My silence salesperson – QuickBooks

Many of the small businesses do not have a huge budget for marketing. Usually, we cannot afford to have a big advertisement space in the newspaper, advertise regularly in the magazine or doing mass mailer as what those big corporate are doing.

Before we look at how small businesses can do the marketing campaign in a smaller wave, we shall first look at who are your salespersons.

Receptionist is the front line salesperson. Receptionist is the very first person who let your customer decide to buy from you or your competitor.  A good receptionist will able to give your prospect a professional impression of your company via the phone. This is the first step of sales – sell your company image.

An actual Salesperson will follow up to provide quotation and demonstration to your prospect. Upon fulfilling of needs, sales will be close.

Then, what is next?

Do your sales stop here?

No, of course, your sales should not end here; you should consider to up-sell or cross-sell your products and services. You should further ‘milks’ from your existing customer.

So, how can QuickBooks helps in your up-sell and cross-sell program? How can QuickBooks be your silence salesperson?

You can consider adding an advertisement image into your invoice template. For example, I am selling QuickBooks accounting software; I can consider adding an advertisement image for my QuickBooks training guide, On-site Service or QuickBooks training into my invoice template. This is to up-sell my QuickBooks software. If I also sell antivirus software such as BitDefender, defragmentation tools such as O&O Defrag or contact management software like ACT!, I may consider adding advertisement images of these products into my invoices. People who buy accounting software may needs antivirus software to protect their PC from viruses, defragmentation solution to remedy the PC performance and contact management software to manage their out growing business contacts. These users will be my targeted audience, by adding other business tools into my advertisement will help me in cross selling it to my customer.

 “If you can’t find an opportunity, create one.”

I have a customer who sells diving equipment. Regularly he will organize diving trips for his customer. What he did was he added an advertisement about his next diving trip into his invoices. So, when customer purchased his equipment will able to get more information about the next up and coming diving trip. Besides, he also makes use of the advertisement in the invoice to promote his company web site. 

This is quite a smart way of using invoices to do ‘direct mailer’; besides, these are all targeted audience. If monthly, you issue one hundred invoices, in one year you have send out one thousand two hundred ‘direct mailer’.  Although, the hit rate may not be as good as the massive direct mailer did by big corporate, but this ‘direct mailer’ will cost you almost nothing (What you need are some extra ink or toner used in the advertisement image).

Small business cannot have a luxury of having expensive business tools; QuickBooks does come in handy if you are willing to think out of the box.