Getting new customers
The simple truth is that if you do not make any sales, you do not have a business. This chapter looks at how you get new customers by selling direct yourself, rather than relying on an online platform, for example.
Every part of your business will be involved in selling, in the search for more customers. This extends from answering the telephone to your written material, to any person or activity in your business that may one day come into contact with an existing or potential customer. Train everyone who answers the telephone the correct way to do it: they must be prompt, polite, friendly and helpful. If necessary, provide them with a script to follow. But also read Chapter 11, ‘Names and brands’, which gives lots of useful tips on building your reputation. Chapter 12, ‘Getting the message across’, gives some simple and cheap ways of getting your company or product message across to potential buyers.
The first step in gaining sales is to plan and organise. The key to gaining new customers is to gather data and information about people who fit the profile that would be interested in your product. Databases are fundamental to the development of sales, so you need to select database software and work out how to design it to meet your needs. Of course, you need to be extremely careful in gathering data to stay within the law.
What is in this chapter?
Selling through your web site
For many small businesses, selling through your web site will be an important source of revenue. To establish a successful online presence you will need to design and promote your web site to attract as many potential customers as possible. The first step in this process is to optimise your content so that it appears near the top of the search engine rankings (p. 133). You may also want to consider Pay Per Click or display advertising (pp. 139, 140) or including your web site in online directories (p. 140). Another important way to attract visitors is via social media (p. 142). If you can establish a popular presence on any of the major social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest, it will enable those who follow you to recommend your products and services to their friends and contacts.
Once you are successfully attracting enough visitors to your web site the next step is to encourage them to stay. The key to this is the design of your landing pages, which are the pages within your web site that a visitor first sees or ‘lands on’. You can designate the pages that you want your target audience to see first, and these can vary depending on how they got there. For example, you could use a clickable link from a marketing e-mail to take people directly to a page about a particular product or special offer, while a link from a Pay Per Click advertisement could take them to a page specifically tailored for that particular target audience.
It is very easy for people using the Internet to lose interest and click on to another web site, so the aim of the landing pages should be to engage visitors in the content of your web site and ultimately drive them towards a ‘conversion’. This could take the form of a purchase via a ‘buy now’ button, or a request for a telephone call (possibly using live chat or click-to-call technology), or an agreement to sign up to an e-mail newsletter.
The most appropriate strategy will depend on the nature of your business. For example, if you are in a high-volume, low-margin industry, you will want to convert online visitors into buyers as quickly as possible in order to minimise the cost and the degree of human intervention. If you are running a higher-margin operation where repeat sales are important, such as a travel company or guesthouse, it may be more beneficial to get people to sign up to your newsletter so that you can regularly get in touch to tell them about new services and special offers.
Visitors to your web site who register an interest by agreeing to receive e-mails or an e-mail newsletter are an important resource, even if they don’t actually buy anything on their first visit. You should record their details and follow up with appropriate communications with the aim of converting them into customers. This process can be fully automated if you use an autoresponder (p. 137).
Whichever route you take, it is important that you track your visitors throughout the sales process. Once you have collected this data, you can analyse it to see how you can improve your conversion rate and how best to allocate your advertising budget. There are various software tools that you can use, with one example being Google Analytics, which is free if your web site attracts fewer than 10 million hits per month. The way it works is that you include a small piece of extra code in your web site that activates the Google Analytics tracking and sends the data to your account. You can use this to:
- understand the main patterns and trends in your web traffic;
- see where visitors come from and what do they do on the site;
- understand which search terms people use to find the site;
- identify which pages retain visitors the longest;
- see where people leave the site;
- identify which marketing initiatives are the most effective;
- identify which keywords resonate with prospects and lead to conversions.
Selling goods and services online
The easiest way to sell items through your web site is to use an e-commerce package. These generally include: hosting, customisable design templates, a shopping cart and integrated payment options. A ready-made solution like this enables you to get your online shop up and running quickly and is more secure than trying to do it yourself. There are various companies that offer these services, including credit card providers such as Barclaycard.
A good e-commerce package will allow your customers to search for different products and then offer a streamlined checkout process. There should also be a separate version that has been optimised for use on smartphones and tablet computers. All the screen templates should be customisable so that they fit in with the look and feel of the rest of your web site, and it needs to integrate with secure payment providers such as PayPal and WorldPay. If you want to accept credit and debit card payments online, you will need to set up an Internet merchant account with the card provider.
Security is a key priority. This applies both to the handling of the transactions and the safe storage of your customers’ personal data. A serious breach of data protection legislation could result in a fine of up to £500,000 and could damage the reputation of your business beyond repair.
If you store personal data, you need to recognise that it may be at risk and so take the necessary steps to secure it, such as by using up-to-date anti-virus or anti-malware products. The safeguards need to be appropriate to your business and are not necessarily expensive or onerous. They may even be free or already available within your IT system. You can find guidance on IT security for a small business on the Information Commissioner’s Office web site: http://ico.org.uk
If you’re selling goods online or by any other distance method, you must provide certain information for your customers. This includes any business that supplies goods through:
- the Internet and e-mail;
- digital TV;
- phone, or text messages;
- mail order.
Before an order is placed you must display information such as: your business name; a description of your goods or services; the price, including all taxes; how a customer can pay; delivery arrangements, costs and how long goods will take to arrive; and information about the customer’s right to cancel.
In good time after an order is placed, and no later than the delivery of the goods, you must provide in writing: an explanation of how and when your customer can cancel the order and who pays for returning the goods; an address where complaints can be sent; and any guarantees or after-sales services you offer. See the Trading Standards hub for more information about online and distance selling at www.businesscompanion.info
Online sellers must also follow the Electronic Commerce Regulations. You can download a Beginners Guide to the E-commerce Regulations 2002 from the web site http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk. The additional requirements when selling goods online include:
- listing the steps involved in a customer placing an order;
- acknowledging receipt of any orders electronically as soon as possible;
- making it easy for customers to check their orders and correct any errors, and explaining how to do so;
- letting customers know what languages are available to them;
- making sure customers can store and reproduce your terms and conditions, such as by downloading them and printing them off;
- giving your e-mail address and VAT number (if your business is registered for VAT).
Find all the rules on www.gov.uk/online-and-distance-selling-for-businesses.
Selling through other web sites
Rather than selling direct through your own web site, you could use one of the established online marketplaces, such as Amazon Marketplace or eBay Shops or an online platform such as TaskRabbit or Etsy. These trusted sites have millions of customers who regularly use them to buy a whole range of different products or services. Signing up to one of these services could make your products easier for people to find online and could expose your brand to a large potential customer base. They also handle all the practical issues including protection against fraud and security.
There are, however, several disadvantages. Selling via an online marketplace can make it easier for people to compare the price with that of other providers, so if you do not differentiate your product you could find it difficult to maintain your profit margin. You also have to pay the company to host your product and you do not have the same degree of control over the process as you would when using your own web site. This can make it more difficult to get repeat sales or sell other products to your existing customers.
1. Amazon Marketplace
Amazon Marketplace enables you to sell new, used, collectable and refurbished items alongside the products directly available from Amazon. Whenever a potential customer searches for a product on the web site, they will see the details and the price from Amazon, together with a ‘new and used’ link that enables them to view all the other buying options. This is where your product will appear, together with the price you have specified.
Once you’ve registered to start selling online you can use the free web-based tools to upload your inventory. Amazon will e-mail you whenever an order has been placed and it is then your responsibility to pack and deliver the item to the customer. The payment will be collected by Amazon and the company will then deposit it in your bank account. If you plan to sell more than 35 items a month you will need a Pro Account. This has a monthly subscription fee of £25 and there is also a percentage referral fee charged on every sale that varies from 7 to 15 per cent depending on the product category.
2. eBay Shops
The online auction site eBay allows businesses to set up an eBay Shop, which acts as a central buying destination where customers can learn about you and the products that you sell. These customised pages enable you to promote your business name and brand. You can also control your cross-promotions when buyers view, bid on or win your items. To open an eBay Shop you have to pay a subscription fee, which starts at £19.99 a month. Each item you list incurs an insertion fee and, if it sells, a final value fee.
Items can either be entered into an online auction, where the highest bid after a fixed period wins, or listed using a ‘Buy It Now’ option, where buyers pay a fixed price and immediately acquire the goods or services. All the sellers on eBay must offer PayPal as a payment method. This is a secure option that allows you to be paid without sharing any of your financial information with the other user. You may also offer several other payment options including cheque and credit card (if you have your own processing capabilities).
3. iOffer
iOffer is another online marketplace and, although it is not as well known as eBay, it has over 100 million items for sale and thousands of active buyers and sellers. A business can list its products for sale and customers can either pay the fixed price or get in contact with the seller and make a lower offer. You can create an iOffer Store (much like an eBay Shop) and set it up to use Google Analytics (p. 153) to monitor and assess the behaviour of your visitors. You can also promote it using Facebook and Twitter and by paying for keywords to help potential customers find your products. In most cases there is no listing fee, although there will be a final sale fee that takes into account the total sale price including postage. You can offer a range of secure payment options including Amazon payments and credit card (if you have your own processing capabilities).
Direct e-mail and mail
Sales activity takes place via e-mail, text or, less likely, by post – see pp. 141, 170 and 174 to check out the law. The law is very strict about who you can approach, particularly by email. Even if you close the sale by a face-to-face meeting, e-mail will often be the first stage in the sales process to filter and screen the prospects.
However, many products can be sold simply by e-mail or mail without any follow-up stage. The key to a successful direct marketing campaign to attract new customers is to have a very clear idea of your likely customer and to select a list to match that profile. The second most important factor is to be careful about the e-mail, text or mailshot that you send and the offer that you make. Your aim is to increase the response rate as much as you can. The trick with any list, any offer and any mailshot is to test first, before you roll it out on a larger scale.
Typically, you devise an offer that makes what you want to sell look attractive. For example, you might be able to offer a discount. Or you might be able to offer some sort of extra. The idea is to give recipients the feeling that this offer is particularly good and not likely to be bettered.
You might also offer a free product or sample of something if the recipient responds within a number of hours or days, say. The difficulty with any mailer, whether e-mail or postal, is to generate action by the person receiving it. So the notion that something extra is on offer for a prompt reply is attractive.
Gradually, you will find out what style of mailer best fits your target market. There needs to be a subject heading or strapline to attract the reader’s attention and prompt your e-mailer to be read. Otherwise, it might be consigned to the bin, like the other 99 per cent. And the copy can be highlighted to emphasise particular words.
Take particular care with marketing e-mails. It is illegal to ‘cold e-mail’ individuals (see ‘The law’ overleaf). Be wary of words like ‘free’ and ‘save £££s’ as they may trigger Internet service providers’ spam filters so that your e-mail never reaches the intended customer at all. Think carefully about the first line of your e-mail: how will you catch the recipient’s attention without seeming to be just another bit of junk (p. 136)? Make sure your e-mails can be read easily on mobile phones and other mobile devices. Increasingly, e-mail marketing is being used in conjunction with social media (p. 142) – for example, you might set up a fan page on Facebook where people can sign up for your regular e-mail newsletters. Targeting your e-mails in this way is likely to make them more effective. See p. 136 for more information about e-mail marketing.
The law
Anyone collecting or using data lists needs to establish whether they need to register with the Information Commissioner*. You will not have to register if you collect data or buy data lists solely for the purpose of marketing your own goods and services. But, regardless of whether you need to register, you must comply with the principles of data protection (see p. 172 for more information).
If you are marketing by e-mail, text or phone, you must make sure you comply with the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. Amongst other rules, these prohibit you from contacting individuals by these means unless they have consented to receive your messages or calls. There is a ‘soft’ option whereby you can contact someone whose details you have as a result of participating in your sales process about your similar or other products and the person was given the opportunity to opt out of this contact.
Telephone selling
More and more tasks are being handed over to telephone operators – fixing up insurance policies, giving details about bank accounts and so on. Face-to-face selling is partially being superseded by the use of the telephone. Face-to-face selling is being made more effective by the qualifying of prospects by telephone before appointments are made. People’s time is one of the most valuable resources for a business. Anything that reduces the wastage of that time is beneficial. Bear in mind that phone calls count as electronic communication and so the law requires that individuals you phone have consented to this contact (see above).
If you have not sold by telephone, and even if you don’t intend to be selling yourself by telephone, it makes good sense for you to be trained in how to do it. The trick is to try to establish a relationship with the person at the other end of the line.
Telephone selling requires you to have carried out the research into your prospect, preferably to have already sent a letter or an e-mail setting out your proposal, and ensuring that the specific offer you are making is likely to be of some interest to the person you are calling, perhaps because it helps to meet some sort of business objective.
The stages of a sale are the same as for face-to-face selling: opening stage, building the sale and closing the sale (see p. 164).
Consider what communications equipment and services you need if telephone sales will be important to your business. For example, you could buy software or a hosted dialling service that schedules and manages outbound calls. In some industries, such as financial services, you are required by law to record telephone calls; even where this is not a legal requirement, recording can provide a useful legal safeguard and potentially valuable information. You can either record, store and retrieve calls using your own equipment or you could buy into a service that hosts and manages your recordings on a remote server. Contact business telecommunications companies to find out what services they can offer.
If you intend to record telephone calls, familiarise yourself with the law in this area. In general, recording of calls is banned but there are exceptions for lawful business practices as set out in the Telecommunications (Lawful Business Practice) (Interception of Communications) Regulations 2000. This allows you to record calls, for example, to comply with regulatory requirements or ensure that quality standards or targets are met. If your calls are for other purposes, such as marketing, you will need to get the recipient’s consent if you want to make the conversation available.
Face-to-face selling
The first stage in acquiring new customers is to work out a possible list by market research and other methods. You may, for example, start with the raw list that you have collected during your business activities. But you could not possibly follow up and sell direct to everyone on this list; your efforts would not be effective, because you would not be pinpointing those most likely to buy. So the list needs narrowing. This is done in many ways:
- Following leads: leads are those people who have approached you, either as a result of your advertising or mailers or having seen your business at an exhibition. They may have asked you for information or for a demonstration or simply expressed interest.
- Using referrals: ask your existing customers if they know of other businesses that might be interested in your product or service. On the whole, referrals are more likely to lead to a successful sale than a lead, because you have several advantages. You already have an introduction, you know something about the person, and your existing customer may have already expressed satisfaction with your business.
- By qualifying potential customers: when you are starting up your business, you may not have any referrals or leads to follow. All you may have is a list you have built up from market research. To reduce the list to the best prospect for you, you need to qualify. Find out the name and position of the decision-taker. Look for information about the potential customer’s business. Work out what are likely to be the main factors that mean a business is likely to buy your product or service. You also need to know if the potential customer is considering buying a product like yours or has recently bought one.
There are detailed rules and regulations about what data you can gather and how to look after it so that it is secure. There are useful checklists on the Information Commissioner’s web site.
Two important aspects of sales organisation are:
- Recording the information you have about each potential customer.
- Devising a strategy for following up at regular intervals those potential customers who are not interested now but may be in the future.
There are two possibilities to carry out direct face-to-face selling: you, directly as a salesperson, or using a sales representative.
You
When you are starting your business, or if it is a very small one, it is more than likely that you yourself will be selling. If you have not previously worked in this role, the prospect may be fairly daunting. But you are likely to start with one major advantage – complete product knowledge – which is very important for selling. It is possible to acquire and develop many of the personal selling skills that you need, and many courses are available. If you are doing the selling, it would be a mistake to think that you do not need to organise and plan because you have stored it all in your head. You need the same information, sales systems and records as any sales rep.
If yours is a very small business, you might include your mobile phone number in your advertisements. This is fine if you do not expect a high volume of enquiries, but you’ll find it hard to get on with your job if you’re constantly being interrupted by phone calls. Bear in mind that you will need to have to hand some means of recording the callers’ details.
Sales representative
At some stage, you may decide to employ someone else to carry out or help with the selling. To enable a sales rep to work effectively, you need to make several decisions:
- How will the rep be paid?
- How much training is needed?
- What sort of back-up organisation and systems will be needed?
- How will the rep’s activities be controlled?
Pay
Most salespeople will have an element of business-related remuneration. The purpose is twofold. First, commission or bonuses can be a motivator for salespeople to achieve greater sales. Second, it allows you to keep your overheads lower by not having to pay a greater fixed salary. However, be aware of a possible conflict of interest if you use commission-based remuneration in an industry where your customers will be relying heavily on advice from your sales reps in coming to a decision about whether or not to buy. In this situation, commission may tempt reps to give inadequate or misleading advice if it generates more sales. In the long term this could damage your business reputation as well as leading to claims for redress. You may need to foster and possibly monitor high ethical standards – see ‘Control’ and ‘Personal selling skills’ (p. 163) and ‘Keeping it legal’ (p. 167).
Training
Unless you yourself as the business owner are a sales specialist, it would be unusual for a small business to take on someone who needs basic training in selling skills. If you do employ a trainee, you need to be prepared to wait for a long period before the person is achieving a good level of sales.
However, even if you employ only experienced salespeople, you may find it difficult to employ someone who knows your particular market and product in great detail. You must be prepared to provide good product training, plus detailed analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of competitive products. If you fail to do this, your sales are likely to be disappointing.
Back-up organisation
There need to be a number of systems and records in place to enable the sales effort to work effectively.
- Sales staff may spend a lot of time out of the office. A sales rep needs to be contactable at all times, able to access information about clients at once and record new information.
- Every sales rep needs to be supported by a web site with up-to-date price and product information.
- If yours is the sort of business that has to issue quotes to customers, try to standardise these as much as possible. This cuts down the amount of time the rep has to spend on admin. This also applies to any other sales job that can be standardised.
Control
You need to exercise effective control over your sales staff. This can be difficult if they spend most of the time out of the office. You must insist on a weekly sales meeting or detailed phone calls with prepared information, such as number of telephone calls, sales contacts, or sales visits made, demonstrations carried out, quotes issued and orders received. The sales rep should be able to give you an estimate of the probability of receiving an order from each potential customer and when it is likely to be received.
The information provided by salespeople is crucial in helping you to plan your business. You may be able to produce ‘conversion ratios’ to help you to predict your likely level of sales. This would be something like a percentage of initial contacts that become a good sales prospect, a percentage of sales prospects that move to the quote stage, or a percentage of quotes that turn into orders.
Personal selling skills
Many people regard salespeople as liars, cheats and commercial vultures. Some salespeople may be like this, while others can be more successful by being honest and responsible, and by paying attention to every small detail and developing their own selling style to match the product, as well as their own character.
What you need to do to improve your selling skills is develop a sales strategy, which can be simple but which should be applied to every sale. One approach is to produce a series of lists. These should include:
- the main features of your product;
- the major benefits it offers;
- the most likely objections and your planned response;
- the advantages and weaknesses of competitive products;
- the key characteristics of your potential customer;
- in what ways your product meets the customer’s needs or wants.
There are also simple rules you can follow that will vastly improve your selling ability:
- know your product;
- listen to your buyer;
- relate what you are selling to your customer’s needs and wants;
- plan your sales strategy for each prospective customer so that you know what you want to achieve at each stage of the negotiation;
- have clear and well-worked-out sales presentations, demonstrations or telephone calls;
- make sure at all times that you know who the decision-maker is in your prospective client’s business.
Developing your own sales approach
The first time you try out your selling approach should not be in a potential customer’s office. It is important to feel confident in your dialogue and handling of the client. This means practice. Ask a relative or a colleague to take part in a role-playing session. The best practice for you will be obtained if the customer is played by your relative or colleague as hostile, vindictive and uncooperative. Try to carry out role-playing sessions many times before you come face-to-face with a genuine customer so that you can develop confidence in your style.
The stages of a sale
There are three stages to making the sale:
- Opening stage (often an initial contact by email, through the web site or by telephone).
- Building the sale (including sales presentations, demonstrations and dealing with objections).
- Closing the sale (recognising buying signals and asking for the order).
Opening stage
Your objective at this stage will usually be to make an appointment to visit a prospective buyer of your product, do an online presentation or demonstration and commence the negotiation. Obviously, you do not want to spend the time doing this unless you have already qualified this potential customer and satisfied yourself that there is a chance of selling your product.
If you want to arrange an appointment, often the best way is still by telephone. The first hurdle may be to get past the buyer’s assistant or colleague. Do not allow your name and telephone number to be taken with a promise of ringing back. Instead, ask when your prospect will be free to take a telephone call.
The purpose of the telephone call is to make the appointment, not sell your product at this stage. Try to keep it fairly brief and plan ahead what you are going to say. It may run along these lines:
- an opening statement;
- any qualifying questions you would like to put (such as ‘Are you likely to buy this product in the next three months if it meets your requirements?’ or ‘What is your budget?’);
- why your prospective customer should arrange a meeting to see you and your product;
- be prepared with a list of answers to the possible objections your prospect might throw out;
- offer alternative times for the appointment;
- finish the telephone call.
Record the important parts of the conversation in your sales database while you are speaking on the telephone or straight afterwards.
Building the sale
You must plan in advance any sales call, presentation or demonstration. Carefully analyse your potential customer’s needs and requirements and decide the relevance of your product or service to these.
The opening phase is important. First impressions are important, so make sure that your appearance fits in with your customer’s, as well as being neat and clean. Do not waste too long on social trivialities but establish why you are there and awaken your listener’s interest in your product. Before making your detailed sales pitch, ask about the customer’s needs, so you can sell to these.
Important points you want to communicate to your listener are:
- the good reputation of your business and product and yourself;
- the benefit your potential buyer will gain if your product or service is purchased.
This suggests that you are talking while your possible buyer is listening. But this is unlikely to achieve your sale. Salespeople have a tendency to talk too much. Instead, you should spend over half the sales call listening to your prospective customer. If you do not do this, you cannot judge the chance of making the sale and you cannot relate your product to the customer’s needs. You must be able to see yourself, your product and your company through your prospective customer’s eyes. This involves listening.
It also implies that your prospective customer will talk. Some try not to, which can be disconcerting. Prepare a number of open questions that you can put during the sales call. An open question is one that cannot be answered by ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
References to other customers who are already dealing with you can be very powerful, as long as your buyer sees the reference as relevant. So the reference must be to a comparable business and use.
At some stage, the subject of your competitors may be raised by your buyer. The traditional stand-by advice is ‘Don’t knock the competition!’ On the whole, the advice is sound; criticising the competition may have an adverse effect on your listener, because it tends to make you sound rather weak. However, do emphasise any benefits that you know your competitors do not have, as long as they are important to your buyer.
Demonstrations can be an effective selling device but need careful preparation. Make sure everything works before you leave your office for the appointment. Handle the equipment carefully during the demo and if possible involve the buyer in using and handling it during the demo.
With some products or services, quite a lot of investigation needs to be done by you before you can suggest a solution and give a quote. If yours is this sort of complicated sale, before you make a proposal you should carry out the following steps:
- Make sure you are investigating the right problem.
- Ensure you have all the facts you need by speaking to everyone involved.
- Keep an open mind about the solution you will propose.
- Keep in touch with the decision-maker and talk through your proposed solution before committing yourself to paper.
The sales proposal should be a restatement of what has already been said. Little has been said so far of your potential client’s reactions. If there is to be any chance of making a sale, at some stage objections will be raised. Do not view these negatively as a nuisance. An objection displays that your listener is interested in the negotiation process. An objection should be treated as a request for more information. It would be a mistake to respond to sales resistance by becoming too persistent or pressuring too much.
There are some general guidelines to follow:
- Do not contradict or argue and remain calm at all times.
- Do not allow the objection to become too important by spending too long replying to it or making several attempts to reply.
- If possible, anticipate the objections and prepare a response.
- The best way of dealing with an objection is to turn it into a sales benefit or to agree with the prospect, but counter with a benefit.
Closing the sale
It is important to ask for the order at the right psychological moment. This could be after overcoming an objection or if your potential buyer is showing buying signals. These might include asking about delivery terms or financial terms, arguing about price or asking about extras available.
If your prospective customer is hesitating, extra pressure is unlikely to be effective. Instead, try to create a relaxed atmosphere to have a discussion and assume the decision will go your way. Talk about what will happen in the future and assume that there will be a continuing relationship between the two businesses.
Once you have got the order verbally, do not relax – you can still lose it. Do not count it as an order until you have received written confirmation; in particular, do not order materials until you have the order in writing. If it is a new customer, it is financially prudent to take up references or find out credit ratings before you accept the order. The last thing you want is to do all the work and find that you will not be paid.
Keeping it legal
The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 impose a general ban on unfair commercial practices and also outlaw 31 specific practices. Unfair commercial practices are broadly any that fail to meet the honest practices and good faith that can be expected of traders in your field. The specific practices that the regulations ban include:
- making personal visits to the consumer’s home and ignoring the customer’s request to leave or not to return;
- making persistent and unwanted, unsolicited telephone, or e-mail contact;
- falsely stating that a product or particular terms will be available only for a very limited time;
- falsely claiming that you are about to close down or move premises;
- promoting a product in such a way as deliberately to confuse it with some other manufacturer’s product;
- falsely claiming or creating the impression that you are not acting for purposes relating to your business;
- demanding immediate payment for or the return or safekeeping of unsolicited products.
Contravening the regulations can result in fines and up to two years in prison, so make sure you familiarise yourself with these regulations – see the guidance on the Competition & Markets Authority (CMA)* web site.
The local authority Trading Standards Services has a role in the enforcement of consumer protection law at a national level. The Trading Standards Institute* provides guidance on its web site and there is an online tool to help you find your nearest Trading Standards office on www.gov.uk/find-local-trading-standards-office
Summary
- For many small businesses, online sales will be an important source of revenue. You can either sell direct through your own web site, in which case you would need to attract a sufficient number of visitors, or use one of the established online marketplaces and compete head-to-head with all the other sellers.
- E-mail marketing can be effective ways to sell some products. Test your lists and offers before mailing in volume.
- Selling on the telephone is an increasingly important sales tool. Consider being trained yourself for your own calls.
- Qualify all potential customers to avoid wasting time and effort. Narrow down your list to those most likely to buy from you.
- If you employ salespeople, you will need some back-up organisation and systems. You need to be able to record information about customers to help with negotiations and to help you to plan, control and forecast.
- If you are doing the selling, try to develop personal selling skills. There are some hints about starting sales negotiations, developing them and closing the sales earlier in this chapter (p. 163).