Turning a profit and optimising sales as a small business or a startup is not easy. The unfavourable economic conditions do not help at all. At the end of 2021, South Africa’s consumer price reached an inflated point of 5.9%. As if this is not limiting enough, we expect an increase in the already pocket-breaking petrol prices in April 2022. Even with all the barriers working against small businesses who have very little resistance power, there is still light at the end of the very long tunnel. Business analysts and experts have written manual after manual on how to survive and grow as a small business. Optimising your business’s sales is one such strategy.
This article seeks to delve into the concept of optimisating sales. Whilst there are many practical guides to optimising sales, this article will look into 3 strategies to achieving this goal:
- Rolling Out the Red Carpet for Your Customers
- Revisiting Your Current Sales Practices
- Automation: The Time Saver Your Small Business Needs
Explaining sales optimisation
Optimising sales entails working smarter and not harder. It is about enhancing customer experience to keep them hooked to your offerings. This would then mean finding effective ways to keep your customers coming back to your small business. Offering customers convenience, speed, efficiency are but a few ways to achieve sales optimisation. Ultimately, optimising sales refers to the practices behind the scenes that you do to lead your business to more sales.
Sales can be considered the ‘last mile’ for businesses. As a business owner, you know that when a sale is made it is the result of all the tears, work, trials, errors and spreading of the word of the business that led to that moment.
Rolling Out the Red Carpet For Your Customers
“Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says: Make me feel important.” These are the words uttered by Mary Kay Ash, the founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics. It is an indisputable fact that customers want to be treated as king. If they are unhappy, they do not mind taking their business — their much needed money — elsewhere. Giving your customers what they want is a great sales optimisation strategy.
If your customers recommend that your business get a functional and easy-to-navigate website, it is in your business’ best interest to heed their call. It clearly shows that they use your website as a way to connect with your business. Understanding what your customers want and giving it to them makes them feel heard. It also works in favour of your business in that it can help you in eliminating all that is unnecessary.
African Flavour Books, a small South African book retailer, saw a huge gap in their industry: there were no bookstores in South Africa that focused on serving the African community and those passionate about African literature. The owners, a young couple, opened their store with this in mind. They subsequently expanded their reach by adding African-centered movies and music — all this upon customer recommendation. In addition to this, they aimed to sell their books for under R200 upon noticing and appreciating the economic stance of their target audience. This is the sales optimisation strategy that African Flavour Books seized and it saw them generating a steady flow of sales revenue. They made their target market feel like they and their preferences matter.
Revisiting Your Current Sales Practices
Who says that optimising sales needs to be complicated? Starting with a task as simple as revisiting and reviewing your business’ s current sales practices can go a long way.
How To Revisit Your Current Sales Practices
The first question to ask yourself when you begin this reviewing process is: “What am I doing right?” Provided that your business has already raked in some sales, consider the process that your business underwent to reach those moments of sales.
Perhaps your business spent months in producing or availing those sold products or services. Maybe you physically knocked on people’s doors to tell them about your business and its offerings. Whatever it is that helped your business land those sales, note them down.
The next question to consider is: “Which sales practices are not working towards the good of my business?” It may not always be easy to point out the mistakes you are making in your business especially if you are a one-person team. To make this process easier, ask for customer feedback on how your customers felt when your business served them. Perhaps your response time to your customers is not the fastest or your products from your suppliers are not arriving fast enough. If you produce your own products, it could be that you are not spending enough time sampling your products to test them.
In addition to this business examining, taking note of the amount of money your business managed to make from sales is a good practice to optimising your future sales. Asking questions such ask “Did the business make more sales this quarter than the last?” can aid you in identifying more ways to achieve the last mile — the sales.
Spending time on business introspection, should help you find the good and the not-so-good aspects of your sales practices. You can then begin the process of improving where you lack. This is your opportunity to identify holes in your practices to patch up to prevent any further sales from falling through them.
Automation: The Time Saver Your Small Business Needs
Capturing and maintaining customer records, keeping stock records, recording cashflow and keeping a clean business image are but a few tasks that need the attention of your business. What this all means is work after work. Sales automation refers to the much-needed task of using digital tools and software to automate as much of the time-consuming, manual tasks that need to be done. This is done to allow businesses to designate more time to more important tasks, such as building great customer relations and drawing in more sales.
Benefits of Automation:
Automation helps your business save time. Using technology in your daily dealings allows for the fast completion of tasks with increased accuracy. For example, using a spreadsheet can help you add up all your business’ finances at a much faster and more accurate rate than most manual methods.
Efficiency when capturing customer data is yet another benefit. Imagine having to write down each and every sale in a sales book instead of having a point-of- sale system that captures all sales in your computer. This leaves too much room for error. Automating this part of your business, thus reduces such potential errors.
Business automation helps lowers operational costs. The central goal of any business is to generate profits. For instance, a small business with limited financial capacity may not always have the pleasure of employing staff. Therefore, using automation procedures — such as email management tools — eliminates payroll costs.
Ways to Automate Your Small Business:
- Automate your email processes to avoid, for example, having to send the same marketing email to your long list of customers and potential customers. An automated email system will allow you to send such an email to hundreds of recipients in just one go. MailChimp and Hubspot are some the many available platforms that help with email automation. These allow you to create and schedule your emails and even provide you with feedback reports your activities.
- If your small business has a website — and hopefully it does — the use of chatbots is recommended. It is a good way to provide your visitors with ‘immediate’ responses whenever they need it.
- Easy Collect & Drop serves as a prime example for business automation. As a logistics enterprise, ECD offers convenient delivery solutions that allow customers to book their delivers online. Customers are provided with easy methods to track their orders, access and download their invoices. Through ECD’s automation efforts, customers are always kept in the loop.
Automating your business’ processes will help you focus more on the sales and the moments of sales with your customers, as opposed to the administrative side business. Automation saves you time while simultaneously keeping your data consistent.
Sales Optimisation In A Nutshell
Giving your customers a great experience is beneficial for customer retention. For as small business with limited resources, optimising sales does not have to include intricate procedures that are rather difficult to execute. You do not have to spend unnecessary monies to achieve this strategy. This is more so if your business does not house the financial capabilities to do so.
Sales optimisation will set your small business on a path that moves away from the sporadic sales that you might have been experiencing. It can aid in setting your small business on an upward sales trajectory altogether.
As a small business owner, you should never cease to place your business’ focus on increasing the effectiveness of your sales. Sales optimisation is rather a strategy you will have to revisit as often as possible. That’s how you keep up with customer needs and increase the number of sales that your business generates.
