Are You Maximizing Every Single Sales Opportunity?

Are You Maximizing Every Single Sales Opportunity?
Are you capturing every possible opportunity to make a
sale? If you do not plan your annual marketing calendar,
you may be missing some!

It takes time to figure out what works best in marketing
your business. (Even huge companies with huge marketing
budgets and high-powered advertising agencies have to
experiment some.)

Once you have determined which strategies work best for
your product or service, your location, your personality,
your budget and your target market, then you need to
execute them! (I hope you see from this list why it is so
difficult to market your business by yourself!)

Most small businesses have a website, which requires some
attention all year. Besides that, there are online and
print advertising, direct mail, email campaigns and many
other strategies. Because we don’t have unlimited
resources of time and money, it is important to plan when
we will market.

First, determine the exact strategies you will use and
their corresponding actions to promote your business.
Next, look at what worked the best last year and the year
before, and when they were executed. You may also want to
research what has worked well for your competition.

Now create a ‘promotions calendar’. You may
use a whiteboard or tape several pieces of paper together,
but it is best to create a physical, written calendar.

Write in the marketing events you already know you will do
– for example, monthly newsletters or networking
meetings. I recommend adding in a quarterly return on
investment analysis to keep checking on what is working and
what is not.

Next is when your creative side and your business side need
to play well together. Start with identifying your slow
times of the year and create a promotion to drive sales
during this time. If you don’t really have slow
times or a seasonality to your business, then you will need
to create consistent, regular marketing events throughout
the year.

If January is traditionally slow, what happens in January
that you can use? Well, people go on diets, set
resolutions and start anew. If summer is slow, when do you
need to step up your marketing to prevent a dramatic
slowdown?

What can you offer your prospects to motivate them to buy
when you need them to? Offer bonuses? Offer discounts?
Keep your target market in mind when making these
decisions. Offering discounts to wealthy people might be
less appealing to them than giving bonuses, for example.

By calendarizing your marketing, slow times and
opportunities will not sneak up on you and you can take
full advantage of every sales opportunity!

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Audrey Burton, Small Business Coach, is “The
Tigress”. Get her FR'EE Special Report,
“Closing the Sale is Not Complicated!” and her
FR'EE monthly email newsletter at
http://www.TigressCoaching.com .