Your Secret Weapon for Increasing Sales

Everyone wants to increase sales. Increasing sales is the holy grail of business, wouldn’t you agree? We all want to get more results from our efforts, and I want to share a very simple technique I use to get powerful results every day in my business. Sound good?

Like most ideas I share with my readers, this stuff isn’t rocket science. I deliberately pick businesses and techniques that are NOT overly complicated. To me, if it’s complicated that means it’s going to be that much more difficult and/or expensive to sustain over the long term. Simple stuff is easy to learn, easy to train others to use (delegation!), and typically very inexpensive to maintain. Yet if you pick and choose your tools carefully, you can do a lot of damage with very little effort. If you dig, read on!

The Secret Weapon of Speed

Speed is essential. It is my secret weapon. But when I look around, I see a lot of slow. In real estate for example, my foundational business where I got started, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) reports repeatedly that the average consumer expects an email response to an inquiry in 20 minutes or less. Is it a reasonable expectation? Honestly, it doesn’t matter. Since when are consumers realistic? Realism is not the point. The point is for us, as business owners to pay attention to what consumers expect, and we must address it. We must meet them at their level and help them get the results they need. It’s our job to serve them.

What’s the actual average follow up time? Over 24 hours. That means real estate pros are massively off the mark with regards to what consumers expect of them. Can you imagine how this causes a poor first impression? Can you imagine how much business this costs the agents who fail to perform when it comes to speed?

How many other real estate professionals do you think a prospect can contact over the course of 24 hours? How about EVERY OTHER REALTOR in your market? That’s how many. At the front end of a relationship, do you think the prospect cares about you? Why should they? Is there any loyalty at all at the beginning of your working relationship? No. Why should there be? The consumer wants service, and most Realtors don’t deliver. Sorry. It’s not my rule.

How Speed Increases Sales

Speed is essential. It increases sales. If we employ speed as a tool in our business, it can pay massive returns. How much does it cost to follow up more quickly? It costs the price of a smart phone and then actually using it to be responsive to incoming leads. At the most comprehensive level, it costs the price of a few virtual assistants to monitor incoming inquiries and follow up promptly around the clock.

How much more could you sell by simply being responsive? By simply being faster, you dramatically increase your sales, because by being fast, you capture interest while it still exists. You prove to your potential clients, vendors, partners, etc…that you actually give a damn and are there for them. You prove to them that you’re all about getting things done, and you don’t let opportunities get away from you. Speed is huge. Speed is a secret weapon that most business owners don’t have on their side. While others follow up in 24 hours or more, you follow up in 20 minutes or less. It costs you very little, but it immediately produces a significant difference in the mind of your customers.

Why Lack of Speed Costs You Dearly

To drive the point home, it’s important to know the nature of opportunity at it’s most basic level. Speed is essential, and if you just take my word for it and implement on this concept, you’ll be fine. Speed works for you whether you understand “why” or not. Nevertheless, explaining the “why” is very simple to do, so here it is.

The reason speed is mandatory and such a powerful weapon is because opportunity is dynamic. It’s not static like so many people believe. A typical sales person will call leads back. They’ll call dozens and dozens of people at a clip, closing very little. They convert only a small percentage on their incoming leads, because they’re slow. If they were only quicker, their closing ratio would dramatically increase. Even if they changed nothing else about what they do, they would still sell more.

How can this be possible? Because speed puts opportunity in your favor. When you realize that opportunity is dynamic, you become sensitive to the fact that the email sitting in your inbox literally, in a very real measurable way, gets less and less valuable every minute that passes.

In sales, sales trainers love to concentrate on different closing techniques, scripts and such. I use these. I teach them to clients as well. They work, but if you’re fast as hell, you can get away with a lot more. If you’re fast, you grab opportunities while they’re still hot. Most of us don’t realize that opportunities to do business are only good for a very short while. When someone contacts us, they want to do business. But there’s a catch. The reason they’re contacting us now, is because they want to do business NOW. Not later. If we contact them later, the deal’s off. At the very least, we have a lot of ground to make up.

You don’t need to be nearly as good a closer if you’re fast. Speed is my secret weapon. How about you?

Tagged as: business building, virtual assistant