Most Effective Startup Sales Strategies
If you’re an entrepreneur who’s recently started your business, you might struggle to get your name out into the world and make sales. Without an established brand reputation, unique selling point, or customer base that will vouch for you, making sales can be an uphill battle. Your budget might also be limited, which in turn limits the extent of your marketing and sales efforts.
In a loft office, three people are having a meeting. Two are sitting around a table with their computers and one is standing with a cup of coffee.
With all of the odds stacked against you, how can a small startup like yours make more sales? If you’ve been struggling with this exact question, don’t worry! We’ll go through five surefire ways to increase your sales figures and boost your bottom line.
Social Selling
Our first strategy is social selling, which stands for social media selling. By leveraging social media, you can find and connect with qualified prospects and build a presence in the market – all for free! For cost-conscious entrepreneurs, social selling is a low-risk, high-reward sales tactic.
However, social selling is easier said than done. To make the most of your social selling campaign, it’d be wise to strategically choose a social media platform best suited to your industry and business type – for example, a webshop would find more success on consumer platforms like Instagram, while a manufacturing or professional services company should instead focus on more industry-relevant sites, such as LinkedIn.
In the beginning, you could use social media to find and reach out to leads and establish a strong reputation. As your business grows, you can then expand into purchasing paid advertisement space, such as Meta Ads, reaching more potential customers than ever before.
2. Set Up a Website
Another relatively low-cost selling strategy is to set up a website to help you establish a strong reputation, obtain lead information, receive orders, and showcase your sales collateral. The easier it is for customers to determine your trustworthiness, read up on product info, and speak to a sales rep, the more inclined they’ll be toward making a purchase.
When curious potential customers research you online, greet them with a clean and professional website. You could also fill the site with tools, infographics, and articles that build your authority as an industry expert. These boost your credibility and position you as a good company to buy from.
Depending on your product, you could have an ecommerce store and allow customers to place orders through your website. Alternatively, if your products require a more individualized offer, you could offer a live chat or video conferencing feature, allowing curious visitors to speak with a live agent. In other words, the more accessible the sale or a sales rep is to potential customers early in the sales process, the higher chance they’ll be swayed to purchase.
On the other hand, if it’s unlikely a prospect will make a purchase from the first visit, setting up lead magnets that exchange contact information for the aforementioned tools and articles could be a good way to track and follow up with potential buyers.
3. Warm Calling
Let’s face it: telemarketers are annoying. Over 60% of consumers call it “annoying” and “not effective” for both purchasing and customer retention, reports LinkedIn.
But it’s true that talking with someone on the phone is a great way to reach out to geographically distant customers, to add a human touch to a sales pitch, or to streamline a conversation that would’ve taken a week of back-and-forth emails. So how do you improve your phone sales strategies?
The answer to that is warm calling. You can use a VoIP phone service to make these calls, which can be more cost-effective and flexible than traditional phone lines. Warm calling means researching and qualifying your lead ahead of time, ensuring that they have the budget, purchasing authority, and timely need for your product or service. That way, once you get on the phone with them, you won’t have to waste their precious time with simple get-to-know-you questions. You can also tailor your sales pitch to each individual client, offering them a personalized deal they can’t refuse.
Another tactic you can implement is integrating SMS Sales to your Calls. As a rapidly growing sales vertical and extremely effective strategy, this is a type of mobile marketing that allows you to be more creative and effective with warming your targets before and after making a call.
Whether B2C or B2B, a quick trawl through your client’s social media account can turn up quite a lot of detail about their personality, current concerns, and lifestyle. B2B sales reps would also be wise to check the company’s website and review recent press releases and interviews to get a sense of your potential client’s current concerns.
The more you know about your target customer, the faster you can streamline your sales conversation with them, skipping over the boring details. Not only will each sales conversation go faster, but the chances of each call blossoming into a sale also will go way up!
4. The Assumptive Close
Imagine you’re a customer hearing an amazing sales pitch for a new product. The sales representative builds a close rapport with you, convinces you that the product is everything you need, helps you find a price point that works, and then… nothing.
The conversation trails off. The momentum fizzles out. The sales rep waffles about, returning to product and pricing details, obviously hoping to hear the magic words “I’ll buy it.” But with the magic gone, you’ve had a moment to come to your senses and decide to walk away from the sale.
For one-on-one sales, the close is the most critical junction of the sales conversation, the point where a sales rep makes an offer to a potential customer, and the customer is expected to say either yes or no. As we saw, it’d be a tragedy for a sales rep to fumble a sale at the last moment, letting the decisive moment pass them by and letting a sale hang in the air until it fades away.
A powerful sales technique is the assumptive close, which sidesteps this stressful moment by continuing the conversation as if the customer has already said yes. This keeps the ball rolling and moves tenuous sales conversations to post-sale details in a flash.
Some examples of an assumptive close are:
“If you’d be interested, there are some cushions over there that would look lovely with your new couch.”
“What time are you available at home to receive the delivery?”
“Would you prefer this item in red or blue?”
Alternatively, sales reps can also learn about other hard and soft closing techniques such as the walk-away close, urgency close, Ben Franklin close, and alternative close. With a full arsenal of closing techniques, your sales reps can employ the best closer for each conversation, converting more conversations into done deals.
5. Networking
Last but not least is networking, which means building, maintaining, and leveraging relationships for your business. There are two ways that entrepreneurs can utilize networking for their sales strategies: sales networking and professional networking.
First off is sales networking, where the company’s employees (and you) leverage personal and professional connections to find new customers. In other words, this means asking your friends, family, and associates if they’d be interested in purchasing or know anyone else who meets your ideal customer profile. Your friends and family want to see you succeed, so with a bit of explanation into who you’re looking for, they’ll likely be more than happy to help you find customers!
Next is professional networking, where you connect with other companies and individuals in the industry. While this might not directly lead to a sale, it can help you build industry connections and uncover new opportunities for selling – for example, you might be invited to an exclusive trade show where plenty of high-profile buyers will be present.
More specifically, we’d recommend networking by joining a referral group. In these groups, businesses from different industries refer each other to their own customers, helping each member expand their reach. While this does mean you’ll have to refer other businesses in turn, you’ll also be sure to see a steady supply of customers, streaming in by your referral partners.
Conclusion
It’s sink or swim in the sales world. And as a startup thrown into the deep end, the only way to swim is to be smart about your sales strategies, conserving your resources while maximizing sales. Rather than flailing about wildly, following these five tips to build a watertight sales strategy will help you close more sales than you could have imagined.
