Business, Money, and Trading Blog

Let’s say that your business involves you selling home-made soaps. Because your product is unique and all of your scented, bubbly delights are lovingly created, they’re considerably more expensive than traditional off-the-shelf soaps.

Limiting yourself to one price range can lead to problems and you could find, as many gift shops do, that your shop is full of `Sunday browsers’ oohing and cooing over everything, but buying nothing. The problem here is often that the prices are just out of reach of the average impulse purchaser. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s also something that takes a bit of getting used to because most of us find silences uncomfortable. Therefore rather than wait until you’re at that crucial moment where everything depends on your staying quiet long enough to win the sale, start practicing now.

A good way to do this is to start using the silent technique next time you’re buying something. You’ll be amazed at how quickly prices come down when you simply say nothing. Read the rest of this entry »

Silence is a much underestimated selling technique. Too often salespeople rush in and spoil a sale because they just can’t stay silent for long enough. Unfortunately many of us are programmed to find silence unbearable, but silence is a natural part of the buying process. Read the rest of this entry »

Because you’ve probed a bit more into the reason your customer believes it may be too expensive you’re in a better position to overcome their objection. But before you do that you need to know whether or not the holiday is within your customer’s budget. You do this by asking, `How much are you planning to spend on your holiday?’

Some salespeople will disagree with me when I tell them this saying that you’re going to insult your customer. However, in all the years I’ve been running my own businesses no one has been insulted by this question. In fact quite the opposite has happened and they’ve been pleased to be able to give me something that I can work on to come up with a package to suit their needs. Read the rest of this entry »

Now you have two options:

1. Decide to stop wasting their time and politely invite them to browse through the brochures when they get home while you get on with the next customer.

2. Overcome the objection, or, if this is not possible, interest them in an alternative holiday that fits their budget. Read the rest of this entry »

The most notable difference between giving something away and selling it, is objections.

If you’ve already set up your business and you find you’re not at least on occasions getting objections from potential customers then it probably means you’re giving it away! Because customer objections are a natural part of the buying process, not the selling process. Read the rest of this entry »

Some good questions to ask are:

• Who makes the furniture?
• Where is it made?
• When can you deliver it? Get specific here   ‘when’ as in morning? Afternoon? Mid-afternoon?
• Has anyone ever cancelled an order with your store?
• What happens if my furniture is late – will you phone me, or someone from your call centre? Read the rest of this entry »

One of the reasons that many otherwise professional salespeople fail to reach sales targets is that they don’t really believe in what they’re selling. It is often the problem when you work for someone else where the sales department has little control over the quality of the products or service they’re selling.

This is the problem with the large furniture stores I mentioned previously. My experiences have been that you walk in and are pounced on by an over-zealous salesperson who follows you around the store like a puppy saying how wonderful and nice everything that you look at is. Read the rest of this entry »

Uniqueness

Many businesses based around a hobby are successful because what they are offering is unique.

Large retailers, travel companies and the like steer clear of what is often referred to as niche markets. The last thing they want is a large amount of their store shelf space clogged up by products that relatively few customers will be interested in.

Therefore your unique selling point could be that you’re offering hard-to-find items such as books, memorabilia or even specialist holidays. Read the rest of this entry »

Ideally you should give your customers as many reasons as you possibly can for buying from you, although often this isn’t possible. But the bottom line still remains – if you don’t give a good enough reason, people will buy elsewhere.

I want you to think about something you need to buy. This could be anything    an essential item, luxury treat or something you buy everyday like a newspaper or carton of milk.

Now on a blank piece of paper write down the item you’ve just thought of and draw a big circle around it.

Immediately underneath your circled item write down where you intend to buy this item and draw a circle around it. Don’t give this too much thought; just write down where you’d first go to buy it.

Done? Read the rest of this entry »