Millennials or Generation Y, on account of their primary nature of being fickle-minded and difficult to please single-handedly, make it extremely difficult for businesses to sell to them. After all, how do you convince a group of people who rely on nothing but extensive research and trial and error before settling on one brand – the same set of people who find it extremely difficult to commit.
In this article, we are going to look into some of the most effective sales success strategies that are time tested to have convinced millennials to become loyal customers of a brand.
1. Influencer Marketing Drives the Product Value
Influence is the capability of persuading others to adopt your perspective. While it can be difficult for you as an entrepreneur occupied with a slew of business tasks to achieve the same single-handedly, you can always take external help.
The onset of growing social media reaches and the convenience that mobile apps offer has led to a new class of marketing – influencer marketing.
This is how it works. After being engaged and responsive to a grand social media audience, some people become influencers – ones that others start following to know the trends.
As a product owner, you can contact the influencers to promote your brand among their user base.
2. Personal Branding Over Product Branding
As a 21st century entrepreneur who is selling to the class of people who invest in people first and product/service second, it is imperative to understand the needs of personal branding. While social media can be a great place to achieve this, you should also look into email marketing, creation of websites, or landing pages, among other ways.
Pro tip: When marketing yourself through your brand, the best approach would be to focus on educating your audience instead of selling your product.
This brings us to the third success secret.
3. Educate, Don’t Sell
This one formula goes against all the traditional selling strategies that the sales forefathers have left for us to follow.
The millennial user base that you seek to serve is one that craves learning and education. The more you educate them and prepare them for greater skill, the higher would be the chances of you being able to convince them of your product’s worth.
4. Better Your Value Proposition
For winning a sale, it is of utmost importance that the product value is something that the buyers would appreciate. Here are three elements that come together to define the value proposition of your business – something that solely defines your product’s saleability.
- Resonation – buyers should have a want or need for what you are selling. For connecting with your customers on both emotional and rational levels, you must answer ‘Why act’ and ‘Why now’ on your customers’ behalf.
- Substantiate – the buyers must believe that you will keep up with your promise. They should know that you would deliver the offering they require. When selling, you must ask yourself what would make your customers trust you.
- Differentiation – customers should see for themselves what sets your business apart. At any given point in time, multiple businesses are offering the same or similar offering like yours. The only reason they would buy from you is because you would have something different to offer them.
5. Optimization of Sales Processes
Organizations that have a properly defined sales processes tend to have a much higher proposal winning rates and much lower chances of proposals getting lost to the competitors or going in the pile of no-decisions bucket. The best sales processes are likely to:
- Contain a sales process which is completely customer focused and drawn to map out the buying processes.
- Allocate the leads to people who are most well suited to win them.
- Consists of an effective process designed for the sellers to manage their sales pipelines.
- Employ a non-fixed sales process which answers to buyers’ multitude of roles and situations.
Even after this is a known fact that optimization of a sales process is an opportunity for almost every company under the sun, over fifty-one percent of the organizations do not have a formally defined sales process.
6. Concentrate on Your Existing Customer in Addition to New Customer Acquisition
An untraceable statistics that generally do the rounds in the sales domain is that 49% of the buyers who are content with a service or product would still consider choosing another provider. While the source is unsure, the truth remains intact. You should have a robust internal referral and retention plan in place that would help keep your current clients hooked to your business offering.
So here were the six ways that define how sales processes can be made better to suit the millennials customer’s requirements.
While it is true that convincing them to invest their money and time in your business is difficult, the fact is that it is the present and future source of businesses’ survival.
What other ways do you think businesses can keep their millennial users interested in their offering? Let us know in the comments below.
DepositPhotos – millenials
