of customers.
So, how can you effectively make the most of a niche opportunity? Let’s go step-by-step:
Step 1: Don’t be an outsider
Repeat after me: study, talk, and stalk.
Study your market, talk to members of your target group, and stalk their activities (in a legal manner, of course). Read as much as you can about what their main concerns, problems, and issues are. Find out what they wish they could do better. Talk to them wherever possible, and gain information about their needs. Listen to what they say to each other, read what they write, and watch what they do.
You get the point.
You need to understand them deeply, or you won’t be able to meet their specific needs well (or sell to them effectively). Outsiders have too large a “wall” to climb. So, don’t be an outsider! Instead, follow insiders around until you find the secret entrance to their club, and you’ll be halfway to your goal.
Step 2: Master their app needs and develop a custom-tailored offering
Now that you know the niche market so well, you can figure out exactly what features they need in an app. Simple is best, so focus on the most important single feature and be skeptical about adding many beyond it. Each feature needs to be carefully chosen to serve the needs of your targets and their end users.
If your niche is take-out restaurants, for example, a function that lets users order food might be very valuable. If your niche is high-end restaurants, on the other hand, that function might be utterly pointless.
Focus on the true needs of your targets, and be creative. Don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach. Figure out what makes your niche special, and tailor your offering to that.
Step 3: Find them where they live
When it comes time to reach out to your targets to get them to try your app, find them wherever it is they call “home.” Don’t blindly use the same channels you would use for other markets. If your niche loves a particular Internet forum, meet them there. If there’s an event that is critical in the industry, be there. If they never leave their own locations, pay them visits. The point is, you want to show that you live in their world, and you’re willing to conform to them, not the other way around. Once you’ve got the ball rolling, you can start learning whether you’ve made a good app or not.
Step 4: Give out freebies to earn testimonials and referrals
Now that you’ve got some connections with members of the niche, get them to try your app for free. The feedback you get at this stage will be critical to the ultimate quality of the app. Listen carefully to what they say about it, and take copious notes. If things are going well, get testimonials to help you break down the doors for future sales.
Consider providing incentives for referrals, as well. One member of the niche just might become your most powerful product evangelist, because specialty niches tend to be highly interconnected communities. This can be true even between competitors.
Step 5: Tweak, tweak, tweak
You’ve deployed your app, and gotten lots of feedback. Now it’s time to transform it into the killer app it was always meant to be. Keep in mind, however, that this process doesn’t have to end. There may be room for further rounds of improvement. The key is to make sure that the design of your app always reflects the feedback you get from the users.
In short, listen carefully to your market, and meet its demands. If you do that, your chances for success will be maximized.
