Here are four straight forward things you can do to improve sales at your startup, that have been proven to work over and over again:
1One of the best things you can do to increase sales and set your company apart from the competition is to increase the number of blog posts on your website. You don’t have to be a perfectionist. These blog posts can be a couple of paragraphs long, and each blog post can be an answer to questions your customers/prospects typically ask. If one person is asking a question about your product, a lot more people will be asking the same question —> but to Google first. And if your dear friend Google can’t find that answer because it is sitting in your inbox instead of a blog post, you are losing quite a few prospects.
How to get started with your blog posts: begin by keeping track of all questions that customers and prospects ask, and write a blog post for each response. The numbers are there to back this up, businesses with websites of 401–1000 pages (consisting mostly of blog posts) get 6x more leads than those with 51–100 pages. That’s 6 times more! Also, by 2020, 85% of the sales interaction will be done without a human (i.e. good ol’ google search, a responsive AI, etc), and you need to start preparing for that now. In the near future, AI will tell people exactly which product is best for their needs, and if you don’t have tons of information available online, nobody will be able to find you.
2 Are there highly demanded features that you can sell separately as a product, or as an optional add on to your core product? Salesforce started this trend with its SaaS purchasing model (pay monthly for what you need), and AWS has been doing a great job letting customers buy only what they need, and charging for each item separately instead of giving everyone a big bulk of features that are part of an “Enterprise” package that they will only use 1/3 of the features. Customers today expect to be able to just click and buy only the things they’d like to purchase vs getting everything that your “Enterprise” product offers. They don’t want to have to pay for features that they don’t need. Take a minute to take a deep breath, close your eyes, and put yourself in your customers shoes -> you only want pay for the things that you will need. Sounds great!
3 Review and test all emails that are sent out to your prospects, from the beginning to the end of their journey. Each email should be targeted to where they are in their journey. For instance:
— If they only created an account -> sent a tutorial on how to get started — If they got started but didn’t run any tests -> send a tutorial on how to get tests running, or a blog post on roadblocks people commonly run into — Is there anything else that you can make incredibly easy for your prospects to get started? Take a very close look at your conversion rate: where’s the bottleneck from your customer’s perspective? Always be A/B testing to see where you can improve conversion. Watch prospects use your website, and improve everywhere they get stuck at. A wonderful tool is usertesting.com -> you can pick your exact target audience, and ask people that have never seen your website before to go through it, sign up, see if they understand your value proposition, etc. They will record the entire interaction and say their thoughts out loud as they walk through the journey — this will give you tons of insights of where to improve! You will also begin to see the same trends after you watch 3–5 people go through it.
A beautiful example is the AppDynamics strategy: “One of the most impactful sales enablers the sales team leveraged was the company’s ability to “consumerize” its enterprise software. In fact, AppDynamics mastered this go-to-market strategy by allowing business users to download the software and start using it without needing to speak to anyone; this led the sales team to generate nearly $30 million ARR within the first three years.”
4On “Contact us” and “website chat” responses: do you typically respond to contact us forms within a few minutes? If not, it’s a practice you should start following. Reason: if you follow up with a lead within 5 minutes, you are 9x more likely to convert them to a prospect (that’s not 2x, 3x, 5x, that’s 9x!). Also, 35–50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. Wow! Easy money! On the same vein, are you manning up your website chat? Customers that get a response quick are happier (and again, more likely to convert), and you set yourself apart from your competitors.
Lastly, don’t forget that the biggest question you need to answer before anything else is: do you have something that (a lot of) people need. If not, you should iterate and find that thing pretty fast! Happy selling!
__Please share this article (or clap clap) with anyone that may need sales tips.__Thank you Chandini Ammineni for reading drafts of this article.