You have, no doubt, heard the old sales adage, Always Be Closing (ABC). And while this is certainly true, there is another sales idea that deserves your focus. While not as flashy and slick as ABC, Always Be Building is a solid and long term plan for sales growth. What should you be building? Well, everything. You need to be constantly working on things like customer relationships, your website and marketing materials, and even your business offerings.
Always Be Building Your Relationships
Strong sales are built on good relationships, more so today than even a few years ago. It is getting harder to walk in cold and “close” a sale. At the same time, it is getting easier to network and build relationships with customers and prospects. The web has opened the doors wide to relationship building. But it’s not just online where you can and should be building relationships.
People are looking for more connection with what they are buying. In some senses, they are beginning to think local again. But more so than local, they are looking to have relationships with the people they are buying from. People enjoy doing business on a first-name basis.
What does it look like to always be building relationships? It starts with you caring about your customers. Get out there and visit customers and prospects. Get online and join in on groups that share a passion in your business’s area of expertise. If there is a forum or website devoted to some area your business serves (and there is) you need to be involved there. It is time to get off the sidelines and get involved in your customers’ lives. Don’t be the wallflower. Instead, find out about the people you serve, interact with them, and care for them.
Always Be Building Your Website
This goes for all of your marketing and sales materials, but especially for your website; always be adding value and content. Your website should be a living thing, with new information, news, helpful articles and videos, and more. Think of your website as an important hub of information for your prospects and customers. It is not enough for your website to be just another sales pitch. It needs to provide real, useful information to your audience.
Today, one of the best ways to keep your small business website alive and well is to maintain a blog. Write about things that your customers will care about. If you are a brain surgeon, this means sharing your knowledge about health, procedures, and research. If you are tree surgeon, this means sharing your knowledge about horticulture, pruning, and tree diseases. Everyone has some knowledge to share.
Sharing knowledge attracts visitors to your website. Some of these visitors will be potential customers. The more you build your website, the more potential customers you will be able to reach.
Always Be Building Your Business
One of the best ways to get new sales is to sell something else to an old customer. To this end, you should always be building your business by adding new products, services, and affiliate or partner offers. Don’t go crazy here, a car dealership probably shouldn’t start selling flowers, but it could certainly add a car wash. Look to build new revenue streams that fit right in with what you are already doing and won’t require a massive reorganization of your business.
By adding on new business offerings, you have more to sell. You can earn a higher profit per customer, and long-term, loyal customers will be worth more to you. If you don’t build your business in new directions, you will always need to focus on getting new customers and won’t have the time to build those great, long-term relationships that can keep your business humming along for years.
These are just a few ideas for how you can adopt the Always Be Building principle into your small business. Can you think of some more? Keeping your eyes on growth and building strong bases from which to grow will do more in the long run for your business than any single sales push ever could.
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photo credit: C. G. P. Grey
[...] at AllBizAnswers.com, Bradford Shimp has written a post called “Always Be Building.” It is a good reminder that in today’s world, relying on the status quo just [...]