If you run a local retail or service business, chances are that advertising salespeople knock on your door all the time.
Where’s your advertising money best spent? Unless you’re the local theater or you have a fantastic sale on attractive consumer items, nothing beats direct sales for small businesses.
Target 100 potential new customers, take an hour a day for two weeks, and talk to each one of them about what you do. Best if you can meet face-to-face. The phone is OK. And a careful, personalized letter is better than nothing. Dollar for dollar, you’ll pull much greater response by making personal phone calls than most other advertising vehicles.
When you are on the phone selling, keep in mind that most sales – especially sales of large-ticket items and intangible services – take several steps to close. On the phone you aren’t really selling the product or service – you’re selling the next step in the process, usually a face-to-face meeting.
Questions you can expect to hear from interested prospects:
- Can you send me some literature? This is often a polite way of saying “no thanks.” Try to gauge the interest of these prospects by asking how, exactly, they might use your product or service. Tell them you want to know this in order to send them literature that highlights the right features. If they don’t have a real answer to this question, they aren’t likely to become buyers. But have helpful literature prepared in advance, and do send it out to everyone who asks, whether they seem serious or not.
- Who uses your products or services now? The best response is a list of happy current customers. If you’re new in business, say so, and don’t apologize. If you have customers who you think are not entirely pleased with what you’ve delivered to them, do not mention them to your prospects. Better to be perceived as inexperienced than as less-than-competent.
- I’m interested. What’s the next step? This is the question you’re waiting for. The next step is probably a meeting – in your prospect’s office if he or she prefers, or in your office if it is thoroughly professional. Bad move: meeting in a restaurant or hotel lobby. Better alternative, if you’ve got no presentable space of your own: a local business club, or a borrowed office from your local Chamber of Commerce.
Content copyright Enterprise Interactive
