Sales For The Nigerian Business Person: The Sales and Marketing Blueprint

Should we lead with our contract templates? or settle into a conversational approach that helps us tease out what they want? Which approach seems less dispute prone?

It’s not a good idea to blow up someone’s phone. A follow up text message after the call might be more useful than you think.

Sales contracts are important but are of very little use if you haven’t optimized your sales process in the first place. Your problem isn’t the documentation. The problem is a process which fails to set out expectations.

When speaking to potential customers, it is important to make sure that you are speaking to people who already have an interest in what it is that you sell.

Don’t randomly scour the internet! Go where “your people” are! Make no assumptions about what they need! And “go with the flow” when someone responds.

As has been said here on the podcast before, handle as many customer interactions as you can in the beginning until you’re totally familiar with your customers and you come up with an optimal sales process. After that you can outsource or delegate your selling and marketing functions because you have clear expectations and yardsticks to delegate and measure progress from.

In summary? Be customer centric and make sure you’ve thought through and created all your processes ahead of time!

What is the best way to get to the root of the matter when we have angry customers on our hands?

Problems usually occur with customers when there is a failure in Expectations. They might’ve been expecting one thing, but you mistakenly delivered something else because you didn’t have an appropriate understanding of their needs. This podcast episode looks into the possible causes of the state of affairs.

This takes off from prior episodes where I discussed my attempts to source financing for my wedding photography business. This episode might be good news to folks considering sales contracts and lease type arrangements as a way to grow their businesses in 2021.

This episode runs a hypothetical on the kinds of opportunities and personal interactions that we miss when we do not follow up adequately with our sales process and the current potential customers that we are chatting with.

This episode looks into tips for “following up” that can be used to nurture relationships with our past clients.

This episode explores how to handle customer service conversations, and how they can be useful to ensuring that you have repeatable, sustainable, and long-term profits over the course of your business.

This episode looks into whether you should pressure customers to buy more from you and what the best ways of going about that might be.

There’s no point in spending all your time with people who can say “no” but they have no real ability to say “yes” to you.

This episode examines another questioning framework that you can use to get to the root of where your customers are, what problems they are trying to solve, and if indeed they feel strongly that there is a significant problem that you can help them with.

This episode is a rant about why we should have a well thought out process for engaging with customers and not just stick a pretty sales girl behind the counter!

It is tempting when you’re in a sales situation to answer the question “how much does it cost?” And then furnish a document with packages and pricing. Slow things down, engage them in conversation, and try to tease out who they are, what they need, and what their motivations are. This gives one a better chance of closing the deal.

If we are in agreement that it is not a good idea to exert influence when trying to get someone to buy your product or service, then the main question is how do we get people to buy without using pressure? The answer is to use existing buyer motivations to move the process along. You have to become adept at finding out if you’re speaking to the right person, and if there is a match between their n...

It is not always a good idea to apply pressure, or to be excessively forceful when it comes to persuading potential customers to buy from us. This can lead to situations where our customers think they have ended up with products or services that are unsuitable. Either way it leads to reduced chances for future businesses for us, and for referrals. This is because our customers will now be dealing...

Whether you’re able to achieve your agenda on this call or email, you should ask as often as possible for referrals and recommendations for other people who might be in need of the services you offer. This is a nice way of expanding your contact base and making sure you have some personal credibility with someone the next time you pick up the phone to “call a stranger”

After you call up a total stranger as a potential customer, it would be most unprofessional to have those follow up calls where all you say is “I’m just calling to check in”. Always have specific agreed to action points during this call... agree to what the next action items will be... whether that’s for you to email material, call to schedule an inspection, or to schedule a meeting. Don’t waffle!...

It’s best to get to the point when you’re dealing with a sophisticated customer who has done some research and is pressed on time. Provided that you’ve come up with an outline for the conversation, you’ll find that it’ll provide a smooth and easy way to move things along.

Free styling when talking to total strangers leads to more anxiety on your part, and lack of direction for the conversation... without any clear sense of outcomes. You should always have a clear thought process guiding the call...whether this framework is written out or not.

When you’re calling a total stranger for the first time, it’s more important to establish that you’ve indeed reached the right person and then move on quickly to why this call is relevant, and then ultimately you’ll rest on how suitable your product or service is for them. After that it’s a simple matter of agreeing to next actionable steps so you don’t take up too much of their time.