What selling strategies are you using? A business cannot survive without sales. If your products and services are not selling, it is essential to ask why they are not and what you can do about it. You cannot make a turn around without the answers. Here are several questions you must find answers to further refine your strategy.

Five Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Selling Strategies

1. Are you doing sufficient marketing? Many small businesses rely on only one or two outlets. You ought to be thinking of four or five. Examples are: e-mail newsletter, speaking (in person, on the radio), publicity, advertising, cold calls, direct mail, book and booklet sales.

2. Are your products promoted around the concept of packages? Instead of offering “coaching beginning in January,” it is more effective to promote a package like “Six coaching sessions to implement your new year’s marketing resolutions.” People need to buy something tangible.

3. Is your pricing appropriate to the clientele? It can be priced either too high or too low. Try removing or adding elements to arrive at a price value that your clientele can appreciate.

4. Are you marketing to the right clientele? You may want to make inground swimming pools affordable to poor families but you are not likely to make many sales nor to turn much of a profit. This would be an example of how you might bifurcate your market. Sell inground pools to a more financially stable clientele while selling children’s above ground wade-in pools to a less well-heeled group.

5. Are you selling your product as a unique opportunity? If you are presenting your product to potential customers as merely one commodity among many others, and not as a unique product, you will likely lose sales to cheaper alternatives which the customer identifies as a comparable product. (This is the definition of a commodity.) You must show potential clients that you are offering a unique product which cannot be found anywhere else.

Ensuring that your selling strategies coincide with these five points will attract customers and drive up sales.