No matter what you sell, how high the retail price, what time of year or how bad the economy is, people are still buying big-ticket items – houses, cars, Boats, ATVs, and yes-even your products and services.
Are they buying as many as last year. Maybe not. Are they buying less expensive models than they used to? Could be. Are there fewer buyers on the market right now? Probably. So what!
I have purchased 9 homes in my life. Two of these homes I bought on the 24-25th of December. Who the heck buys homes on Christmas or Christmas Eve? Not as many as the weeks before or the weeks after Christmas, but homes still get sold then.
Despite what you’ve heard or read, people ARE still buying. Your job is to stop justifying why your sales are flat or down and find a way to get those people to buy from you. Now is NOT the time to give into what I call “the down disease” – (everyone is down in sales so I don’t feel so bad that my sales are down too).
In times like these, your competitors will slow down or even eliminate some or all of their marketing efforts. This creates an opportunity for you to capture their customers is you already have systems in place to do so.
Your job is to take advantage of this opportunity and find those prospects that ARE ready, willing and able to buy and make sure that they buy from you, not your competition. Sounds logical and simple enough. But if it was that simple, wouldn’t more dealers be doing it?
What it really comes down to is not having sales generating systems in place to help you and your team get the most out of all your marketing efforts.
Systems are what make so many franchises successful. Why do you think McDonalds®, Starbucks® and Kinko’s® stores and franchises are so successful? Because they have, over time, developed systems that work.
Make no mistake about it, people who buy a franchise aren’t buying hamburgers, coffee or copy machines, they’re buying a program that has proven the test of time, they are buying a successful system!
What type of systems should you create for your business? The 3 most important systems that I teach in my Ultimate Lead Generation Manual include the following:
1 – Lead capture system – here are many ways of obtaining contact information from your prospects both online and offline. Lead capture systems help you fill your “sales funnel” with highly qualified leads.
2 – Follow up marketing system – Now that you’ve enticed prospects to give you their contact information, you must create a system of following up. Statistics show that 48% of sales people never follow up on a lead and only 10% of sales people make more than 3 contacts. Don’t be a statistic…create a follow-up system!
3 – Referral marketing system – After you’ve closed the deal, you must create a system of getting referrals. 91% of customers would give a referral, but 80% have never been asked. That’s a sin! Creating a system of obtaining referrals can triple the number of referrals coming into your business.
Having sales generating systems in place in your business can help you get a predictable and constant stream of sales regardless of what is going on around the block or around the world.
David Carleton is a San Diego Local Business Marketing Consultant who specializes in showing small business owners how to spend less and get more from their marketing and advertising using low cost strategies in local business marketing, lead generation and conversion, Internet marketing and social media. To download a copy of the free report, “7 Steps to Website Success”, go to http://LocalBusinessMarketingSuccess.com
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