Are Your Customers Ready For Your Products ?

The trouble with being a small business owner is you go day to day with the frustrations of “not quite making it” - you know you have great products and services and you have communicated these to your customers either by direct mail, email marketing or other traditional methods but you just haven’t made the sales you believe you should.

You have researched the market place, asked your previous buyers what they want and produced something better than what’s on the market already. But your sales are lower, perhaps much lower than expected.

No matter how much effort you have put in some or many of your customers may not be a position to buy from you at the moment even if they have purchased from you before.

So what’s the problem? Is your price too high or maybe you got something wrong when you were developing your product? Maybe the economic climate is so bad that budgets have been cut so bad that there’s no money for new initiatives at the moment? You may have caught them on a bad day or when they were out of the office.

So what is the solution? Well timing is crucial and everything in business.

Most times people are just not ready to buy just yet. When people go onto the internet for the first time most likely they will be researching the market to see what is out there and will gather information from many companies. They may even then put their idea on the back burner because other issues or pressing problems have come their way. They may even forget they were researching the subject and will certainly forget about you, your company and website if you don’t follow up with them after they have made contact.

So you need to follow up with your prospect relentlessly. This has always been true with traditional sales. A sales person has their prospect list and will follow up with telephone calls, visits or direct mail. If they are trying to win a contact from a company the timing may just not be right and their current contract has not come to an end yet.

For an internet business this means you need to collect as many emails addresses from people who roam your site each and every day and add them to an autoresponder.

For one site we own we did this. Our autoresponder had about 10 messages on it …. and then nothing. We believed that if we didn’t make a sale after 10 contacts we would never make a sale. But this simply was not true. We added another 30 messages - a week apart - and our overall sales went up by 20%+ and still do today because we continue to capture email addresses and continue to send the email messages.

By “mastering the moment” when your prospect is ready to get their credit card details out and make a sale from you is all so important. You need to be ready when your prospects or current customers are ready to interact with you. You won’t necessarily know when this will be, but by keeping in constant contact with them all, offering information they need and interspersing with sales messages your sales will surely soar.