Do you like sales? Can you close a deal?
I don’t know about you but I suck at sales. Well, actually I can sell myself pretty well, but I can’t close. Moving them from interested to buying has always been my challenge. So much so that I’d rather not do it, but I gotta eat. What I’d really prefer is that someone sells themselves so that by the time they call me they’re ready to get started. I wonder, does such a service exist? Sure does, but it doesn’t work how you may think.
Sales & marketing automation
We all know what e-mail and text message marketing is. Well, if you want another hand helping at sales then you want to utilize SaaS services to automate them. Companies like Hubspot, MailChimp, Constant Contact, Salesforce and more give you the ability to automate your marketing. It’s very much like those infomercials where they said, “set it and forget it.” With Saas you can create funnels for the various situations that arise in your business to motivate clients to buy. Such as:
- Creating automated emails for people who sign up for your email lists — There you can send them a series of emails geared to moving them faster from interested to buying. Heck, you can even sell them a low barrier item as an introduction to your brand. If you have an Ascension Plan (see my article: You’re Doing It Wrong), then you know what I’m talking about.
- Create emails that auto-send when a person hasn’t bought in a while — There’s a caveat here because you’re training them to only buy when your service is discounted thus devaluing your products. Save discount emails for big sales like a semi-annual sale, Black Friday, Cyber Monday or a significant event or milestone with your brand.
- Create A-B emails to test different tactics to see what works best — Sending one email to one segment of your audience and then a variation to another segment allows you to see what gets the best engagement. You can then send the best one going forward.
- Segment your audience and send them each a series of emails for content marketing — Content marketing is where they’ll sell themselves, but it takes consistency and time. This is why automating it works best.
How to do it
Setting up an automated marketing program requires one major commitment — time. The time you spend will be a lot, but it’s on the back end and once done, it’ll save you countless hours later because it’s automated. Think of it as an assembly line. It may take time to power up and get going, but once it does it keeps going until you stop it.
Hidden perk
One last perk about automating your marketing is all the data you collect. As I always say, you need to track your marketing so you know where the breaks are (see my article: Is Your Marketing Chain Broken?). However, tracking your automated marketing will allow you to see which posts have higher engagement which can give you ideas for future posts, articles, products and offers thus adding to your revenue.
Do a work staycation, lock yourself in a room until you finish it or outsource it. Whatever you do, implement your SaaS marketing and watch your sales grow. Until next time I wish you much success transforming your business into an amazing brand.
