The area of sales is the backbone of every company — its lifeline. No business can survive without the process of selling its products or services. Unfortunately, sales also often end up being the weakest link and the most difficult mystery to solve. In this blog, I’m going to offer some of my best tips for how to increase sales in a sustainable, effective, and authentic way. Let’s dive in!

How to Increase Sales: 5 Actionable Tips

Try implementing this guidance and you might find that your success rate sees a nice boost.

1. Map Out the Complete Customer Journey

Your leads don’t see you for the first time… and then immediately buy. You probably already know that these relationships take a lot of time and nurturing. In fact, in sales and marketing, there’s something called the “rule of 7”: They have to see you seven times before they’ll actually take action and purchase.

In order to fully leverage this journey, you have to know what that journey is! What are some of the most common first touchpoints — those moments when people learn of your brand for the first time? How are you acquiring new customers? Are they coming from inbound sales like incoming phone calls or outbound sales? Then what happens? Where do they go? What do they see? Essentially, what are all the “stops” they make on their journey before they spend money with you?

Document all of these touchpoints. Expand on them with what communication looks like at each of them. Depict it like an actual roadmap and make sure your sales and marketing teams are thoroughly familiar with it!

2. Segment and Tag Your Leads

So, you know that your leads are on a journey. And the stops along his journey are all unique. Thus, you can’t treat every lead like they’re the same — because they’re not!

If you’re already using software to manage your lead pipeline — like a lead generation tool or email marketing software — then there should be a way to segment and tag your leads. But what does this mean? Well, it means… whatever you want it to mean! But let’s go through an example.

Maybe you have a pet brand and you sell dog food, toys, and clothing. If you have customers who only buy food, you can segment them into your food list. If they auto-purchase the product, maybe you add a tag to denote that detail.

In your software, you can then organize and sift through your data (and take action on it) based on these segmented lists and tags. For instance, maybe you want to send an email to customers who bought something from your latest line of dog shoes. People who only buy food don’t need to receive that email. That’s where segmentation and tagging come into play!

3. Cross-Sell and Upsell

Cross-selling is when you offer a different product or service to an existing customer. Using our previous example, if a customer bought dog food for a large breed, maybe you then point them in the direction of your de-shedding tool.

Upselling is when you offer additional items as upgrades, more expensive versions, or add-ons. For instance, if a customer buys a leash, maybe you upsell them with a collar as an add-on purchase.

This is a good opportunity to increase sales because think about it: They’re already buying.

On a similar note…

4. Leverage Your Current Customer Base

Cross-selling and upselling are both powerful approaches because you’re already dealing with a very warm (hot, even) lead. Here’s why that matters.

Traditionally, it’s easier to get previous shoppers to buy again than it is to acquire new customers — although to be clear, you need to be doing both. But the point is that your job isn’t done once someone checks out and hits the “buy” button.

Do you have an automated system in place where you follow up with customers after they buy? Do you ask them for a review? Do you send them a coupon or discount code to incentivize them to make another purchase?

If you don’t consistently communicate with them in some way, then there’s a good chance they’re just going to forget about you. Remember, they’re on a journey — and their purchase is not the last stop.

5. Split Test Everything

If you want to figure out how to increase sales for your brand, then you have to be able to compare your various approaches to selling. You can’t know if Approach A is the best bet if you don’t have an Approach B to compare it to. This is why split testing (also called A/B testing) is so important.

Think of split testing as running a controlled experiment. It’s when you take an approach, isolate one variable in it, and then run that approach again but with that altered variable.

Let’s do an example! Say you have a sales page for your new dog hats. Maybe you have two versions of this page. In Version A, there is no header image and it goes straight into text. In Version B, you have a header image of a puppy wearing one of your hats. You run both pages and learn that Version B gets significantly more views, clicks, and sales. This is split testing!

Be sure that you only change one variable at a time when you run these tests. Otherwise, it becomes very challenging — impossible, even — to determine what had an impact and what didn’t.

When it comes to learning how to increase sales, don’t just work hard. Work smart. Strategy matters! Follow these five suggestions, track your results, and you should see a bump in your sales in no time.

If you want to learn how to leverage incoming sales calls and boost your conversion rate to 80%, learn more about my high-converting call class.