Sales Strategies Need Creativity

Meaningful Messages

For many business owners, advertising means radio, TV, newspapers, magazines and perhaps direct mail. But the most obvious options are not always the best, or the most cost effective. One opportunity often overlooked is the time your callers are on hold. "Around 70 percent of callers are put on hold on any given day, and they wait an average of 43 seconds," says Adam Bowen, director of The On Hold Company. "That’s thousands of opportunities every year to get your message across to a completely captive audience. Instead of leaving your callers to listen to music or nothing at all, you can be up-selling, cross-promoting and educating them about what your business has to offer. We go to great lengths to tailor our on-hold message creations for businesses of all sizes.

Our mandate is to create messages that actually make money for our clients." As business growth specialist with Quantum, Peter Beveridge encourages his clients to think laterally. One client, a firm which supplies raw materials to the furniture fabrication industry, decided against spending money on glossy advertisements in favour of a series of seminars. "They used the seminars to position themselves as experts to their market," he says. "And now they’re working closely with the key influencers in the industry to establish an accreditation system. Their aim is to be recognised as leaders in the field, and this strategy is working very well for them." A seminar can also provide an opportunity to develop customer loyalty by adding value to the service you provide. Beveridge has seen an accounting firm turn their business around by using seminars to cross-sell relevant products, switching their focus from attracting new customers to retaining and building business with existing ones. He has also found that many successful businesses are creative in the way they distribute their product.

"It could be as simple as making better use of the internet," he says. "There are still business owners who don’t understand how effective a website can be, or who dismiss the idea as too expensive. This may be because they looked into it 10 years ago when you needed around $20,000 to get a website up and running, and they haven’t been back since. Nowadays you can do it for $1,000 and it can be set up so that you can keep the content up to date yourself."

Most business owners have heard that it’s more expensive to find a new customer than to retain an existing one. Yet, while many retailers will claim to have plenty of regular customers, they will often admit to knowing nothing about them. In other words, they have no other way to market to them. "There are ways for even a cash business to capture customer details," says Beveridge. "You could offer an extended warranty or entry into a competition, for example." Once you have the details, it pays to be vigilant about using them. "Email addresses are clearly best as communication costs you nothing," says Beveridge. "Otherwise, direct mail still works well when it’s done properly. Yes, people are inundated with junk mail, but there are creative ways to get your message read. If one mailing doesn’t work, try a different approach."

Knowing more about your customers also means identifying what they value most. "Getting new customers is just one of a number of profit drivers including increasing the buying lifetime, frequency of purchase, the value of each transaction or the profit margin per transaction," he says. "If your rate of converting leads to sales is low—for example, one conversion for every 10 inquiries—it would be a lot easier to double that rate by doing a bit of staff training than to double the number of inquiries." There’s also a tendency for business owners to forget what made them successful in the first place. "If customers came to you because they appreciate the wide range of goods you have on offer, culling that range will not be a sensible economy," says Beveridge. "Yet people often make decisions which are not based on customer feedback or market research."