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

It’s not a bad idea to call up total strangers in the hopes of drumming up new business. The challenge is to make sure that the strangers you’re talking to are qualified to hear your message. They should’ve done something in the past to show they could be possibly interested in your product or service. Best case scenario? You get some business! Worst case scenario? The person isn’t interested. In...

There are situations where you can get the customer to commit to making a deposit on the first visit. These are situations where you are dealing with a simple sales context, or where the customer has so much money that the deposit is of little stakes. For other situations where large sums are involved for complex goods and services, the right approach is to have incremental conversations with litt...

It’s important to ask yourself if you’re in a simple or complex sale situation because if it’s complex, you have more room for nuanced conversations, and your negotiation techniques have to be more refined than just “take it or leave it”.

You know you’re in a simple sales situation when you have a low priced commodity product or service, and if neither you nor the buyer care about long term relationships and prospects. Why is this important? Because it has implications for how you price and negotiate!

Whether we think of sales as an event or a long term process is important. If you think about sales in a more long term fashion, then you’re continually trying to leverage present contacts and opportunities for future mutual gains between you and your prospective customers. If you think sales is a “one and done” event then you’re constantly dealing with people in a transnational manner with loads...

Client questionnaires and questioning frameworks are important not just so that you have all the information necessary to give an accurate quote, but also so that they help with what you should anticipate when coming through on delivering what you promised.

These questions are important because they help you figure out what other people or factors you should accommodate and take into account as you try to negotiate that sale.

It is useful to ask questions about what your customers want, what they need, what they can afford, and when they will be ready to pull the trigger. This is because, if you don’t run through this exercise, you’re on the risk of giving a quotation that is not accurate and is not relevant to their needs. It also may cause problems in the future when we run into scope creep. This is when due to misco...

Feedback is essential to developing our products and our services. And the feedback of our various stakeholders is very important because we do not have a 360° perspective to account for all the eventualities and facets of our businesses. But who’s feedback is important? And what kind of feedback should we seek? I think the people that we should pay attention to the most, are those who actually us...

Yes! Google reviews and other “back end” processes and avenues should be a significant part of your sales process. Reviews, recommendations, referrals and repeat business are easier and more viable forms of future income. They are definitely more easier than having to go out and chase folks afresh at wedding fairs or wherever it is that you drum up business. Google reviews make you look more profe...

Most people are anxious to get a sale from the moment they meet with a prospective customer. Because of this they immediately launch into their presentation trying to convince the poor customer that this service person is the right professional for the job! Don’t launch into a sales pitch right away because you haven’t discovered what the client’s ideal vision is, what he or she wants, needs, and...

Spec driven industries like software, engineering, etc require a proper understanding of the technical specifications that have to be met for the success of the project at hand. The rest of us who are more “artsy” and service oriented ought to take the same approach to figuring out what our clients wants and needs are; as well as the outcomes and vision they’re aiming for, and which will allow us...

It cannot be overstressed, the importance of knowing who your customer is, and why you should hang out with them more! Not only do they lead to more repeat business and referrals, but you also get valuable opportunities for business insights that you can use to improve your product or your service.

Outsourcing your sales, or giving other people the responsibility to sell for you, is not always such a bad idea. But before you do that! You have to be sure that you have already thought through and created your own ideal sales process. Until you do that, the people you delegate will go around making promises of offerings that you cannot fulfill. They might create liability and reputation issues...

This might not be such a bad idea! Marketing and advertising professionals bring useful “know how” when it comes to figuring out what your “core marketing messaging” should be as well as who your “ideal customer profile” or “target market” is.

Bank financing can be a handy way to get around “money” objections when talking to prospective customers. This currently doesn’t apply to those of us in the wedding and event space, but you never know! The scenario might not be as far fetched as we think!

Asking questions around the “value trinity” shows that you provide a valuable service. As wedding and event professionals we provide financial savings, physical comforts and psychological benefits in the way we conduct our services. Our discussions with prospective clients should reflect this. Unless we do this, there’s really not much reason to do business with us in the first place.

The finale!

Part 1 of the discussion!

Some people think it’s OK when talking to a prospective customer for the first Time to pretend like you had a previous relationship with them to get them to be warm and loosen up to listen to you. This is a bad idea because there is a little bit of apprehension when people are involved in sales conversations... this can be even more annoying when they discover that you are just trying to sell them...

Business owners in general and wedding industry professionals in particular need to start asking clients questions that show how valuable our products/ services are, and to help the client realize that the problems we solve are much bigger than they think! After all why should they pay top naira for someone to merely click the shutter? Or pay someone lots of money just to tell servers which table...

Asking the right questions is essential. We have to get to the root of whether they are ready to buy or not. This is an important skill because it’s going to save you time and money from following up on people who were never going to buy in the first place!

As with the previous episode, asking questions to gauge the level of the problem our prospects have, and any sense of urgency around making the decision is absolutely essential. This will save you time in the long run and avoid you talking to people who have no need for your service.

Not only is important to have the budget conversations to be sure our expectations aren’t too far apart, we also ought to ask about timeframes to get a sense of whether, and if they’ll ever make a decision. Sometimes they’re okay with things the way they are and your services might not be required after all!

The money conversations are key in the sales process... to be sure that both you and your clients have similar expectations as far as money and price are concerned. Skip them at your peril! You’re better off talking about money now, than after having had 10 meetings only to find out you guys were never even close to reaching a deal from the beginning!