Surviving the early years of establishing your startup might seem nigh impossible. Even when your company gains traction, you may still experience hiccups and temporary lapses in business. Poor marketing and sales strategies can be a huge contributor to your success or failure. It doesn’t have to be this way. We have gone around and researched what works for other successful startups and boiled it down to a handful of sage suggestions for your reading pleasure. Take a gander at our list of 5 essential marketing and sales tips for startups!
1: Target your IPC
Your ideal potential customer or client, your IPC, is who is going to make you successful. Win them over and your business will flourish.
Your marketing and sales should be targeting them with every move. They are your key demographic. The design of your website should appeal to them. The message of your product or service should cater to them.
Research your target demographic to identify what sort of messaging and rhetoric is effective on them. The profile of your IPC may shift as your business experiences growth. Stay up to date on the customer profile to avoid losing touch with your customer base as your business grows. If there is a dramatic shift in your IPC profile, this isn’t necessarily a negative thing. Consider that new profit avenues will develop as your outreach expands. New products and services can be offered by your company if you have the flexibility to accommodate, further increasing your brand’s expansion.
2: Reduce actions
Whether you’re making a pitch or your customers are browsing your catalog, reduction of actions is important to keep the business running smoothly.
In a meeting this might look like providing pertinent, comprehensive statistics for the prospective client. Questions and objections can grind the dialog to a halt, which lets the deal fall through. Answering questions before they are asked will move the meeting along, closer to closure.
When shopping online, customers navigate UI to browse and make purchases. Every click, scroll, and loading page is interrupting the sale of your product or service. Some websites will have customers sift through dense catalogs to find what they are looking for, bringing them to a new webpage with every click. By the time the customer has filled their cart, the momentum of their purchase has faltered and the items are left abandoned in a virtual shopping cart, never to be sold.
Reducing the number of interruptions maintains the momentum of the sale, helping the customer make their purchase. Your company website should ensure the UX is as efficient as possible for the potential customer to get what they want. This might not always be ordering a product or paying for a service.
This logic applies to offering your potential customers assistance, booking meetings with potential clients, and providing contact details as well. Look to chat bots or representatives that can be reached from any web-page for answering basic questions. Place a button that schedules meetings for those interested to avoid playing email and phone tag with prospective clients. Provide contact information and the address of your company on every page of your site (in an unobtrusive way, of course) for the customer’s ease of access.
The less actions a prospective client or customer needs to take in order to make you money, the better.
3: Time and Effort
Devote your time and effort to your business, it’s all you can offer at the end of the day. Tending to your business with passion and time is important, as your startup is at its most vulnerable at its beginning. It isn’t solely your time and effort that can benefit your startup. Take care to hire passionate members who will gel as a team. Working toward the same goal with compatible mindsets makes for a powerful team. We aren’t suggesting you sacrifice your social life entirely, so don’t blame that on us!
4: Embrace the Darkness
As a startup, you’re going to be feeling around in the dark for a while. Your company doesn’t possess years of data points and feedback to guide you toward success. That is okay, it is to be expected in your position.
You need to trust in your wisdom, intuition and judgment at this point. Trusted advisors work too. Research companies similar to yours and study their figures, examine their strategies. See if you can’t glean some insight into what might benefit your company from those who blaze a similar trail. Your marketing and sales team will thank you.
5: Progress Isn’t Always Linear
Closing a deal may require you to talk to another decision maker than the one you initiated the deal with. Of course, you’ll need this decision-maker to be of high value, someone who can confirm that “yes” for you as much as the first person. It’s not always going to be a step-by-step process.
The information you need to convince the right decision-maker might not yet be available, or you didn’t know you needed that specific set. You’ll experience a good amount of back and forth. Don’t be dissuaded if closing the deal feels a little chaotic, that’s just business. All you need to worry about is securing that contract or deposit to move things along.
Just be wary of deals that take a long while to close. As a deal hangs in the air, it will slowly lose momentum and appeal, before too long you’re SOL.
We hope you enjoyed our marketing and sales survival guide. Did our list of essential tips provide you with the answers you need? Do you have any other suggestions you think would make great additions to our list? We encourage you to share your thoughts in the comment section below!
