Will I increase my sales if I offer free shipping? Amazon does it so does it generate more sales? How do I compete with Amazon and other big retailers?

These are some of the questions that I hear when I am coaching sales organizations with becoming the brand of choice. It’s something that sales organizations ask all the time when it comes to generating more revenues.

This is about the time that I burst the bubble about free shipping and making more sales. Amazon does offer free sales and they sell quite a bit of products on their sites every day. Sometimes I even buy too much on their site.

Yes, Amazon does offer free shipping, but they offer fast shipping, with great updates on their app that you can see how the product moves through their delivery system. They also offer really simple and low effort returns. The third thing that they do is offer free two-day shipping by a use of a subscription.

This is more than just simply offering free shipping. We need to look at our business and our product offering to understand what we can offer as a solution to our customers so that they will want to do more business with us. Likely we have more than one product / service offering that will benefit our customers far better than just free shipping.

This is the time we need to open our file cabinets and study our customers. What we can do to benefit our customers better? When we really understand our customers, we can start building partnerships with them to buy more and more of what we offer instead of one off sales. We want returning partners that will benefit the more they do business with us.

What I teach in the sales process is that we need to ask a great deal of questions at the beginning of the sales process to understand our customers. This is also the time that the customers start to believe we are really looking to help them and not just sell our products / service.

We need to get the customers to buy into us if we are ever going to sell them more. We need to make sure that we are building that influence and that is why it is crucial that we ask a great deal of questions to truly understand our customers. We need to understand their situation, their issues, and the ramifications.

If we can solve them and get the customer to a better way, then we will reap the rewards of more sales and increased revenues. Each customer has an acquisition cost and we need to make sure that we are selling enough to cover those costs to manage those customers. If we do not, then it does not matter as much about the revenue because we will have too high of costs resulting in lower profits. In the end profits are what keep businesses moving forward.

“Businesses wonder why it is still hard to be thought of as the brand of choice with customers. How can our business make more profitable transactions and stay out of the commodity battle with low profits? I equip your sales team to walk with the customer through the five buying decisions, and in the correct order to generate explosive revenues with greater profits!”

www.kevinsidebottom.com

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lWIVasmkFsoYL4h0AqIZgH6LC3qaw_gI/view?usp=sharing – client profile sheet

https://www.amazon.com/Sales-Process-Uncovered-Success-Influence/dp/0578421518 - Book

The Sales Process Uncovered Membership Page

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Just about every major retailer has a loyalty program. Offers are given with point systems in hopes of retaining customers. These are all great things, but there is one area that businesses are falling short when they try to build customer loyalty.

All of us are familiar with Starbucks and Chick-Fil-A who both host lines for the drive through wrapping around parking lots and disrupting street traffic flow. What we need to do is think about ways to serve customers so well and consistently that they want to keep coming back.

Both Starbucks and Chick-Fil-A do one thing really, really well. It’s customer service. That’s right, they are always going above and beyond the call to serve the customer. This is resulting in customer loyalty, a Fanocrocy, and great business success even during pandemics. People will literally wait in 20 min lines for a cup of coffee, or a chicken sandwich (with waffle fries of course.)

Chick-Fil-A also has one thing they do every time they serve us when we say thank you. They respond immediately with “it’s my pleasure.” They literally ingrain each employee to be customer service focused. It does not matter which location we to go, we still get great consistent service.

When an organization focuses only on profits and not on serving the customers it never ends well. Doing the right thing consistently over time creates brand loyalty. Making sure we have set up a customer experience mindset, we will see customers return again and again. Even if we sell and inferior product / service, by serving the customer we will see returning customers.

Too many organizations focus on short term profits. One main driver for this is publicly traded companies focusing on making their stock holders more money as their main goals. All organizational goals serve this one main goal. How do we make shareholders more money? Unfortunately, these large organizations forget about the investments needed to keep the customers happy who are actually paying the bills. Investments to maintain quality, delivery, and customer focused service.

Organizations should consistently do the right thing for the customers to generate loyal “Fans.” When “Fans” pledge their loyalty to us, they tell others how awesome our organization is They share stories of how we have helped them and rave about our service. We have sales people selling for us that are not on our payroll. Wouldn’t you like that?

Do not take the customer’s payment and walk away from the transaction waiting to see if the customer will buy from us again before we give extra effort. Give the extra effort up front and every time we engage people and we will be rewarded! Consistency over time equals more profits and more customer loyalty.

I am also not sponsored by either organization discussed in this blog, but if they want to give me free food, I fat Kevin would be glad to accept it :)

www.kevinsidebottom.com

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lWIVasmkFsoYL4h0AqIZgH6LC3qaw_gI/view?usp=sharing – client profile sheet

https://www.amazon.com/Sales-Process-Uncovered-Success-Influence/dp/0578421518 - Book

The Sales Process Uncovered Membership Page

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