For your business to be successful, you need to generate enough sales. How you generate those sales is determined by your sales model. One popular option is direct sales, where you have a sales team that reaches out to consumers directly, many of them people within the sales team’s personal networks, to demonstrate and sell your business’s products. This sales model can be extremely effective when it’s implemented correctly. Here are the four keys to doing just that.
Make Sure Your Sales Team Can Provide Free Samples
If you have a small business, it’s unlikely you’re able to pay for a huge marketing campaign to get your brand name out there. And many direct sales businesses don’t use much traditional marketing, anyway. Since it’s not easy to convince people to buy something they’ve never heard of, free samples are a great secret weapon.
Empower your sales team to provide the occasional free sample to potential customers. It’s a small cost for your business, but when the customer is impressed with your product, they’ll be more likely to order it and talk to their friends about it, resulting in good word of mouth.
Use Social Media Marketing to Reach More People
There’s a huge social component to direct sales. The entire sales model is based on social connections. Your sales team reaches out to people, hosts parties and shows off your products. This builds a great connection between your business and its customers. Considering how important connections are to a direct sales business, it makes sense to use social media marketing.
Social media networks are perfect for keeping your business in front of existing customers, reaching out to new customers and communicating with your sales team. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest all work well for social media marketing, although for the best results, you’ll want to choose the network that best matches your business. For example, if you sell beauty supplies, Instagram will work well because it’s centered on images.
Learn from Successful Companies that Use Direct Sales
Learning from other companies is business 101, and fortunately, there are quite a few successful companies using the direct sales model for you to learn from. A few famous examples are NuSkin, which focuses on personal care and supplements, Le-Vel, which is in health and wellness, and Direct Cellars, a wine program.
Analyze what some of these successful companies did so that you can apply their techniques with your own business. Look at how they grew their operations and built up their customer bases. Don’t forget to see what mistakes they made to avoid doing the same thing.
Cross-Sell to Your Existing Customers
It’s much easier to sell to current customers than to someone new. Those current customers have already gotten over that initial hurdle of purchasing from your business, and if they’re satisfied with the product, they’re likely willing to buy something else from you. That’s where the cross-sell comes in.
With cross-selling, you’re promoting different products to your current customers. For example, if you normally sell daily multivitamins, you may branch out and offer a pre-workout supplement. When you have multiple products that fit the same niche, it’s easy to cross-sell and increase your profits.
The direct sales model certainly isn’t a magic bullet that will have you making sales hand over fist with little effort. You need to use the right strategy for it to work, but when you use the tips above, your business will be much more likely to succeed with its direct sales.
