Business 101: Building Sales and Customer Loyalty – How to Get Your Sales Rolling
As we hunker down for the biggest selling season of the direct sales year, it may seem like sales are coming easier – and in a way they are easier. People are a bit looser with their wallets because they’re planning to spend money: for friends, family, teachers, and themselves.
But don’t be fooled, just because money’s flowing a bit more freely doesn’t mean you can be lax in building your business. In fact, now is the time to cultivate stronger relationships in your business to ensure smoother cash flow year round.
Building Your Sales: Understanding the Sales Cycle
Think of building your sales and customer loyalty as two halves of a circle. Building your sales is all about generating revenue and building loyalty is about ensuring sustainability, making any season a strong selling season.
Let’s start with building your sales. In the next post in this series, I’ll discuss building customer loyalty. Imagine your business is the hub of a big wheel. From that wheel, six spokes keep everything stable and moving:
#1: Meeting new people – This is where most consultants spend the most time and get the most discouraged. They’re “bumping carts” at the local grocery store, passing out business cards at networking functions, and getting frustrated at the lack of results.
While it’s important to meet new people, you need to spread your efforts around into other marketing areas as well.
#2: Lead generation – Whether it’s through your internet presence, speaking engagements, vendor events or home shows, these are people that have expressed an interest, but haven’t become a client yet.
These folks are your “maybe” pile. This is the second most frustrating place on the wheel, yet a very necessary component of your business marketing. Until these people get to know you, like you, and trust you more, it’s unlikely you’ll ever turn them into a client.
A word for warning: never count a “maybe” as a “yes.” Until the contract is signed, the payment is made, or the show is on the books, it’s NOT a client relationship; it’s still a maybe. Period.
#3: Working with clients and customers – Team members, paying guests, and hosts all constitute your client base. If you serve them and you are compensated for serving them, they are your customers.
Most people would believe that this is where the money is made, and while you definitely generate revenue here, you’ve still got to develop long-term loyalty to make your business work.
Next time, we’ll discuss the other half of the sales cycle, and how to build a loyal base of business customers that continue to buy from you for months and years to come.
In addition to founding #dstips on Twitter, Lisa also publishes the popular and highly recommendedPartyOn! A weekly ezine for direct sales professionals. Get your free business building tips at Home Party Solution.com.
About Lisa Robbin Young
Lisa Robbin Young is a performing artist, author, business coach and mentor, founding multiple businesses in her years as an entrepreneur. Lisa brings a sharp, analytical mind to being an entrepreneur in today’s multi-tasking world. Her ability to brainstorm and break problems into their smallest parts earned her a prestigious position in The Governor’s Problem Solving Institute before she started high school. According to her mother, Lisa’s been asking tough questions for over 30 years.
A National Merit and National Achievement Scholar, Lisa prides herself on both book smarts and common sense. An award winning writer, speaker, graphic artist and composer, Lisa has recorded two full-length albums, and published numerous articles, poems and literary works. She blends logic and creativity in her approach to life and business. She’s both directed and performed in numerous local theater productions and is currently working on an edu-tainment television series for the web. She also built one of the first ever e-commerce websites in the early 1990′s. And her kitchen sink is still full of dishes from time to time.
Lisa is known for her direct, no-nonsense approach to helping entrepreneurs pin-point the obstacles that keep them from being successful. She pulls no punches and isn’t afraid to tell it like it is – a refreshing, disruptive approach to our common thought patterns. Her breakthrough book “Home Party Solution” and the correlating web project, Direct Sales Classroom, provides specific hands-on training for direct sales consultants that want to build a profitable business, instead of an expensive hobby. Her coaching project, Business Action Hero, helps entrepreneurs find elegantly simple solutions to be more profitable in life and business. Lisa’s new book, The Secret Watch, is expected to be released early 2012.
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