Company of the Month

Owning An Online Business- Do You Still Need Sales Training?

I’ve worked as a presenter/lecturer at the NSA and Impact Training from the very start of its launch. During that time I was fine tuning my online business, Presents for Her. My background had always been in face to face sales and also sales training, however what I didn't realise was how much I still needed cutting edge sales and communication skills to help break through to the customer if not more as having a website business you have up to 80% less customer contact and interaction. 

Here are three fundamental ways to involve sales and communication in the online world.

How to build rapport when you only have an email address and no contact number to call?

Focus on using words that create an impact to make your emails more dynamic than competitors. This helps by fueling the driver of all human decisions –The Emotional Cortex. It gives your email personality, meaning the customer starts to attach a face and voice to your words. The more senses you can get a reader involved in the better the result of it being memorable!

Avoid relying solely on email

Just because you have an internet based company doesn’t mean you have to do everything via email. People build relationships quicker through voice to voice interaction. Have you ever read an email or sms text message and thought the person sounded angry but they actually weren’t? On the phone your customers can hear the tone, empathy and sincerity delivered in your voice. These are all emotions that will help connect you to your customer thus improving sales and customer retention.

You must step out of the ‘it’s easier to email’ world. It’s actually not easier it’s just that you’re comfortable not having to confront. Once you get into habitual emailing you’ll start to get nervous when you do actually need to call a customer and converse. Losing the skills to interact over the phone or face to face could cost your business down the track.

How would you like to earn an extra 25% more income each day? When writing an important email, do you realise you take much longer typing and strategically creating the delivery then what it would take to have picked up the phone? Studies show that you gain 25% more time each day by picking up the phone, meaning you could do 25% more activity a day, meaning you could be making more money!!

A simple way to sell out of product!

One strategy I applied from the NSA and Impact Training that gave me sell out figures in 4 days was implementing the mind set behind creating dynamic names for options and packs. This helped my business immensley especially for seasonal purchasing e.g. Christmas, Valentines Day and Mother's Day.

By creating packs with a name, that presented the type of emotion/outcome the customer was wanting. I noticed within hours of creating these names they started to become my biggest sellers. Within four days, 4 of the 5 packs totally sold out.

An example for Mother's Day was the 'Best Mum Pack', 'Mum's Escape' and 'Indulgence'. For Valentine's Day I created 'Ms Raunchy Gift Pack', 'Princess Pack' and 'Conservative Queen'. These were all best sellers as it enabled the customer to directly link my products with their loved ones.

So there you have it, my three key sales and communication approaches that can be used for online business. Identifying the emotions that drive people’s decisions can only be done through successful rapport building, whether it’s face to face or over the internet.