Johanne Wilson is co-founder of a Florida-based design agency called COOL Creative. COOL stands for Create Out of Love. Their branding comes from a creative and design standpoint.
Challenges in sales
Every company experiences challenges when it comes to sales. Understanding those challenges and learning effective ways to overcome them can increase your sales. It can also clarify your target audience and reveal how to best go about reaching them.
Find effective ways to pitch so you can have a healthy flow of clients and client work. When you do, you’ll create active, recurrent clients that return again and again.
From a fashion standpoint, offer enough product and keep it updated and fresh. The customer will keep coming in to purchase product and will create recurrent revenue.
Change product release times and inform the customer of new releases to keep him engaged..
Strive for constant communication with the customer in order to drive sales.
Solutions to challenges
Maintain consistent growth within your business.
On the agency side, COOL Creative developed a growth plan that would move the sales needle.
For example, making an investment in the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program provides tools for creating an effective growth plan.
Johanne realized that she was spending too much time on client work and not enough on the sales side of her business. As the business leader, she realized she was spending a lot of time on design because she was comfortable with it. She was not investing enough time in the sales side.
She learned that in order to be a good business person, you have to become a good sales person as well. You must familiarize yourself with the aspects of the business that you aren’t comfortable or familiar with.
Prioritizing sales
On the fashion side, pushing more on advertising, marketing, social, communication, and partnerships with influential people like celebrities can all help drive sales. Right partnerships can lead to other agencies funneling clients your way.
Work smarter, not harder. Identify the areas that need more attention and push toward making those a priority.
As an entrepreneur, Donald neglected the sales facet. But once he made sales a priority, everything else fell into place.
As a business leader, sales is a necessity.
Nobody knows your business better than you. Nobody can sell it better than you.
It can be hard to let go of the things that got you into business in the first place. Identify the areas of business that aren’t as strong. Invest more time and energy into those areas.
Business will become healthier and you will be able to serve clients better.
Understand your clients’ issues and the strategies you will use in solving them. Then attach a price tag to those solutions.
When you and the client see amazing results from something you helped him with, it’s rewarding. Bringing a client’s idea to life or bringing a business objective to life makes it all worthwhile. Create Out of Love (COOL) speaks for itself when these instances occur.
Results of changes
Growth is always a good indicator for having made positive changes.
You don’t have to do anything drastic: small changes can have big rewards.
What are you focusing on? If your head is always down working on the deliverables, which is important, you must make sure there is a strong person on the sales side to keep the engine moving.
Speaking to the creative entrepreneur, don’t forget why you are in business. While it is the creative piece that got you started, you have to get good at the business side, too. This includes sales, accurate bookkeeping, and meeting with other professionals to make sure that the business stays in good standing.
“Constant Flow of New Customers” episode resources
You can reach Johanne Wilson online at www.coolcreativeinc.com. Here you can link to the online shop, Instagram @CoolCreativeinc, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
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