When the slow period arrives in business it can be absolutely detrimental to whether you can survive for the next month or not. Your stress increases, panic sets in and before you know it you are so far in debt it will take you months to dig yourself back out again.
In small business especially, you don’t have the financial means to go out and splash your cash at advertising so here are some tried and tested tips you can do to help get a pure cash injection during a quiet period.
Now just to add most of these require you to get off your BUTT!!! It’s the difference between being interested in wanting your business to survive or being committed.
Most small business fail due to this very reason. By you being 100% committed in working your booty off to generate cash, magically you’ll make cash! It’s that easy.
If you throw it in the “too hard basket” then I can already tell you why your business is suffering. It’s because you think your products/services should just be walking off the shelves itself and you just sit and wait for customers to come to you instead of you coming out to them. I know this to be true as I’ve seen it more times then I have had home cooked dinners.
This year alone I have coached well and truly over a thousand small business owners, I see the results weekly! The ones who succeed are the ones who are prepared to IMPLEMENT the strategies of prospecting and lead generation.
Business is tough when you don’t have much cash to flash, you need to get off your butt to create it. Yes it can stretch you at the start but what’s even harder is when your business fails and eats away your self esteem.
So check out these 8 tips to give your business a fuel injection over the quiet periods.
1) Do a courtesy call of your past clients:
These are people who are already qualified, do a courtesy call and have 5 set question to find out how they are doing. The question must be towards the SOLUTION you or your product solve. If you find they are having a challenge what a perfect opportunity for you to get them back on board.
2) Gift Vouchers:
Send a gift voucher to your list. Nothing generates sales more then when you have a sale..but even better gee them the money to go shopping.
Eg: It’s xmas and I’m giving you the present
3) Create a Mini Event:
People love to mingle and have an outing, so create a mini event that you can educate your new and past clients on what’s new. Send out an invite and follow up them up to ensure they got it and book them in. If you have no money then Officeworks has boardrooms you can hire for FREE!! Yes- FREE!!! Grab some potential customer and educated them on something that your business. product or service helps them with and create a mini boardroom session and then have a special offer on the day.
4) Friendly Fridays.
If you have a business that has foot traffic then create a friend on fridays day. Where any of you customers and can invite a friend to come into your facility for free and enjoy what their friend enjoys. Any friends who come in for that day get a special offer.
5) 30 Second Survey
Hit the road and do a 30second survey to people walking past. It’s only 30seconds and helps you create dialogue and even better gain leads! The idea is you create 3 easy to answer question that have relevance toy your business.
Once they finish the survey you thank them and give them a special offer e.g: a voucher, discount, freebie etc.
Some will decline BUT some will take it! It’s about a 30:70 split so pretty successful results for a free task.
Those who take it take it, you grab their details to “activate the special offer” and say you’ll “call them to organise it when you get back to office in a few hours time.”
6) Do a Complementary.
Need more customers or clients? Great way is to show them how good you are with a free session, consultation, visit, free sample etc.
7) Have a Reason for a Sale.
I recall having two weeks booked for a holiday then my husbands work schedule had last minute plans so we had to push our holiday back. I had two weeks open in my diary that I need to fill fast so I created a win/win by offering a special offer for a sales “Anyone who books a session in with me in that period of time gets it for half price”. I filled that two weeks within 1 day. It was a great win/win and there was an honest reason for doing a last minute sale.
8) Call your Graveyard of Dead Leads:
Surely you have a graveyard of dead leads that you haven’t ever heard from again after you spoke to them about your business or you couldn’t convert them into a paying customer, they gave you an objection and never got back to you after they said they “wanted to have a think about it”…there’s a list full of reasons why you have a graveyard list.
Many graveyard list have customers who are ready to buy but they just never got around to doing it/moving forward etc. Go through your graveyard and spend a few power hours calling them up and seeing if you can reignite the dead.
NOTE: I recently had an email from a client who did the dead lead strategy and made $20,000 in 6 weeks!
Success is not by chance, it’s by pure action, effort and repetition.
Netty’d