What are your 5 top sales challenges?

[Improvesaleswithyou]

All you business owners out there!

If someone could help you, what 5 areas of improving sales would you want to focus on first. If you guys let me know I will try and help you all out!

kind regards
Gary

 

[hagrid han]

Thank you firstly!
1.The communicate skill with different countries problems.
2.Promoting business by facebook.
3.The design of email.
4.Online market strategy.
only these come out of my head.tks

 

[LloydBurrell]

Interesting thread!

1. Defining my clients' expectations;
2. Finding the most effective relation between time allotted for advertisement and sales;
3. New opportunities for my business;
4. Rules of interaction;

 

[Improvesaleswithyou]

Lloyd,

thanks for the post, lets give it a couple of days and see what else crops up then I will try and post some helpful advice!

Gary

 

[JoTheEntreprenette]

1. The ability to manage my time and resources
2. The ability to handle failure, rejection and discouragement
3. The ability to control my attitude no matter what is going on
4. Ideas to leverage sales through other businesses
5. Systemise my upsells

Regards

Jo

 

[christian_d]

Wave your wand and provide us with 20 qualified appointments per week, all at £2.50 each.

Don't worry about the other stuff, we'll do the rest! ;-)

 

[Improvesaleswithyou]

Hagrid, number 4 first. Well this is a pretty big one and the items in 2,3 and 4 are part of this, your business seems very large you have lots of products and sell to many countries and many markets.
You will be unable to have a single marketing, online or offline strategy that covers all of these. When it comes to communicating with different countries I would recommend having multiple websites that are designed specifically for each country, have a look at the Canon website.
I would also suggest having sub sites for each product range as you have:
Health monitoring
Beauty enhancement
Sports and training.....and so on.
I think facebook may be of little use at the moment, as it works best when you target smaller groups of people. Email design again needs to address specific markets or otherwise will get little or no response to it.
Hope this helps, please PM me if you want to discuss more!
Gary
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Lloyd, I think 1, 3 and 4 are linked, 2 see below, in the first instance to defining your market, your website is very nice and clean and professional but you are trying to market yourself to everyone. Now I know everyone who wants a desk could be a customer, but you will get more traction and more sales if you try and market to a subset of everyone.
This can sound counter productive as you will feel you are limiting your market, but that is why it will boost sales in the long run. Let me give you a couple of ideas.
Desks for employed people who work at home.
Desks for self employed people that work at home.
Top of the range desks for business owners.
A good idea is look at your current customers and look for a pattern or common elements. Once you have selected your market then start tailoring your offer to them, show them you know all about their specific problems and have answers to them, in a similar way to your top 5 mistakes section.
The market selection will then help you, define your clients expectations and govern rules of interaction, plus I think will help you spot more opportunities.
Hope this helps, please PM me if you want to discuss more!
Gary
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Lloyd number 2 and Jo number 1
The biggest problem for small business and people in general is time management. Typically the issue is not time per se, but a failure to plan, as without a plan it is easy to get sidetracked into things which seem worthy but are not contributing as positively to the business as a whole.
When preparation meets opportunity then success results.
Most business focus on the opportunity aspect, which is why when they meet it, it doesn’t turn into the success they thought it would, because the preparation was not done. There are lots of books and courses on how to plan, but here are some essentials.
Start by defining the end goal, make sure it is achievable, ok difficult but achievable otherwise no amount of planning will get you there.
Then set out a realistic timescale, for instance 12 months. Break this down into 4 x 90 day plans. Break each of the 90 day plans into 3 x 4 week plans. Each week plan into 5 day plans. Then use to do sheets and did sheets to plan tomorrow today and at the end of the day review what you did and what is left to do.
We all probably know what “To Do” sheets are, but “Did Sheets”? well these are how you track your progress about what you did in the day, not just tasks you were meant to do, but things that cropped up during the day, phone calls, emails and so on. It will soon become apparent where your time is being spent.
Jo, I think this is also part of your number 2 and 3, the reason is that without a plan rejection and failure seems a bigger part of your life than when it is just part of the plan. It is a bit old but very true, every failure brings you one step closer to a win, if you have a plan to work to!
Also you have to understand just because someone didn’t buy or do what you wanted them to do is not a failure it just means that the meeting point of your offer the persons own goals and drivers required for them to say yes, were not met.
Hope this helps, please PM me if you want to discuss more!
Gary