How to Double Sales for Your Service Business

If you operate a service business, pay attention ...

You can double your sales simply by following up systematically with your prospects and clients. I've seen it happen over and over.

For a good perspective on this, here's an excerpt from an article by EyeonSales.com:

Keep Efforts Organized

Sales can be a daunting task when you do not keep all of your contacts, leads, and activities in a central place. To make your sacred selling time most effective, use a CRM tool to keep track of your sales conversations. I use and recommend Salesforce.com, though there are many other tools out there that you can use.

Take good notes, and at the end of each conversation, set a solid next step for yourself and record this in your CRM. This will help you stay organized as well as prioritize your follow-up and sales efforts.

Stop stressing out about your long to-do list. Follow these tips, and your days could look something like this:

It’s Friday morning, and you have blocked off three hours for uninterrupted sales time. You sit down at your computer, and an alarm goes off instructing you to call back Jessica Smith of Smith & Jones Manufacturing, whom you met at an industry event two weeks ago.

You open up your contact management system, peruse your notes, and see that Jessica is a Boston Celtics fan. You pick up the phone and call her, making a point to congratulate her on her team’s recent win over San Antonio.

The conversation continues, and you mention how you read a Harvard Business Review article that relates to the manufacturing industry. When the conversation ends you set a task in your calendar to follow up with Jessica next month. There is no immediate need, but you realize you can help Jessica’s business be more successful in the long term. Using your CRM tool, you add her to your enewsletter list and send a quick email to one of your associates, asking him to retrieve the article from HBR and send it to Jessica.

You move on to the next person on your list. By the time noon rolls around, you have moved four leads forward and left messages for five others.

This afternoon, you are off to deliver that big consulting project you’ve been working on all month.

The result: Your sales efforts are consistent and organized. You are developing relationships and moving prospects to the next stage of the pipeline. And it’s all because you made the time and added selling to your priority list.

It's baffling how many service business owners don't track their conversations with prospects or clients, or follow up with them systematically.

Bad news: You will never improve if you don't know what you're doing. And, when it comes to sales, most service business owners really don't know what they're doing.

Good news: You can double your sales if you do nothing more than follow up with all qualified prospects at least 3 times.

How?

Get a good CRM like SalesForce or GoldMine. Then use it to organize your communications with prospects and clients. It can pay you back in about 2-3 days ... but only if you use it.

I have never seen this fail since 1996. Heck, I quickly doubled sales twice for my first business by doing nothing more than using GoldMine to literally mine the gold from inbound emails and phone calls.

For more information, check out the little ebook I wrote on the followup marketing.