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Sales keep your business going. Sales keep your business growing. Without sales, your business is gone. Because sales are so important to your business, to any business really, it makes good sense to understand the entire sales process from start to finish. You wouldn’t begin to cook a meal without a thorough understanding of the recipes you were using. You wouldn’t go golfing without a thorough understanding of the rules of the game and how to swing a club. You wouldn’t jump into the deep end of a swimming pool without knowing how to swim. So, why would you run a business without knowing everything there is to know about the sales process?
A good place to begin learning how sales are made is with the terminology of lead generation. Good leads are essential to healthy sales. Therefore knowing the difference between a lead and a prospect or an opportunity and a customer is vital.
In general, a lead is any person with a potential interest in your business and what you have to sell. Leads come in all forms. For a brick and mortar business, leads could be anyone who lives within a certain geographic distance from where your store is located. For an online business, a lead could be anyone within a certain delineated demographic. If they might like or need what you sell, then they are a lead.
A prospect, in general, is any person with an active interest in your business and what you have to sell. Leads turn into prospects when they express this interest. In a brick and mortar business they might do this by browsing in your store and asking questions. For an online business, they might leave a comment on your blog or ask for further information on your products and/or services. The important thing to remember is that prospects are leads who have communicated.
An opportunity is a situation where you have a chance to turn a prospect into a customer by making a sale. This can occur any ;me aMer a lead has become a prospect. In a brick and mortar business, this might happen when a salesperson helps a prospect find a product or when they give the prospect information on a service. For an online business, it might occur when a prospect is given an offer to purchase a product or service. It is important to remember that opportunities to convert prospects into customers can happen again and again with the same prospect.
Having great customer service is one of the best ways to help your business grow. A bad customer service experience is enough to prevent a client from using your services ever again, while a great experience can create a client who is loyal for life. No matter how well you think you’re doing in the customer service department, there are always ways to improve. Here are five of the easiest ways to improve your small business’ customer service.
To offer excellent customer service, you should provide customers with the opportunity to engage in a dialogue with you. Whether it’s through email, over the phone, or on social media, encourage customers to get in contact and actively respond to them when they do.
For 24/7 customer support, consider hiring a virtual receptionist. A virtual receptionist will answer your phone on behalf of your company when you or your reception team aren’t able to. Depending on your needs, they can direct clients to the appropriate resource or contact. Take a look at answering service prices to see if this is an affordable option for your company.
Reward customer loyalty
By giving back to customers who purchase your products and services, you demonstrate your appreciation for them and incentivize them to keep coming back. While loyalty cards and rewards programs are an effective strategy, rewards don’t have to be done on such a grand scale. If you don’t have the infrastructure to implement a rewards program yet, simply offer coupons and discounts to customers.
To convert future customers, offer free gifts or discounts for referrals. You can also give loyal customers early-access to new products and services.
Emphasize customer service behind closed doors
It’s not enough to say you value customer service on paper – this value also needs to be instilled in the entire team. Make sure your employees have the skills needed to deliver customer support. They should have excellent communication skills, be able to receive criticism without taking it personally, and have a strong knowledge of the company’s products and services to come up with a solution that’s right for the customer.
Train your customer service team and front facing employees in the skill of active listening, which involves repeating back what the customer has said and making empathetic statements to ensure the customer feels heard. If you’re not skilled in this area yourself, hire an expert to come in and conduct a training session.
Use customer analytics
Customer analytics involves using customer data to gain insight on customer behavior and communication. With so much available data, you need to sort through and choose the data that will help you answer the questions you have. You might be wondering if customers are using a service more than once, or if one product is selling better or worse than another. By discovering what is and isn’t working for your customers, you can better tailor your marketing and sales to your target audience.
Improving these aspects of the business subsequently improves the customer experience, leading to higher customer satisfaction. However, before you start collecting data, make sure you have a secure system in place to protect your customers’ data. A data breach could result in a loss of customer trust.
Facilitate avenues for self-service
While it’s great that your highly trained, professional, and friendly customer service team are ready and waiting by the phone, many customers don’t want to have to make a call to solve a problem they’re having.
The internet has made it easier than ever before to help customers help themselves. By posting instructional videos and FAQ pages to your website, many customers will be able to solve their problem quickly and efficiently on their own. This saves them from waiting on hold and allows your customer service team to spend more on other high-priority tasks. Self-service content also improves customer engagement. Once they’re on your website, they may notice a promotion you have going on and make a purchase.
Ask for feedback
Although analytics are important, asking customers directly to give their feedback supplies qualitative insight that you may not have been able to obtain through analytics alone. It also makes your customers feel like their voice matters, which increases their trust in and opinion of your company.
There are many ways to obtain customer feedback. The easiest strategy is to send out an automated follow-up email after the customer has received a product or service. Interacting with customers over social media and asking for feedback on these platforms is another simple way to find out about the customer experience. Look for patterns in this feedback and make improvements where needed.
When you walk into a supermarket, your eyes are drawn by the bright colors of the packaging. No matter which aisle you tend to walk down for your shopping list, you will take notice of the packaging and food that looks good – it’s what prompts you to buy it in the first place. If you don’t think that your packaging matters, then you may be setting yourself up for complete failure.
The packaging of your product is not just a bag or a wrapper: it’s your brand and the message that you want to send out to the world. If you do make products to be sold on the shelves, you need to ensure that you stand out with incredible pet food packaging so that you beat out the competition. Some people would argue that the packaging is just as important as the product it holds – and those people would be right! So, we’ve got some of the clear reasons that tell you that your packaging is important.
You Stand Out. Whether it’s pet packaging or paper bags that are branded for fruit and vegetables, you will stand out from your competition if you have the right packaging. It’s all about grabbing the attention of the customers and looking better than the competition. If your packaging is interesting, clear in ingredients and instructions and bright, people will take notice and pay attention.
Swaying Customers. Did you know that the color of the packaging that you design is going to be an important piece of the consumer puzzle? The color is going to be what people notice first, and if you ensure that you have the right color language, you can convey the message that you want to convey to the customers that you want to appeal to. The packaging shape is just as important, too, as that can capture the attention of the audience.
It’s A Marketing Tool. Your packaging is going to play a part in how you market your business to other people. You need to consider the way your packaging is marketed to others, and it’s wise to consider how your product packaging and logo look to the outside world. You don’t want to choose packaging that doesn’t reflect your brand message.
You’ll Be Recognised. When you consider your favorite brands, their logos will pop into your mind the moment you think about their brand names. You know that your name needs to convey an image to customers, and the packaging you choose is going to have the ability to get customers to recognize you and what you offer.
Packaging envelopes everything about your product and your brand, so ensuring that you have created your packaging to maximize the way people view you is so important. Your brand deserves to be seen and with the right thought put into it, you will be able to pull in the customers and impress your clients, too. Keep in mind what you want for packaging shape as well as colors, too!
It is now even more important for businesses to engage, co-create and develop collaborative relationships with their customers and employees for mutual benefit.
Here are the Six Steps to enabling company growth for business-to-business firms:
1: Take a minute or two on the Strategy
To implement the relationship building process effectively the strategy needs to be firmly at the forefront of implementation and shared with all employees.
2: Continually add Value
Conduct periodic reviews of what supplementary services could be added to the organization’s offer, and how these will increase the value received and perceived.
3: Use Information for better engagement
Have a 360-degree view of the customer base because, without that, opportunities can be lost. Employees can be a major source of intelligence.
4: Actually use Technology to enable customer focus
Technology is a tool to facilitate an understanding of customer needs that allow businesses to manage customer relationships.
5: Monitor performance but make sure action is swift
Take action on monitoring information to increase performance standards in customer and employee satisfaction, service quality and supplier performance.
6: Touch-points should satisfy customers not cause frustration
Ensure the customer experience is a highly positive one at each of the touch-points. This can ensure the achievement of the strategy and the delivery of customer value.
Lastly…
Businesses that intend to survive the global revolution will invest wisely in their talent to enable meaningful dialogues with their customer and employee base.
I’m Lena Benjamin—global growth strategist and author of NIFTY, expanding into sustainable fashionand film. With 25+ years of experience in over 30 cities, I advise on UK buy-refurb-sell property ventures and have worked with startups, corporates, and SMEs. From Amazon interest to FT recognition—let’s unlock your next move.