Improve Your Website's Conversion Rates With These 6 Design Tips

An appealing website design is important, but you can’t lose sight of what your website is really for: to convert traffic into lead-form submissions, phone calls, physical-location visits, contact-form submissions and sales. Without these actions, your business will not generate revenue. Naturally, the more conversions your website produces, the more revenue your business is going to produce.

I recently sat down for a morning cup of coffee with a friend that wanted me to audit his company’s website. Its conversion numbers were extremely low and my friend was willing to make any necessary changes to improve those numbers. Here are six takeaways from our conversation that you can implement to improve your conversion rates.

7 Ideas for Smoother Selling

If you talk to enough prospects, eventually you'll make sales - even if your sales skills are minimal. Selling well is basically a way to reduce the number of prospects you need to meet with before you can make the requisite number of sales. Instead of making hundreds of cold calls in a day, you might be able to get by with a few dozen and still make the same number of sales. Here are some ideas to help you improve your sales results.

1. Be Likable
People want to do business with people they like. Of course, not everybody likes the same things. In a selling situation, the trick is to understand your prospect well enough to get along with him. Being likable is the first step towards building a relationship with a prospect. And building relationships with prospects and customers is the key to selling, not once, but many times. 

Why You Should Be Cross-Selling

Closing ratios vary across companies and industries, but for the most part average salespeople close about one deal in four to new prospects, and great salespeople close about one deal in three. That means there are really only two ways to get more sales. You can increase the number of leads you go through, because one in three of 500 prospects is a bigger number than one in three out of 100 prospects. Or you can turn your attention to existing customers and work on your cross-selling and up-selling.

Writing a Powerful Sales Proposal

Receiving a RFP (request for proposal) is both an exciting and a frightening moment. It's exciting because it means you've got a chance to win this sale. But it's frightening because you'll be competing with other bidders, some of whom are probably larger companies with plenty of resources. The solution is to create such a powerful proposal that you'll stand out from the rest of the pack. A strong proposal can get you the sale even if you're against competitors who offer a better deal.

Customer Success

Here’s the big fact: 98% of all dissatisfied customers were not dissatisfied because of a quality problem with the product or service purchased. In 98% of the cases their dissatisfaction was related to their perception of how they were treated by the people they dealt with.

McDonald’s Restaurants notes that over 70% of the complaints that were serious enough to be escalated to a manager where “the clerk was rude, uncommunicative or would not listen to me.” These complaints had nothing to do with the quality of the food or the speed it was delivered.

When Prospects Change Their Minds

Sales is all about getting people to change their minds. Whatever their current solution might be, your job is to convince them to buy your company's solution instead. But sometimes, after you've worked through the whole sales process and gotten a handshake agreement, the prospect will suddenly tell you that he's changed his mind. Or worse, you'll try to set up an appointment to sign the final paperwork and find that the prospect has vanished.

These situations are terribly frustrating because by this point, you believe that it's a done deal. You've probably told your sales manager to expect the order shortly and if it's a big sale, you may have done some bragging to your fellow salespeople. And now you have to tell all of those people that your sale has evaporated.

Don't Use Social to Generate Sales; Make Selling Social

Some say we can't value social-marketing efforts directly. Others claim that if we can't attribute a return on investment, we shouldn't be doing it. But maybe we're all missing the point. Maybe the problem is not whether social value can be measured in dollars. Perhaps the issue is that we can't measure in dollars objectives that weren't intended to be profitable in the first place.

“How Much Does That Cost?”

A natural question customers always ask is, “How much does that cost?”  Unfortunately, too often sales people answer incorrectly, responding with, “The price is……….”

Cost and price are very different!  If we answer with our price, we’ve immediately transformed the conversation into a pricing discussion.  The end of this conversation is always the level of discount you’ve provided.  We totally miss the opportunity to really talk about costs when we shift the conversation to pricing.

The biggest thing sales leaders overlook: SALES!

Dear Jeffrey, I’m a big fan of your weekly column, especially the one about making sales vs. measuring sales activity. Brilliant! It describes my situation to a tee. I'm an outside salesman who spends countless hours filling in itineraries, CRM notes, and reports. I had the biggest ever increase in sales last year by far, yet I have been told at times I didn't make enough calls that week. Very frustrating. Thanks for any advice you can give me.

 My first piece of advice is: Get your boss fired as soon as possible. Get a real boss, leader, coach and helper, and your sales willdouble.

You seem to be doing the right thing – INCREASING SALES, and having the best year of your career. What else could a manager want? Sounds like it’s your manager that needs to make more calls and increase his activity.

Let me address sales leaders...

Study Reveals Why B2B Salespeople Lose Deals

Harvard Business Review is arguably the most prestigious publication for business leaders and management thinkers. Here’s one of my recent Harvard Business Review articles titled “Ten Reasons Salespeople Lose Deals.”

Over the past year I’ve had the opportunity to interview several hundred business-to-business salespeople about how they win-over prospective clients and the circumstances when they lose. These interviews were conducted with salespeople across a wide variety of industries including high technology, telecommunications, financial services, consulting, industrial equipment, healthcare, and electronics to name a few. Their companies ranged from start-ups to billions of dollars in sales with the majority being between fifty and five-hundred million in annual revenues.

Why Value Trumps Selling in the Complex B2B Sales Cycle

In 2011 the Marketing Leadership Council surveyed 1900 customers to uncover insight regarding B2B purchasing behavior. It turns out, that on average (and with little variation among industries) customers will contact Sales when they independently completed about 60% of the purchasing decision process. That’s right. When you get that coveted form completion on the website “Contact Us” or a phone call to sales, chances are your prospect has weighed the alternatives and more than likely is ready to do business with you. In many cases, prospects are so educated they may even know more about your products and services (and competitive alternatives) than your own sales reps.

6 σημαντικές ανάγκες πελατών και πώς να τις ικανοποιήσετε

Όλοι γνωρίζουν ότι η πώληση συνεπάγεται την ικανοποίηση των αναγκών των πελατών. Ωστόσο, είναι  τεράστιο λάθος να υποθέσουμε ότι οι πιο σημαντικές ανάγκες είναι αυτές που εμφανίζονται μόνο κατά τη συνεργασία με τους πελάτες, ή έτσι ξαφνικά σε μια επαγγελματική συζήτηση.  

Οι πελάτες εξ όσων ο ίδιος γνωρίζω αλλά και βάσει των όσων οι ειδικοί πρεσβεύουν, έχουν συνήθως ανάγκες που σπάνια εκφράζονται και που είναι η πραγματική βάση μιας αμοιβαίας υγιούς και επικερδούς σχέσης μαζί τους. Παρακάτω σας παραθέτω έξι από τις πιο σημαντικές: 

Types of Professional Buyers

If you sell B2B, you probably deal with a lot of professional buyers. Buyers are responsible for finding materials for their companies, and they can literally lose their jobs if they make a bad deal – so they take purchasing very seriously. Experienced buyers know more about sales than many salespeople. Using sales tricks and manipulation tactics on a professional buyer is usually a bad idea, as they'll spot these tactics immediately and won't be happy. Instead, the best way to sell to a professional is to figure out what motivates them and then supply it. Different types of buyers tend to be motivated by different drives and goals, so being able to spot each type early in the sales process is crucial.

The Number-Cruncher

The ROI of Working With a Sales Recruiter

Sales is the lifeblood of an organization so when a sales department is expanding or previously filled sales positions fall vacant, it is important to fill openings as quickly as possible with the highest quality candidates possible. Unfortunately, for organizations that do not specialize in sales hiring this is easier said than done. However, positive cash flow and improved hiring ROI can be realized efficiently when hiring through a sales recruiter, since sales recruiters work with established processes in well-qualified applicant pools where there is already experience in marketplaces like yours.

A Sales Recruiter Improves ROI by Filling The Job Faster

Reducing Risk

Fear is the number-one reason why prospects hesitate to agree to a deal. Any change that occurs in someone's life has an element of risk, and selling someone your product is definitely a change for them. The more a prospect has invested in a purchase, the higher the risk. So if you want to nudge an indecisive prospect into signing on the bottom line, you must reduce his perceived risk.

Top Ways to Maximize Trade Show Opportunities

Can you remember back to that time, perhaps not so long ago, when you had an amazing trade show booth opportunity to showcase your company and for whatever reason you did not capitalize on it?  Perhaps you were an exhibitor and did not prepare, or you were an attendee and did not block out enough time to speak with key vendors or industry experts. Maybe you did everything right, but your marketing colleagues dropped the ball and follow-up happened months later.  Whatever the reason, opportunities fizzled away.  The company invested a lot of time and money, and for what?

Make that your last poorly executed event, and read on for ways to leverage this opportunity into a strategic opportunity finder.

5 Steps to Identify Qualified Leads

Not everyone on Earth is a prospect for your product or service. If you're pitching to people who truly don't need or can't buy what you have to sell, you're wasting your time. So take a few minutes to qualify your leads before launching into a full-bore sales presentation.

Are They the Decision Maker?
The very first thing you should find out is whether the person you're talking to is authorized to buy from you. In B2B sales you may need to seek out a purchasing person, the department head, the office manager, or even the company owner. In B2C your prospect may need or want to share the decision with a spouse, parent or significant other. 

When B2B Cross Selling Goes Bad

My new book, Account Planning in Salesforce, is due to be published at the end of March 2013.  I am excited about it.  As you would expect from anyone book on account planning it dives into the benefits of generating more sales from existing customers. Selling to an existing customer is easier than acquiring a new customer, and there is much research to support that.  But as I researched the cross-selling and up-selling activities of the ‘average’ B2B salesperson, I noticed some behavior that I think merits comment.

How to Raise Your Prices Without Playing the Blame Game

I am constantly looking for ways to raise the prices on my products and services so that I can improve the margins. As you continue to expand your company and improve your services, you'll one day face the challenge of raising your prices.

Almost every day you experience higher prices at the grocery store, gas pump and a range of other places. From time to time, the government requires you to increase employee wages. Why are you the only one not raising your prices? You may say, "My business is so competitive, and it's all price driven." Most companies make that claim. Your competition may be unwilling to ask for a higher price, but it doesn't mean you should be. You are not your competition. You offer a different service, you are a different company, you have different people and hopefully what you offer is a better value at any price. To be successful you must figure know your unique value proposition -- what it is that sets your apart from others.

How to Stop Chasing Prospects Forever !

Perhaps the biggest challenge faced by salespeople is the problem of chasing prospects. In this article I’ll explain exactly why that happens, and how you can avoid it entirely and make prospects chase you instead.

I once heard Donald Trump say, "In selling, you must never appear desperate. As soon as you look desperate, it's over."

A friend and I were talking about the dynamics of a cold call the other day. When we make that call, we usually hope and expect that the prospect will be receptive to hearing what we have to say. However, salespeople face increasing resistance to cold calling, as well as increasing flakiness on the part of prospects who do meet with them. Instead of thinking, "Ok, this may be interesting," here's what most prospects actually think when they receive a cold call: "Great. You don't know me and I don't know you. You have no idea what my goals are. You don't even know if we need what you're selling, and in spite of all that, you've decided to waste my time anyway with this call."