How to increase sales by 20% for your business!!

So how do you follow up effectively to increase sales?

If you are just starting out in business then you can probably easily follow-up with low numbers of enquiries and customers manually using spreadsheets, notes, Outlook/ Gmail. Plus it keeps the costs down as you go through the start-up phase. To do anything more sophisticated at this point is a distraction from getting your first customers and testing your business model.

Now, once you start to gain traction then the number of enquiries and customers will increase and following up will start to take more and more of your time. Sales opportunities will start to “fall between the cracks” as you are just too busy to do everything. And this is the point where business owners start to add systems to help with keeping in touch with enquiries and customers. One key tool they will acquire is an email platform, as email marketing works very well. So it will probably be something like MailChimp. Aweber, Constant Contact or one of many others. And this will work to a certain point.

And finally, the business reaches a point where they have many sales enquiries and customers. The business will have built up a whole “technology stack” of tools that simply do not talk to each other. We call this Multi-System Chaos.

You will know when you have Multi-System Chaos when non of your separate systems will talk to one another and you simply cannot do the marketing that you now need to do in order to grow your business.

And this is the point that you realise you need a more sophisticated tool that gives you an all in one marketing solution to increase sales. So what are the options?

If you are looking for an enterprise-level solution then you could be looking at SalesForce and  HubSpot. These start with a free solution but in order to do serious marketing, you will be looking at multiple thousands of pounds per month in fees. Plus set up charges. These I believe are very good solutions, but I have no experience of them myself.

If you are looking for a comprehensive small business marketing and sales automation solution then you would be advised to look at ActiveCampaign or Keap (particularly Keap). Both of these are excellent solutions for smaller businesses with a small business price tag. I have used both solutions with clients and which one would be best for you really depends on your particular requirements.

If you are looking for a cheap/ free solution then you could look at SugarCRM or ZohoCRM. But when I have looked at the free solutions they either have very limited functionality or you will have to spend money in order to customise it enough to do the job for you. So not really “free” by the time you have it up and running.

If you found yourself gravitating to the comprehensive small business marketing and sales automation solution then choosing the right solution to increase sales for your business can be daunting – each software has pros and cons and the key to success is to select the solution which best fits your requirements. I would be delighted to have a quick chat where I could help guide you to the right solution for your business (even if it is a solution that I am not the right person to assist you with)

Feel free to schedule a 15-minute Discovery Call where we can have a chat.