Entries Tagged 'Sales & Marketing' ↓

As we emphasize throughout our website, reputation is the most valuable asset of any person or organization. It must be preserved and built with great care.

If you want to build reputation for your business, you will have to start with building your own self esteem and being true to yourself. Think and write down the principles and values by which you want to lead your life. Do not try to live by other people’s principles. In the long term, honesty towards yourself, your family, work, customers, employees, suppliers will pay off more than anything else.

So be honest and your self esteem will grow and would start impacting everything in a positive manner. Once you have got control over yourself, you can now start looking at ways to build your business reputation.

Here are some of the proven tips for building reputation:

1. Be brutally honest even if it costs you money. Admit your mistakes when you do wrong things. Trust can not exist without honesty and transparency.
2. Do not make promises that you can not keep; learn to say no if you think you would not be able to keep a promise. Keep your promise to deliver on time and if you can not deliver communicate it asap.
3. Do not try to be the cheapest at the cost of service. It would cost you more.
4. Pay suppliers, creditors on time as per the negotiated terms, if you can not renegotiate the terms.
5. Look after your staff well, they would reciprocate in the same manner with other business stakeholders.
6. Communicate with authority, even if you communicate less.
7. Let others speak about your virtues; let customers tell how good you are to other prospects; Let investors tell other investors.

Building reputation takes years to build but it can get crushed in a moment. It is your reputation that goes hand in hand with your business’ reputation so your actions are impacting your business’ reputation. So keep proper communication with any one and inform them if there are chances of default.

Try to have people, in your network/work area/ as friends, who have good reputation. This would automatically enhance your reputation. When you have people good reputation , businesses would start approaching you for business.

Whatever you earn in the end would make you happy as all through your life/career you have lived upto the principles and values that you had chosen for yourself.

In this article, I would like to share my inputs with you on how to win new customers. Every suggestion mentioned in this article has given successful results to many companies. You just have to apply them for your case, because they can be used in any business.

The key is to understand that customer are seeking information about products/services or they look for information that would help them solve their day to day or long pending problem.

If you are into a business you would certainly have very good information about your business that potential customers might be interested in. You can share this information with them to solve their problem. You, as an expert, can use your knowledge to make people come to you when they need certain information. Once they see you as an impartial source of information provider they would like to reciprocate by considering your product/service when they make up their mind to buy the product.

Sales will follow as prospects come to you for advice, and repeat business and referrals will multiply as trust in you grows and people spread the word. In direct sales to public you can use this technique effectively to gain their trust, which is difficult to build, as they would see you as an impartial party and the next step of buying then becomes much easier.

Whatever your service or profession: lawyer accountant, builder, plumber, car repair, insurance, etc — give away free information and build your reputation as an expert. Like a car repair shop can give free information about good maintenance technique (though this may not be desirable by your business), gas oil detail, information about different car parts, new car launches etc.

To get started, write down 5 tips that you could give to people on what to look for when buying products that you offer. Now use this information to attract potential customers and when a only few of them try to approach you.

If you implement the above sales and marketing tips, you can easily take away business from your competitors because you are offering something valuable they are not.