Staying Sharp With Sales as an Entrepreneur
Sales are the lifeblood of any business, and keeping their numbers maintained or growing is the core focus on any entrepreneur. It might not be the only important aspect of your business, but it will always be the most important aspect of your business, because if the product isn’t selling, you aren’t going to be a business for much longer. That can be a problem, though, because market saturation is bound to happen. At that point, you need to find a way to keep numbers up, because otherwise the attrition rate among existing customers will erode your income.
There are a few known ways to drive sales, and some work even when you have maximized every possible market for an existing product or service. When all else fails, though, a new offering is always an option. There’s no better way to bring back customers and initiate a new wave of popularity than by unveiling a new and improved model that lets its owners compete favorably against those who don’t choose to upgrade.
That’s a long-term solution to an ongoing issue, though. The research and development cycle for most new products is five to eight years, and you need a way to maintain and grow your numbers in the meantime. There are two ways to do that easily. You can fight attrition without expanding your market share if you can drive demand among existing customers by becoming an exclusive supplier or incentivizing larger volume orders with payment plans and delivery options. That works in some cases, especially if it helps you reposition as a niche provider without a lot of competition while you ramp up for a major new initiative on a new product or service.
The other option is by researching new applications and bringing the product to new markets. You can either identify a population who needs your product or service and then market to them to increase sales, or you can find new ways to use the product to create new markets among people who previously did not realize your product was a fit for their needs. Both these tactics keep your teams selling, and both can increase orders in the short and medium-term.
If you’re especially savvy as you gear up for a new product rollout, you might even be able to swing things, so you have the opportunity to open new applications and new markets for a product considered obsolete in its primary market. That way, even as you phase it out in favor of new models among your core customers, you have a market for used models you acquire as trade-ins. If you have a service-based business and not a product-based one, of course, you’ll need to find another way to sharpen your sales.
