Work upon Consistency.. Sales will come automatically...

Everyone wants success, achieve their goals, achieve their targets, earn more money…

But, how many of them are actually able to achieve their desired goals?

90% of the people fail in achieving their desired goals and the only reason is lack of consistency. They give up right before they are about to achieve their goals. 

One of the best examples of consistency is KFC’s founder Colonel Sanders who failed 1009 times before starting KFC and we could never eat that delicious chicken today if he wouldn’t have tried 1010th time.

While I was a part of Entrepreneurship vertical in Young Indians (Yi), Confederation of Indian Industry(CII), we used to visit a lot of E-Cells at different colleges. While mentoring their business plans one thing was always common, every student had complete faith in his/her idea. They were sure of what they were coming up with. Even if the idea was not new they used to BELIEVE it will work. 

But something went wrong. 80% of those ideas could not even come to an implementation stage. 

What could be the reason behind the failure?

It was definitely not because of lack of resources, knowledge or guidance. It was only because of consistent efforts they could not put in because of several other distractions.

Now when a business fails, we always blame it on sales and why we could not get enough sales? Mostly what we hear is because market was down, employees were not working properly, competitors were working unethically, technology is changing very quickly and they couldn’t upgrade themselves with time. But what have we done to get over all these challenges? We all know that there are, people in the market who are still earning and are successful in what they are doing.

The only Mantra to get more sales, get more business is consistency. Here you do not need to have consistency in selling your products. You need to be consistent in the following aspects and you will see the sales will come even without you trying to sell the product:

1. Consistency in Visibility: Trust is the main factor because of which the sales is easy. More you are visible to the audience more they will Trust you. So if you are new in the market you need to know that people will not trust you if they don’t see you much often. There are a lot of brands in every industry launching every day but they do not last for long, people have lost their money and their trust on them and you are no different to them right now. It will take time for people to believe in you and the only way is to be present in front of them and let them know that you aren’t going anywhere.
2. Consistency in reaching out: Most of the time we miss on a client or an opportunity only because we hesitate in reaching out to them time and again. Sales are never predictable, we never know when, what is going to click to the client we just need to reach out to them in every way possible. Call them, text them, send them emails use every platform to make them realise that you exist and you are offering them that someone else cannot. One live example is of my own, when I make calls there are so many people saying “No, I am not interested, I don’t have time, I haven’t thought about it” and later they are the one’s reaching out to my team mate to confirm their interest in the product. It is just that different mind sets have different ways of understanding, which we might not be able to understand in every case, so we should use each & every platform we have.
3. Consistency in helping your audience: When we launch a product, looking from the point of view of helping our audience it is much more easier to sell. But most often what happens is that we are not able to look at a larger picture. We are very much interested in just getting the sales at the moment. A business to sustain needs consistent sales and that can not happen with just one time approach. One time solution will give you one time sale and consistent help to your audience will give you long term business. So understand what is it that is going to last for long, what additional value can you provide to the audience.

I have several examples to explain this situation, but I would like to take the example from education given online. There are so many courses which are sold everyday through Udemy and other platforms but after talking to so many people on calls everyday, one thing I have understood is that none of them are satisfied and that is the reason they have lesser faith in what is being sold online. High ticket products, they don't want to take risk. Which is quite understood after looking at the after sale services provided to them. After going through the whole knowledge and everything, most of them are still confused about how to get started. The only reason is that the focus is upon selling the product and not actually providing what the audience need.

4. Consistency in upgrading your marketing strategy: Recently, I had a call with one of the digital marketeers who wanted to learn how to convert sales calls. After understanding his whole concept I could identify one mistake, which most of us make very often. We are afraid of spending on the marketing of our business. Maximum of the business models which I have seen has the lowest budget for the marketing and maximum for the infrastructure. Now, when we know that the best way to reach out to the larger audience is through Social Media, why don't we use that in the best possible manner? Most of us wait to get more business so that they can invest for more business but we forget that we are not getting any business if we are not investing and upgrading our marketing strategy. Traditional form of marketing is helping us reaching out to the masses but through digital platforms we can generate genuine leads. Using LinkedIn is itself a powerful tool to generate leads if one learns how to do it. 

5. Consistency in investing in yourself: When we invest lakhs in our studies and higher education, we plan to study abroad and get that expensive degree, we never think twice. Its just something that is way too important to show when we are applying for jobs. But here I want to know, how much of that part of education are we implementing in our daily life? Well, I wont say none, but definitely it is not upto that level that we are investing.

I have seen a drastic change in the mindset of people these days, we should first invest upon ourselves to upgrade our business and professional life. But to my surprise people are busy upgrading their lifestyles with brands and things that seems to be expensive. We are ready to invest on gold, cars, home loans, branded clothes and watches, which is not wrong but at the same time is it as important as your personal growth? Is it helping you earn more? Is it helping someone else, even your family or your friends? Understanding the priorities and identifying right opportunity is what I am talking about here, which is still lacking in most of us.

6. Consistency in Overdelivering: 90% of the failed business can actually go to the next level only by delivering what they have committed and 80% of the our work is done by delivering what is promised, but the sad part is most of the organisations fail to do so and yet they create the pressure on their sales team to get more business. 90% of the employees are feeling this pressure because of which they are willing to quit their jobs and don't give the best of their performance.

One live example that I have seen is when I was working with one E-commerce company which was also running Multi Level Marketing business on the same platform, over here a customer would buy a product or two at Rs 1000(Example) and become a member of the organisation where the customer was promised certain monetary benefits. Now the customer who was investing Rs 1000 was expecting to get a product worth the same amount but instead he was getting something not even worth Rs 500. Their customer service team was always in pressure of exchanging products.

Now because of them trying to save that Rs 500 they were wasting minimum of 3 hours of each of their sales and customer service team. the time which could actually give them the revenue of 10 times more than the amount they were trying to save. In this case, it was easy to get more people to get associated with them but difficult to sustain the existing one’s was.

On the contrary, we have Amway which after so many years in service have actually kept their customers satisfied. They have always over delivered in such a way that even after being one of the most expensive brands people would not stop buying their products. It does not happen in just MLM industry, education, fashion, medical, insurance, digital platforms, every where we have the same story.

Hence, I believe all the above mentioned points are proven methods to get excellent results in sales of any business.