Speed Up Your Sales – Customer Incentives That Deliver
What influences your customers to make that all important purchase decision? The truth is your customers’ purchase behaviours hinge on many different factors — the most common being the “Four C’s“: Cost, Confidence, Competitor offerings and Calendar (i.e. timing).
But, you can have a dramatic impact on the purchase behaviour of many of your prospects and existing customers by providing the right incentive at the right time.
In episode #68 of the BusinessCast – Incentives that Sell - Robert and I provide some practical guidelines for developing and offering incentives that leverage your customers’/prospects’ state-of-mind.
Some of the key lessons from incentive ‘best practices’ include:
- Begin developing incentives by mapping out your prospects’/customers’ purchase cycle and then matching that with your sales cycle.
- Define what your incentives are based on. In other words, decide if you are offering incentives based on a particular ‘type’ of customer or on a particular purchase history (e.g. dollars spent, frequency of purchase or recency of purchase).
- Address at least one of your buyers’/prospects’ key issues/concerns.
- Make sure you have the support to handle any sudden or drastic increase in purchases that accompany an effective incentive or incentive program. Keep in-mind that also means spikes in the demand for customer service and its associated costs.
- Track the success of your incentive program.
Listen to BusinessCast podcast episode #68 - Incentives that Sell - and get pushing the right buttons.
Although only one person can say yes, many others can veto the purchase so it pays to research their requirements as well. In short, in considering incentives, don’t forget key influencers as well as decision makers.
Barbara: Are your comments based on the blog entry, or on the content of the podcast? Thanks!
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