Streamline Your Sales Process with Automatic Sales for Small Businesses

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In this episode, you’ll find out about 10 sales and marketing automation best practices for small businesses. Including The KEY strategy to ULTIMATELY being able to replace yourself in sales and business and at the same time, keep growing your business, and have more freedom as well. My name is Istvan Bujdoso and welcome to The 47 Marketing Show that reveals marketing automation strategies for entrepreneurs to get MORE done in LESS time, and ultimately, to grow your business WITHOUT your day-to-day involvement. Make sure to tap the like button if you enjoy this episode. And don’t forget to subscribe and hit the bell button to get notified of the future episodes. And now, let’s get started. Before we go through the sales automation best practices, let’s talk a bit about the one-to-one vs automated sales. Doing one-to-one sales is time-consuming, can be stressful, your mood and state can highly impact the sales results and it’s very limited to the hours you spend directly with potential clients. On the other hand, the benefits of sales automation, it works 24/7/365 days, even when you’re doing something completely different the results don’t depend on the mood and state of you or your team and a sales automation solution is virtually unlimited because your potential clients, from all around the world, can see the sales pages day and night and buy and a sales funnel can handle MANY potential clients and orders at the same time. OK, these are the KEY sales automation benefits. And now, let’s dive into the list of the best practices and how to enhance sales performance. No. 1: Start With The End In Mind. Set yourself specific sales goals. What do you want to EXACTLY achieve in this area? This is not only important because it will give the direction on which way to go but more importantly, your end goal is the starting point to break down that long journey into small specific steps and to work out what sales automation strategies you will need to use to get your desired results. The next best practice is No. 2: Understand The Journey Of Your Customers. Besides sales automation, what we are focusing on in this episode, it’s really important to understand the big marketing picture as well and where sales fits into that. In a nutshell, this is the journey your customers usually go through. Stage 1: Strangers find and consume some of your contents online and they get to know you, like you and trust you to a certain level. And by that, they turn into your audience. Stage 2: Some of your audience not only consume your content they also react to the call to actions and visit your landing page and lead funnel. Stage 3: From that traffic, the curious visitors type in their email address and they turn into your leads. Which takes us to what we are focusing on today. Stage 4: Some leads on your email list develop enough trust in you over time, and buy the first product from you. With that, they turn into your customers. And Stage 5: When some of your customers, who already have STRONG ‘know’, ‘like’, and ‘trust’ in you they turn into your RETURNING clients who regularly buy from you. Now that you understand where sales fits into the overall big marketing picture, let’s talk about Best practice No. 3: Know Your Customers. The more an entrepreneur knows their potential and existing customers, the better their sales will get. Ultimately, the goal is to know your customers BETTER than they know themselves in your specific area. Because that information is the fundamental of your marketing being able to get the most customers through the stages we talked about. Every part of your marketing has to talk to them. Let me give you a simple and a bit extreme example to make a clear point Let’s say your target customers are first-time puppy owners of a specific breed, who live in the countryside. If your sales page and other parts of your marketing would talk about how to keep elderly cats healthy in the city you would get 0 of your target customers. But if your contents, your ads, your landing page, and every other part of your marketing talks to first-time puppy owners of a specific breed who live in the countryside, then your marketing automations and sales will get you the most of the RIGHT customers. And that’s why knowing your customers is one of the key sales automation best practices on this list. And more is coming up includingThe KEY strategy to ULTIMATELY being able to replace yourself in sales and business and at the same time, keep growing your business, and have more freedom as well. OK, the next best practice is No. 4: Mindset. Sales and marketing automation are big and complex and can be quite overwhelming at the beginning. That’s why your MINDSET is KEY. Instead of worrying about how to automate sales and the whole complexity of it chop the entire thing up into smaller steps, even into baby steps get started now, in small, and progress step-by-step. Which leads us to the fact that you need to be persistent to be able to succeed, because it’s going to take a LOT of steps for a long time. And besides being persistent, you need to be consistent with your online sales as well because selling a few products here and there will not get you to your end goals. Best practice No. 5: Use Sales Funnels Instead Of Online Shops. In case you’re not familiar with sales funnels, they’re SPECIAL step-by-step websites that tend to convert a LOT better than NORMAL webshops. And here’s why: NORMAL webshops have a structure that gives the visitors options to click around, check out multiple things. Sometimes a lot of different things. Let me ask you this: Have you ever gone to a shop that had a lot of things in it and you felt unsure where to even start looking for what you want? And then, you start feeling overwhelmed and frustrated, and then you left WITHOUT what you wanted to get? That’s kind of the experience that NORMAL webshops gives to potential customers. It scares most of them away. Now, imagine a very different experience. You’d go into a shop, somebody would welcome you and present you ONLY ONE thing that you need. In that moment, you’d have ONLY ONE decision to make: take it or leave it. No question where to start, no overwhelm, no frustration. Just one simple decision to make at that moment. That’s how sales funnels lead the customers through the entire buying process step-by-step. And in each step, there’s only ONE simple decision to make. In a nutshell, that’s why sales funnels tend to convert a lot better than normal webshops. Besides the better conversion rates, a sales funnel is an amazing form of sales automation for small businesses. Best practice No. 6: KISS. When it comes to any sales automation system, the KEY is KISS, Keep It Super Simple. Complexity creates confusion. And “the confused mind always says NO”. So it’s not only about leading the customers through the buying process step-by-step. It is also about keeping each step as simple as possible. Only having words, images, videos, or any other elements on the page that are truly needed to help customers to decide to buy. Just for a moment, let’s stop here. If you’re enjoying this episode so far, then show it to us by clicking on the like button right now. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for your “like”. And now, let’s continue with the list of sales automation done right. No. 7: Make A GREAT First Impression. I assume you’ve heard the saying in your life: “saving the best for last”. Well, that’s NOT the case when it comes to sales funnels and sales automation. It’s quite the opposite. The first step of the sales funnel has to offer the MOST exciting value that the customer wants and needs. And in a price range of an impulse buy. In most cases, that’s under $20. Because that’s how you can make a GREAT first impression. And once those customers are through the door then the next steps of your sales funnel can offer to solve more of their problems and upsell them to other products. Which I’ll talk about more in detail, in one of the next few episodes. And now, let’s talk about the next sales automation best practice No. 8: Bring The Right Traffic. As I mentioned earlier, knowing your customers and audience is a KEY best practice for every area of your sales and marketing. And that includes the area of bringing traffic to your sales funnels. Just imagine this: To stick with the previous example, let’s say your target customers are first time puppy owners of a specific breed who live in the countryside. If you’d bring visitors who have elderly cats in the city, that would be a total mismatch and obviously, the conversion rate of your sales funnel would suffer. On the other hand, do you think your funnel could convert much better if most of the traffic would be from the RIGHT people? Like first-time puppy owners of a specific breed who live in the countryside. When the RIGHT traffic matches with the RIGHT sales funnel, then you can get a lot more customers. Besides generating traffic from new people, another part of bringing the right traffic is retargeting those who have visited your sales page, but not YET purchased the offer. They are obviously interested in the offer, but may not be ready to buy YET. Some people naturally need to see your sales funnel and offer multiple times before they buy. And that’s why it’s a best practice to keep bringing them back in different ways until they are ready to turn into your customers. Best practice No. 9: Track And Optimize. When it comes to marketing automation and sales the rule of thumb is to avoid guesswork. No matter how well your sales funnels seem to convert, there’s always space for improvements. And it’s best practice to always do that based on REAL numbers. So, from the very beginning, track the performance of your sales funnels then use those REAL numbers to optimize the relevant part of your sales campaign. With that said, it’s time to talk about Best practice No. 10: The A.D.P. Strategy This is the strategy that is the KEY to ULTIMATELY being able to replace yourself in sales and business, and at the same time, keep growing your business, and have more freedom. This A.D.P. Strategy not only can be applied to sales, it is a best practice in that area. The first part of the strategy is to AUTOMATE as much as possible. In this case, as many parts of the sales as possible. The second part is to DELEGATE what’s not possible to automate. And the third part is the most important one: PROCESSES. The processes make it possible for your sales automations and team to work on their most optimum level WITHOUT your day-to-day involvement. And that’s how you can replace yourself in sales, marketing, and more. Recently, we’ve published a full, dedicated episode on the A.D.P. Strategy. I’ll leave you a link to that in the description so you can check it out after this episode. While it’s good to know these marketing automation tips and sales automation best practices, you can only enjoy the REAL benefits of them when you take action and actually implement them. So I’d like to challenge you, and invite you to implement them. The good news is you don’t have to do that all alone. I’ll leave you a link in the description to the One Funnel Away Challenge that will help you to set up your first (or next) sales funnel step-by-step.