In this week's Sales Buzz:

Draw your customers in with a sales stratgey that uses small steps in commitment and costs to move your prospects gently towards becoming a paying customer.

An Effective Sales Questioning Technique That Everyone Should Use

Now you might think that this alone was a good sales strategy. Perhaps it is similar to one that you use for your products or services. A free trial has always been a good selling technique. Give the prospect the puppy and they won’t want to give it back. Let a prospect see how good your product is and they will want to buy.

But the free trial is just one technique, one sales action, and it stands alone.

To continue with my free trial of the online marketing service...

As my free trial was coming to an end I received an email from the company with details of a special offer. The same special offer greeted me when I logged on to my home page with them.

The offer is saving me up to 42% if I start using their services before the end of the month. A fare offer and one I would certainly consider. But that’s it with me, like many people I just consider the one off stand alone sales offer. I look at it, keep the email, and do nothing.

But in this case there is a combination of my free trial running out and the special offer that could save me 42%.

So what looked like a big step, moving from a free trial to a full paying customer, is now a much smaller step from free to almost half price. Even a procrastinator like me will take this step. Only for now I’m not going to because I have a hunch that if I get right to the deadline of my free trial there might just be an even better offer in my inbox.

The service has proved really good for me and if it continues like that I will be doing a full review in this newsletter in a few week’s time.

Many sales organisations make the mistake of using stand alone offers. A free trial, special offer, clearance sale, end of line, end of season, and lots more one off marketing attacks to attract new customers or get existing customers to buy.

Step back and take a look at how you could use these and similar offers and have a much greater effect.

Plan your strategy

Instead of firing out all these special stand alone offers, plan a sales strategy that takes your prospect, or existing customer, from A to B.

Look at individual prospects, or groups of potential customers, and plan how you can get them from where they are now to where you want them to be.

Let’s take a new prospect as an example. Imagine a cold prospect with no connection to your company or its products, yet. You have their starting point A, and you want them to become a regular customer, that’s the objective, position B.

So the first contact will have to be an attention grabber, a free trial, invitation to a demonstration, test drive, or some similar opportunity. You will move a percentage of your cold prospects a step forward from position A, towards B, with the first offer of your sales strategy.

Once the prospect has moved what’s your next action in your strategy. Well it could be similar to my experience above, a small step forward from free to a small price or commitment.

Charities use this technique really well

You have probably seen the TV and Newspaper campaigns by charities that ask you to commit to a very small sum each month. In the UK is can be as small as £2.50, around $4.00, a month.

This is a well thought out sales strategy that draws you in slowly.

They show you what a big difference your small commitment will make using great sales copy and images. And many people agree to this small step. Once a commitment is made there is a sales strategy to get the donator to take another step, and give a little bit more. This can be phone calls asking for a donation to a specific incident or emergency.

There may be a call that gives the season as the reason why you should give that little bit more now. The sales strategy slowly draws you in and gets more form you by getting you to take small steps.

This sales technique is much more effective than a marketing attack using one off adverts that ask for big donations.

What about you

How can you use this sales strategy to get your prospects from A to B in small steps that don’t require big leaps in cost or commitment.

Here’s a list of possible actions:

Get a clear understanding of where your target group is now, position A.

Define where you want the target group to be, position B.

List all the current marketing offers that you use.

Create a list of new ideas for small step sales offers that you could use in your strategy.

Then put your offers from both lists in the order that you will use them.

Lay them alongside a time line that will show how a prospect responding positively will move forward from A to B.

Every sales person can use this sales strategy

Don’t think that you need to be a small business owner or marketing director to use this strategy. If you are selling a product or service and you are able to make special offers, give away something for free, arrange free trials, or you can have some flexibility on price, then you can use the above action plan and draw your prospects into becoming customers.

This newsletter is published by the website www.provensalestraining.com. It’s a website specifically for anyone that sells for a living, or as part of their role. It’s also aimed at small business owners that want to increase their sales.

There are regular updates and new pages added to the site. Move over to the website and have a click around at www.provensalestraining.com.

I'm Stephen Craine from the website Sales-Training-Sales-Tips.com

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