(What Could Be Holding Your Company Back From Making Sales)
Regardless of the size of a business, sales are crucial to its success. It’s possible to quantify this as a win. When a customer’s needs are identified, salespeople can better match them with the appropriate offerings from a company.
A company can get into serious trouble, even bankruptcy, if its slow sales growth. However, some business owners don’t understand why their company is failing. This is why it’s crucial to have a thorough grasp of the sales process as a whole.
Various internal and external variables can affect business sales, including marketing efforts, products, services, leadership, and customer interactions.
The business’s many moving parts must function perfectly with one another. However, despite your best efforts to ensure a seamless operation and stellar sales results, unforeseen problems may still significantly impact your bottom line. There may be some of them that you’re entirely unaware of.
A Fall in Sales: Why It Occurred and What Can Be Done About It
If you want to boost sales, consider these frequently overlooked causes of poor performance.
- Disregard for the Wishes of One’s Clientele
A company’s success depends on its management team’s ability to read the minds of its customers and anticipate their needs. Businesses that lose touch with their customers and fail to anticipate their needs render all their planning moot.
Business owners can learn more about their customers’ buying habits by collecting and analyzing customer feedback and tracking sales trends.
- How content are they with the current state of your products and services?
- Are they requesting additional functionality? More advantages?
- What’s the latest on customer satisfaction?
Answering these questions will help you adjust or fine-tune your marketing approach.
- So Far, You Haven’t Attracted Much of a Following
Even if we do everything right at the beginning, there will be a time when we don’t have enough of an audience to see sales or even to learn what we’re doing wrong at first so we can fix it.
It’s possible to fall into this category if you’re still in the early stages of your profile’s development and have fewer than a thousand followers. It would be best if you didn’t give up; instead, focus on getting your offer in front of as many people as possible.
You can’t be sure that all of your 1,000 followers have seen the great content marketing you’ve created to sell your offer, even if you have a lot of followers. My experience has taught me that a person needs to be exposed to an offer three times before seriously considering it.
The first impression might not stick. They may realize they have seen it before after the second viewing. After hearing your pitch three times, there’s a chance they’ll take notice.
Therefore, if you only have a small following, you should keep making the same offer repeatedly, and your audience size will eventually increase.
Imagine you have successfully built an online following and are now attempting to sell your wares to that audience. No matter how many people are following you or seeing the offer, the wrong person will never buy if they are not the ideal customer for the offer.
Sometimes people who have been blogging or making videos for enjoyment and cultivating an audience for their niche decide to turn their hobby into a business. You can’t just sell anything to your audience, so be cautious about what you put out there.
You might fail in reselling designer handbags if your platform is typically used to share tips on cooking and Target hauls, but you decide to start a business selling them.
There’s a chance your followers are interested in your cooking and shopping, and that’s how you started with them. If you want to make money off the things you buy and show off to your customers, you may have more success selling them a recipe eBook or joining an affiliate network that works with Target.
- You Haven’t Earned the Trust of Your Readers/Listeners Just Yet
Business studies have shown that customers are more likely to purchase from a company they are familiar with. If your company hasn’t done enough to get the word out about who they are, what they do, and why they do it, then it’s unlikely that many people will be interested in taking you up on an offer.
If your online activity has been sporadic, this is especially true. Not posting regularly or posting low-quality content sends the message that you aren’t invested in your audience and don’t have anything of value to offer them.
No one will purchase from a company if they have doubts about its competence or ability to deliver on its promises.
- Workplace Conditions Are Poor
Inadequate working conditions are a major contributing factor that is often disregarded. If workers aren’t satisfied with their surroundings, they won’t be productive, hurting your business’s bottom line.
Providing employees with time to relax and have fun is one such example. Since its inception, Toyota, like many other Fortune 500 companies like Google, have tried to humanize its manufacturing environment.
- Management Blunder or Poor Leadership
All company decisions must be consistent with the company’s mission. The company’s fate is in the balance, and one wrong move could spell doom. Ineffective management is a leading cause of business failure.
A few examples of bad leadership are as follows: improper delegation, poor employee management, financial mishaps, unhealthy culture, resistance to change, and an inability to anticipate the unexpected.
- Growing Too Fast Before You’re Ready
Say a company has a successful first two months. It has been an enormous success, with revenues doubling from initial estimates.
Consequently, you expand your workforce and acquire additional goods. The market for the product dries up after six months. It hadn’t reached maturity yet so it couldn’t scale to that level. When you feel ready is the only time to scale.
- There Is a Lack of Harmony Between Marketing and Sales
If sales and marketing aren’t working together, it could hurt business.
Marketing strategies and tactics are what drive sales. You can boost sales with the help of a well-thought-out marketing plan that sets monthly goals and prioritizes qualified leads.
- You Aren’t Consistently Selling
There are many strange, untrue, and harmful stories floating around in our heads about what it means to be salesy and self-promoting, and that’s why sales are one of the biggest challenges women face in business.
Unfortunately, none of these tales is even close to being accurate. If you choose to feel bad about selling and keep telling yourself lies about how scammy and pushy you are, you will never share your offer or business online.
Trying to sell and market something can be challenging and time-consuming, and I get that. Did you know, for instance, that a well-executed sales funnel marketing strategy can generate monthly revenue in the three- to the four-figure range for your products and services?
Further, they are automatable, reducing the time spent on direct sales efforts. No matter what approach you take, consistent selling is essential to success.
- You Have Presented an Offer That Is either Unclear, Confusing or Lacking Key Details
Multiple products and services could be on sale from your company. Digital or physical goods could be the subject of such promotions.
You might receive them in exchange for the work you do for other people. It’s also possible that these deals are affiliate programs through which you can earn a commission by referring customers to particular vendors.
However, clarity in the offer is essential for customers to comprehend what you’re providing and determine whether or not they need your service or product. Customers won’t buy something if they can’t understand what it is, how to use it, what problem it solves, or why they need it.
One way to fix this problem is to converse with your followers and ensure they fully grasp the offer.
That’s why it’s essential to sustain a steady stream of marketing and content production that disseminates your message to customers and followers so that you can consistently receive and act on their feedback.
- Sorry, but Your Sales Page Is Terrible
Visiting a poor-quality sales page right before making a purchase is the worst. In an online store, the sales page is the page that displays and describes the offer to potential customers.
Your sales page can’t be effective without high-quality product photos, detailed descriptions of what customers can expect to receive, and answers to their most pressing questions. You wouldn’t believe how often we come across small business websites with sales pages containing no information about the offer.
That’s why, like many others who have visited that page before me, I decided not to buy anything.
Why would anyone purchase something if the sales page is poorly designed or lacks essential information? This signifies the product’s overall quality and is a massive deterrent for potential buyers.
- There Is Not Enough Natural Web Traffic to Sustain Sales
The importance of the company’s online presence cannot be overstated in the current business climate. You can produce a steady flow of leads or prospective customers from web traffic.
For instance, if the company has no social media presence, but the vast majority of its customers are active there, word of the company’s existence will be difficult to spread. Learn how to locate sources of one-of-a-kind, relationship-based, organic traffic and convert that traffic into actual sales.
- Ignoring the Threat Posed by Competitors
Your rival may have quietly released a groundbreaking new product that destroys the competition, and you’re unaware of it.
If you want to retain the competitiveness of your business, you need to be aware of your rivals’ every move at all times to respond quickly and devise effective strategies.
- Disorganized Work Force
The competence and efficiency of the staff rely on the availability of resources and training. Without proper instruction, a customer service representative, for instance, might misunderstand or offend the people they are supposed to help.
Ensure that training is given the time and attention it deserves in your company.
- Neglecting the Needs of Loyal Customers
Special treatment should be for regulars who consistently spend money with the company. It’s crucial to prioritize your connections with customers. If a single dissatisfied customer vents their frustrations on social media, the company stands to lose a lot of business.
Customers who shop with you regularly should be rewarded for their loyalty with special offers like loyalty cards or coupons.
- You Have Unrealistically High Standards
Too many new business owners approach the task with an “If you build it, they will come” mentality, even though the digital marketplace is a beautiful place to build a business.
Unfortunately, that isn’t how things function in practice. A beautiful website showcasing your products and services is a great starting point for an online business, but it won’t guarantee success.
To convert, you’ll need the following and the company assets to work in tandem, and you’ll also need to establish realistic goals. Many business owners are perplexed because they have hundreds of online followers but only a handful of actual customers.
However, assuming that your entire following will immediately become paying customers is unreasonable. Although you can be sure that all your followers have seen your offer, that doesn’t mean they’ll immediately make a purchase.
You may be astonished to learn that a reasonable conversion rate for an online business is 3%. Even if your offer is perfect and you’re speaking to a room full of your ideal customers, you might get three sales out of a hundred people.
This is why we must always make offers, share high-value content, and keep our ideal customers in mind.
Reflections on Declining Revenues
A decreasing sales trend is a red flag that something is wrong.
Consider each of these suggestions in light of your business to determine the extent to which they may be causing you to lose money. Please include it in your regular monthly sales review.
If you would like to know more about topics that would help your business grow, take the time to read “How to Grow Your Small Business in 2022.” Don’t forget to check out our other articles here.
Author’s Bio:
Paul Meñez was a freelance interior designer turned graphic artist and audio-video editor. He went into full-time NGO work for more than ten years and found his passion for outreach work, specifically for underprivileged children and youth. He has travelled around the Philippines and Asia on different outreach efforts, even with his wife and three kids. He is currently based in the Philippines, doing freelance graphic design and video editing while writing for Softvire. He is also preparing to jumpstart his organic farm on his hometown island soon.
