5 Savvy New Small Business Sales Trends in 2023

There are new strategies to attract customers and increase revenue in 2023. These 5 small business sales trends can increase sales.
small business sales trends

Paying attention to small business sales trends is important in growing your revenue. The amount of sales depends on a combination of three components of marketing: customer acquisition, conversion, and loyalty. Each of these stages increases the number of purchases – one-time and regular.

Small Business Sales Trends

In a highly competitive and economically unstable market, all businessmen are looking for ways to increase sales in a store or company. Small business is by far the most common. It is easier to organize, even with little or no experience in work, but it is also characterized by chaos in sales. Therefore, in this article, we will reveal working methods for increasing sales for small businesses, and explain how to make a quick profit or income in the long term.

1. Rolling Planning

When a company has the resources to set goals for a long period, long-term budgeting is used. Once approved, it usually does not change during the entire period. Such planning is considered the “gold standard” of management in a steadily developing market.

However, during a period of uncertainty, the annual forecast may quickly lose its relevance due to the high probability of changes in demand for the company’s goods and services or due to other factors. Therefore, now in the field of small business, there is a tendency to shorten the planning horizon and form budgets in a simplified form for two to three months in advance. So the company can manage processes situationally – adjust indicators depending on market changes.

2. The Evolution of the Sales Funnel

The implementation scheme and sales funnel familiar in business change over time. Today, one of the small business sales trends is that this funnel is more like an hourglass, where the bottleneck is the first purchase. Business owners and managers should adhere to the principle of customer-centricity, which makes it possible to turn a buyer into a permanent customer. Thus, the client base will become wider due to the recommendations of a satisfied consumer and word of mouth.

To work with regular customers correctly, it is necessary to pay due attention to O2O technology, the abbreviation of which stands for “online for offline” and vice versa. In this case, the business will be able to recognize the vast majority of customers, interact with them using various online and offline channels, and build hybrid communication.

3. The Mood of the Sales Department – Pledge of Big Profits

Even the most experienced sales manager sometimes feels intimidated by the upcoming call. Especially if the call is cold and you don’t know who and in what mood will answer on the other end. Sooner or later, constant emotional experiences develop into a well-known concept in the modern world – stress.

It’s no secret that being a sales manager is one of the most stressful jobs in the world. And with stress comes burnout. Therefore, business leaders, this year should pay a lot of attention to those who directly affect the company’s income.

Daily meetings

Remote work has become a challenge for many companies. For it to be productive, it is necessary to regularly measure the effectiveness and maintain the morale of the team. Conduct weekly meetings via video call. Conduct daily meetings with the remote sales force so that the team can stay in sync. Regular communication will also mitigate employee isolation and help prevent burnout. Video calls solve two important tasks:

Help managers control employees, to be sure that everyone is awake and ready to work

Remote work can break the daily routine of even a very responsible person, so the need to attend video meetings will become an external disciplining factor.

Help employees socialize

In the office, this often happens – people meet, exchange a couple of phrases, see each other, and feel involved in a common cause. The remote operator is deprived of all this, which increases the chance of burnout.

Hybrid Mode of Operation for Remote Salespeople

Personal contact with the sales team is difficult to overestimate and it is one of the most popular small business sales trends. And no matter how many laudatory odes are sung to remote work and various tools that support the effectiveness of the team, it is difficult for all of us to discipline ourselves while working at home.

Also, working in the office, among colleagues, helps to quickly cope with the stress of working with “difficult clients”. Therefore, if you have temporarily decided to give up the office during the pandemic, it is a sign for you to rent offices for a few days a week for offline work as well as for team-building activities that are so necessary to maintain team spirit.

4. The Pursuit of Self-service

More and more consumers, especially among the younger generation, are choosing to walk the buyer’s journey on their own without interacting with sales and marketing teams. 81% of customers report wanting to see more self-service options.

This is a difficult problem for companies that have been promoting products with the help of human resources for decades. Now, they need to focus on the product experience and enable buyers to interact with it. After that, they are more likely to contact sales professionals because they can ask questions based on their experience. This trend will also help solve the problems of the previous trend because cold sales cause discomfort to both the sales team and the buyer.

5. Honest Marketing Creates Easy Selling

People are tired of endless aggressive selling and warm-ups, people want honesty. Therefore, more and more customers trust those messages about brands that are left not by the brands themselves, but by other people – and they leave honestly. It works for thousands of years, it just changes its shape. We used to ask our neighbor where he bought the refrigerator, but now we trust the opinions of influencers. However, people are not idiots and easily distinguish bought testimonials and purely promotional integrations from real UGC and honest opinions of influencers. Come up with ways to activate your audience and make such a product that people talk about you well.

Activate your audience to create content about your products: think about the mechanics. Give loyalty points, hold contests, and organize a referral program. Broadcast live from your production/internal meetings / offline outlets and so on. Ask questions to guests, and invite customers to live broadcasts. Live content with real product demos and live reviews is great. In addition, according to statistics, people spend 3 times more time on live broadcasts than on recorded content.

All these marketing tools fundamentally affect the duration and quality of sales, especially for small businesses, as they are often local.

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