How to Find New Customers and Increase Sales: Understand Your Target Audience
Before you can find new customers and increase sales, you need to understand who your customer is, what value proposition you offer to customers, and what your competition is currently offering in the market and where there are gaps for a new entrant. In other words, you need to do some market research — whether that means hiring an outside firm to do the legwork or trying to do it yourself. There’s an underlying disconnect between your motivation to increase sales and your customer’s motivation to solve their problems.
“Attracting more customers is really about listening to their needs, not being a solution looking for a problem. “There are many existing problems out there that need to be solved that customers are willing to pay for today.”
Dig Deeper: Getting to Know Your Frequent Customers
How to Find New Customers and Increase Sales: Find Out Who Your Current Customers Are
In order to develop a marketing plan to reach new customers, you need to better understand who you’re already selling to. “If I’m trying to expand sales, I have to find out who my existing customers are. What are their demographics? What do they look like?” says Jerry Osteryoung, director of outreach for the Jim Moran Institute for Global Entrepreneurship at Florida State University. “That means doing market research.”
Market research runs the gamut from very simple qualitative research to in-depth quantitative analysis. It can be done very quickly and inexpensively by sending surveys to your existing customers using one of the many online survey tools, such as SurveyMonkey or Zoomerang. You can also get to know the target audience by looking at existing sources of information — from the U.S. Census Bureau or other government agencies, from trade associations, or from third-party research firms. But depending on the questions you are trying to answer and your research budget, your market research can involve more extensive interviews with customers and qualitative studies on how target customers feel about your business, its products and services.
Certain products and services may appeal to one audience but not to another, so understanding the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in your target market is critical. You can get to know your customers and segment the market any number of ways including by:
Dig Deeper: How to Conduct Market Research
How to Find New Customers and Increase Sales: Defining the Market for Your Product
Use the information about your existing customers to develop a target audience for your business in its drive to win new customers and increase sales. “While there are core customers you are trying to reach, often there are other markets that are also important to address,” Arnof-Fenn says. “Make sure you know who the gatekeepers and influencers are; they will affect the decision makers and you will most likely need to sell to them differently than to the end user.” For example, parents might be the gatekeepers for products targeted to children or technology managers might hold influence over a company’s decision to invest in new software.
Determine which key messages, features and benefits matter to each potential market. Tell these customers how your business can help them solve their problems. “In order to have a customer go to your online shop, you have to find a reason why these customers want to come to you,” Osteryoung says. “The value proposition has to be spelled out clearly.”
Next, you need to figure out where to reach these customers and whether there should be a marketing or advertising plan that goes along with that outreach.
Dig Deeper: Make 100 Phone Calls to Find Your Target Audience
How to Find New Customers and Increase Sales: Generating Sales Leads
There are a variety of age-old staple techniques and newer tools you can use to find new customers and increase sales. It’s best to understand the range of choices you have in order to determine which may best help your business reach new customers. Newspaper readers may not be moved by Internet-based sales techniques. Similarly, business people who are accustomed with hiring only people they know may be better swayed by meeting you at a chamber of commerce meeting than accepting a blind invitation to connect on LinkedIn or Facebook.
“It starts with good people,” says Peter Handal, chairman and CEO of Dale Carnegie Training, the sales and leadership training organization. “If you’re a one-man shop, it’s one thing. But if sales people are really important, you need to hire and motivate good people and you want to give them an upside, such as sales on commission. The motivation is not just money it’s also helping them overcome the fear of prospecting.”
Here is a rundown on the techniques available:
Dig Deeper: Converting Web Traffic into Sales Leads
How to Find New Customers and Increase Sales: Sell More to Existing Customers
In order to increase sales, many businesses believe the only way is to find new customers, but a number of experts say that this strategy leaves out an obvious potential source of new sales. It’s much easier to get an existing customer to buy from you than to convince a new customer to take the plunge. “They’re forgetting about low hanging fruit — their existing customer base,” says Osteryoung. “If I want to expand sales, the number one place to go is the existing customer base. They already trust you.”
Here’s how to increase sales with your existing customer base:
Dig Deeper: Tips on Creating a Customer Loyalty Program
“There’s a lot you can do that doesn’t require much more work,” Osteryoung says. “You want to make sure you have saturation but obviously you never want to alienate the customer…. You never want to make the customer feel like you are hard selling them.”
If you have any questions, please get in touch with me; I’m always happy to speak with you.