Five Methods To Increase Sales Exponentially!

Achieving market, sales growth is one of the vital goal of any business, that is why every business look for ways to get it, not just for a time being but constantly because humans by nature are greedy or perhaps I am wrong about humans but majority of entrepreneurs definitely are! 😉
 

The methods I am about to share can not only be used for currently running businesses but will also work for startups with low budget except for method five, that one needs money, quite good amount of it actually.

And these methods aren’t some “confidence boosting” “feel good” tips rather they will deliver only if you seriously work on them, utilize them and No! I am not going to beat around the bush, giving you nothing, doing lame blah blah!

Rather you will get some real, actionable stuff that will actually make the difference, help you achieve some real solid increase in sales!

So without further ado, let’s get to it!

Five Methods to Increase Sales

1.      Offer low price high quality + super cool packaging

2.      Focus on building relationships with specific wholesalers

3.      Focus on getting reliable distributors

4.      Hire high experienced sales staff

5.      Do Creative, Cool advertising constantly

Offer Low Price, High Quality + Super Cool Packaging

There is a greater likelihood that due to immense new product failure, your current offering is similar to hundreds of other brands; offering the same thing.

Fact: Nearly 50 percent of new products introduced in the market are complete failures and more than 70 percent do not reach their sales goals.[1]

And since those brands have captured market share, shelves by one strategy or another, the only strategy you have; to achieve further growth is to offer lower price to those wholesalers, retailers who are keeping your competitors items on their shelves.

Remember, retailer, wholesalers are in the market to make money, though they are not there to make lesser money, let me explain this point.

For instance you offer $5 profit per item to your target buyer (wholesaler, retailer) while your competitors offer $6 profit per item, your target buyer won’t like to keep your stuff in his/her shelf instead of your competitor because you offer $5 profit.

Even with offering $6 profit per item won’t make them keep it, because let’s be honest, your competitor has worked a lot like building relationship with your target buyer, building market awareness, has flexible credit policy that you can’t or may not offer for one reason or another and other different factors you may never know etc.

So even offering $6 profit won’t motivate your target buyer (retailer, wholesaler) to keep your product on their shelf, what you need is to offer more in profit, offering $7 or $8 will definitely push him/her to go for your item, to put it on the shelf.

This is how your low price strategy should be!

Now second thing is, although your target buyers (retailers, wholesalers) do consider product quality but they don’t care much, they care about their profit, if your product is lower quality than your competitors they will still keep it on their shelf because of the healthy profit margin.

But the problem with such strategy is, your end users, consumers won’t like to utilize your product for the second time because of lower quality and hence after sometime your target buyers won’t like to burden their shelves with your offer even for $10 profit because nobody is going to buy it.

What you need, is to offer better or equal quality (equal to that of your competitors) to your end users, consumers, to gain that essential market trust, word of mouth marketing and that will result in a kind of snowball effect, catapulting your sales in the long run!

You may like: 20 Facts about Word of Mouth Marketing You didn’t know!

And once that starts happening, then you may renegotiate with your target buyers (wholesalers, retailers) by decreasing per unit profit consequently increasing your profits.

You can also then increase retail unit price of your product/service, to earn even more, but be careful!

Fact: According to research, Managers consider pricing to be the most difficult

marketing decision.[2]

And yep!, packaging matters a lot, so make sure you give special focus to your product/service packaging because looks sells, aesthetics matter a lot, you will read an interesting fact about how much aesthetics matter in brand success, business growth, at the bottom of this article.
  

Focus on building relationships with specific Wholesalers

Instead of working day and night on increasing your retail client base to increase your market share or in case you don’t want to follow the above method because even though you offer better price plus quality they still demand you to offer them even a better offer, which is something you can’t do!

Then you should follow this method, here all you have to do is to focus on building real long lasting relationships with specific wholesalers only.

You can use this strategy when even after hard work, constant visits to huge number of retailers you still don’t get the optimum sales, so in that case instead of wasting all of your energy on covering not only all those retailers along with wholesalers.

How about focusing only on specific wholesalers who won’t demand huge discounts in price but will only keep your items if you constantly piss them off aka doing a constant follow-up !

Yes such wholesalers do exist, all you need is to find them and make a relationship with them, do a constant follow-up.

Fact: Having know-how of communication tools and techniques helps you a great deal in managing relationships.[3]

And at the end of the day having five such wholesalers would cover at least over hundred of your target retailers, without you lowering the price!

Lastly building such relations takes time, so be patient.

Focus on getting Reliable Distributors

In case you don’t want to utilize the above two methods or you just want someone else to deal with wholesalers, retailers then this third method is what you need, to increase sales. 

Here all you need is to find some solid, financially healthy, market experience wise impressive distributors.

Divide your target market into different regions and find a reliable distributor for each region, make sure you don’t leave any loopholes in your distribution policy that may give your distributor an unfair advantage over you.

This approach has some other benefits like you won’t need to hire and train huge number of sales guys to get the job done, setting and achieving sales targets will become easy etc.

Hire High Experienced Sales Staff

Well, before you worry and have questions, let me explain!

Off course getting high qualified, experienced sales staff is not only hard but at times unfeasible or maybe that is not the case!

For startups with low budget getting highly experienced sales staff is equal to day dreaming because one they can’t pay them what they deserves, two highly experienced sales staff don’t like to babysit, by babysitting I mean babysitting newborn startups because that demand hell of an effort.

But there is a way around this, yes, you will be able to pay them what they deserve even when you are low budget not only that even though they hate babysitting newborns they will still love to do it!

To know more about it, you will have to read this article, Start-up Hiring Problems: How to hire well experienced sales staff with low budget that won’t quit ever!

You can use the same strategy in any non start-up business too!

Do Creative, Cool Advertising Constantly

Well to make your brand stand out, to get noticed, you will have to come up with advertising that is always unique, creative, super cool!

You know “super cool” right…!

To get that valuable mind share of your target buyer you will need to advertise but not just advertising for the sake of advertising but to get noticed, to have that special, unique place in your target market minds, to be remembered etc and all of this results in sales, market growth!

If you think it doesn’t or you are doubtful about how advertising can result in sales then you should check out this well researched scientific piece: Does advertising actually works,if so! How exactly?!

Now, sadly this is where majority of businesses fails!

They just don’t know how to do it creatively, uniquely or probably do it the wrong way!

Luckily there is a method, an approach available to do it exactly that way, it’s a simple but really creative approach that we have been using at HCL and ROI is great!

Well to know more about it, read this little article: Very simple marketing for any Business!

There are many ways to achieve creativity but working in teams is probably the best one!

            Fact: According to research, Teams helps a lot in achieving creativity and innovation. [4]

Remember: keep in mind emotional, aesthetic aspects your brand when devising advertising strategy!

Fact: Aesthetic and emotional aspects of brand experience are increasingly acknowledged as important economic drivers and as key differentiators in the marketplace. [5]

That’s it!

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Over to you guys ;)

References:

1.      Delre, S.A., Jager, W., Bijmolt, T.H.A. and Janssen, M.A. (2007), “Targeting and timing promotional activities: an agent-based model for the takeoff of new products”, Journal of Business Research, Vol. 60 No. 8, pp. 826-835.

2.      Dolan, R.J. and Simon, D. (1996), Power Pricing: How Managing Price Transforms the Bottom Line, The Free Press, New York, NY.

3.      Duncan, T. and Moriarty, S.E. (1998), ``A communication based marketing model for managing relationships'', Journal of Marketing, Vol. 62 No. 2, pp. 1-10.

4.      Pirola-Merlo, A. and Mann, L. (2004) The Relationship between Individual Creativity and Team Creativity: Aggregating across People and Time. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 25, 235–57.

5.      Brakus, J.J., Schmitt, B.H. and Zarantonello, L. (2009), “Brand experience: what is it? How is it measured? Does it affect loyalty?”, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 73, May, pp. 52-68.