5 Reasons You're Not Making Sales

No sales? It can be a terrible reality.

But have you taken the time to consider the reasons why you’re not making any or many sales?

Speaking with several business owners and reading several accounts, and what I have experienced personally in business, I have been able to pin the reason for no or low sales to these five reasons. Of course, there are more reasons, but these five would also feature.

Why waste any time? Let’s get to them already.

5 Reasons You’re Not Making Sales

1. You’re not attracting the right customers.

Shocked? I expected you to be. However, many business owners make this mistake. Hashtags are a common example of this mistake. Hashtags work exceptionally well on Instagram. However, using the wrong hashtags can get your product to the wrong customers.

The first thing you need to do is create a buyer persona. What is a buyer persona? This is a model of your perfect customer. Here’s a fitting example in the image below:

Having discovered who your buyer persona represents, use hashtags they engage with. You can use hashtag generators, but be careful. They sometimes give you unrelated hashtags. I mostly use them when I am stuck and need the inspiration to discover new hashtags.

GravTag does a good job of getting hashtags for me. Here’s an example from a search for “Women's Workwear”.

You also want to head to groups, forums, and communities where your target audience is. Don’t go spamming the groups or communities; screen the level of engagement and talk about your business.

2. You don’t have an irresistible offer

Another reason why you’re not making sales is that your offers are not irresistible. I have an interesting but short article about how to make an irresistible offer. Do check it out.

The point is that you want to do something different from what your competitors are doing. You want to add an extra to your ordinary.

When you want to subscribe to certain services, they tell you that you can get it for as low as $3 a month if you activate the three years subscription. However, if you choose a monthly subscription, you would pay $14. You don’t need to be a math whiz to know which one is better.

As icing on the cake, they tell you that you have a no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.

Now, that’s an offer hard to resist.

3. You’re not sure about how to handle objections

It is painful when you finally get a foot in the door and then you hear ‘no’. However, what you do next might account for why you have not been making sales.

Do you say thank you and leave or do you ask the customer why they said no?

Their reply is very vital. It could still help you land that sale or let you know what you might have been doing wrong.

They might say it is the price or that they don’t have the money right now. If the reason is the latter, why not come up with a payment plan that allows them to pay in installments? Car dealers do this.

An objection from the right customer is another lesson in sales. Be professional. Learn their reasons and concerns. See how you can address them. Learn from the experience.

4. Poor Marketing

One of the reasons why you’re not making sales is that it is not that you’re not marketing, it is that you’re wrongly marketing.

One question: do you just tell people that your product is available at a particular price or do you tell them that this product solves a problem for them and they can get it at a certain price?

You don’t go out selling products these days. You aim to sell benefits. People want to solve problems, how well can your product do that?

I have an elder cousin that sells kitchen and home goods. She does not just post pictures of the products, she shares a video of the product performing the function.

Most people don’t think of buying a juicer until when they need it, but a video of how you can easily make juices out of almost any fruit increases their interest in getting a juicer.

Many potential customers you’re marketing to don’t even know what your product does. It is your job to tell them.

5. Not emphasizing the value of your products

The value of your product is that it solves a problem or adds something to the buyer. Failure to emphasize this is another reason many don’t make sales.

Just like I said in the previous point, you need to sell benefits. If your product is an electrical device that stores power. Don’t tell us 20,000 MAH, tell us that it will work for 6 hours non-stop. I can work with that.

I, as well as many others, don’t understand techspeak.

On marketing, here are a few questions for your business marketing audit:

1. Do you run any form of paid marketing?

2. Are your visual designs or pictures eye-catching? Have you asked something or it is just based on what you think?

3. Do you own a website?

4. How do you reach people outside your network?

You don’t have to answer YES to all of them, but the more yes you get, the better.

At Woken Digital, we help you reach your customers by getting to all the YES(es). We audit your marketing strategy, create new designs, look for marketing channels and run your product marketing. We create posts for you that bring customers to your business.