One month of declining sales may be a fluke, but you cannot afford to ignore a downward trend. The question for many is what to do about it. While in some cases, lower sales might be caused by market conditions or other circumstances that are out of your control, many times, they are caused by internal issues that could be easily corrected. Here are three reasons your sales might be dwindling and how to increase them.
Your Stores Have the Wrong Assortment
Many customers come into the store with a particular purchase in mind. If they can’t find what they are looking for, you will probably lose out on that sale, and their poor shopping experience may prevent them from coming back. While you cannot have endless inventory, your business should do an analysis to determine what you must have on hand to maximize the odds the customer will buy something every time they enter the store. Take the time to determine inventory levels too, so that you don’t run out of what the customers want to buy.
Your New Sales Staff Don’t Know How to Sell
Pareto’s Law says that about 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your salespeople. If you lose one or two top performers, sales will fall dramatically unless you raise the performance of the remaining salespeople or replace your star salespeople with new star performers.
Investing in sales training for your staff is the better long-term decision since it will improve the performance of the entire group and reduce the odds of anyone else leaving. Sales training is a good option for improving the performance of your top employees by helping them identify weak points and taking steps to correct them. Services like findcourses.com, for instance, will allow you to find courses on specific aspects of sales management that your top performers may still need help on.
You could also groom some of your senior sales reps for promotion by training them to lead a sales team, or teach them how to become better mentors for their subordinates. You could also train your front-line sales team on how to improve customer service. These are all skills that will improve your sales efforts at every level and ensure that your sales department runs like a well-oiled machine. This will also show your team members that you actually care about their development.
A Lack of Additional Value
If your business doesn’t provide enough additional value, consumers will go somewhere else. For example, customers will buy from another website over yours up to 90% of the time if the competitor offers free shipping and you don’t. Pay attention to what your rivals offer so that you offer the right incentives to your customers.
And don’t assume that lowering prices is sufficient. Businesses should determine the elasticity of their prices. Don’t lower the price to the point that customers worry about its quality, and don’t raise prices to the point that it hurts sales.
You don’t have to sit idly by while sales decline. Identify the root causes and address them so that you can bring in more revenue, ensuring that your doors stay open.