Sales Techniques

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	Planning your first sales campaign			This infosheet introduces some of the basic techniques of selling and advertising that can help you generate more sales for your business. You may be just planning to run a small in-store promotion to shift some slow-moving stock. Or you may just be about to embark on a major advertising campaign costing many thousands of pounds. In both cases you will maximise the results obtained at the end of the day if you observe the following rules. How to make every sales campaign a success: Always treat every project as a campaign with a beginning and an end. Define your objectives, and plan how you are going to achieve them. Decide which advertising media you going to use. Decide how to effectively communicate the offer to your customers. Test the approach to see it works. Run the campaign and monitor performance. Review how successful the campaign has been, and based on the results, start planning for the next one. If you are a new business with a limited advertising budget, then your first series of campaigns should be short and modest affairs. You will quickly build up a picture of what works, and what you should do next time to improve upon the results. Where do you start? The answer is to take a look at your competitors to see what they do.
	How to evaluate the campaign's results			At the close of the campaign it is always important to assess how well it did against the objectives you set. Did the campaign generate enough additional revenue to cover the cost of running it, and break into profits? From the answer you can objectively decide if the campaign is worth repeating and building upon. In such evaluations it is essential to look at the lifetime value of any sales you may have secured. For example the software industry will value a new customer not just on the initial purchase value of the software they buy. They will also include the value of the annual support and upgrade revenue the new customer will bring into the business over the next few years You may need to look at the same approach if you depend on regular repeat business. If the campaign did not work as well as you had planned, it is not a failure. It will have provided invaluable information about what, and what not to do, next time. You also now have a baseline from which to measure the success of the next campaign. If the campaign was a success, then you have a winning formula that can often be repeated many times and still bring in the same results. Even with a successful campaign, do not become complacent. It is too easy to accept the status quo, instead of experimenting to see if you can improve on the current position. As soon as you have found an approach that works, you have a control against which you can run other promotions to see if they outperform it. If a new campaign does do better, make it your new control and continue experimenting.