15 Tips to Keep Your Sales Up This Holiday Season

It's that time of year again. The holidays are just around the corner, and everyone is starting to think about what they will buy for their loved ones. For businesses, it's essential to have a strong sales strategy in place to ensure that you take advantage of the increased spending that comes with the holiday season.

Writing about this topic is interesting because it reminds me of the old days when I used to run my own music studio. But instead, we used to experience the same problem in the summer instead of the holidays, especially since the summer can be a challenging time for music studios. Businesses tend to slow down, and people are on vacation.

Now back to the present, as we all know, it's not always easy to keep your sales up during the holidays because there are so many competing demands on consumers' attention and budgets. So when it comes to strategies to avoid this sales slump, the answer is to be creative. We all just need to think outside of the box and be creative.

Because I know how important it is for businesses to have a successful holiday season, I've put together 15 ideas that I think will help you boost your sales. Let's take a look at these ideas together one by one:

Don’t be shy…ask for them to Buy!

It’s something so simple and remains the one thing most difficult for coaches and other marketers and service providers to do. The first thing you have to do is start the conversation by asking your followers, the community you serve, and even the people you know to buy your products.

Obviously, you believe in what you’re doing. You have the talent and you’ve devoted the time to perfect your craft and create informative, educational, and useful products. You know the techniques you teach work. You can even tell others how effective these things are. But, if you do not ask, they will not buy.

It’s like in the old days of Internet marketing when ads had the huge blinking neon yellow arrows with red lettering telling audiences “Click here to buy now!” They were popular at the time because they were effective. People sometimes just need you to tell them what you want. In this case, they need you to ask them to buy.

Revisit your sales approach

While some people struggle simply asking others to buy their products, others may struggle with the manner in which you ask your audience to buy. The average person has a list of ready-made excuses not to buy whatever it is people are selling. Don’t give them an “out” before you even make your “Ask”.

What this means is that you should avoid offering the people who need your services and products excuses or reasons not to buy before you even make your sales pitch.

Instead, reinforce all the reasons they NEED your products, then ask them to buy. It makes a huge difference in your sales, your confidence, and your bottom line.

More importantly, make the ask CLEARLY. Don’t hem and haw and stutter through a sales pitch. Simply say “These are the reasons you should buy my products, will that be credit card, PayPal, etc.?”

Be bold!

Your plan may include a variety of mediums. From social media and blog posts to YouTube videos, email content, and dedicated sales funnels, the methods of asking people to buy your products and services are nearly limitless.

But you need a plan for how to ask that is bold, brash, and results-oriented. It is even better if you have tools in place to track your results to see where your efforts are offering the greatest rewards.

Of course, all the planning in the world amounts to very little if you do not act according to the plan you’ve created. Just remember to ask across multiple platforms and study your results to determine which platforms offer the greatest traction and ROI for future efforts.

Finally, be consistent when asking. Consistantly asking people to buy your products makes it a habit for you and helps you avoid future sales slumps in many ways – as long as you continue offering value to your audience and generating new, relevant products and services.

Create Videos to Introduce Yourself

Whether you’re working with new audiences, through your own cross-pollination efforts, or you’re seeking to renew connections with your own audiences, videos are amazing tools that drive impressive results when it comes to relationship building.

It’s hard to put yourself out there. But to make the types of connections you need to break your sales slump and take your business to the next level, it is sometimes necessary to do things that are well outside of your comfort zone.

The great thing about using video for this purpose is that it promotes real connections with your audience that set the stage for loyal relationships with people who will buy your products over and over again.

Revisit Old Products

How many products do you have sitting on cyber-shelves collecting dust? Chances are you have a few. Whether they are older products that simply aren’t getting much love lately, or nearly completed projects you put on the back burners for some reason, the odds are good that they can offer new value to your customers.

Nearly completed products, for instance, can be quickly completed and offered as new releases for your audience. Older products can be easily, and often quickly, updated and re-released in their own rights or as sweeteners for more current offers.

You can even bundle a few of your older products together and sell them as a package deal. This increases the odds that one or more of the products in the package will appeal to existing customers who do not yet own those products even if they have some of the other titles in the bundle.

The idea is to renew interest in your products and overcome your current sales slumps. It’s not necessarily about making record profits, but about generating sales throughout your current slump. Price these packages and bundles accordingly.

Solicit Feedback from Your Customers

This goes back to asking, once again. This time you’re not asking your audience to buy products. You’re asking them to offer honest feedback on the products they’ve purchased from you.

Social validation is a powerful tool when it comes to motivating others to buy your products. Even if it has been months, or years, since they’ve purchased from you, getting reviews and feedback from past and present customers alike helps you learn what your audience wants, shows the value of your products to others, and offers validation to those sitting on the fence that people have found your products helpful.

Ultimately, social feedback, testimonials, and reviews encourage fence sitters to make the buy in a way that you would be hard-pressed to do on your own. It shows them that real people have benefits from your products. It’s even better when the real people writing the reviews are people they already know, admire, and respect.

Get Client Feedback

Contact some of your most loyal and consistent clients and ask a few questions. The answers will reveal a lot about what your people are looking for in the services and products you offer, including insights about why they keep coming back to you for the products you offer, what they love about your products, and what they feel is the most valuable aspects of their relationships with you, as customers.

Use this information to help improve morale at a time when it is generally low and to help you create products that add even more value for your audience in the future.

Don’t forget to take plenty of notes and ask them if you can use some of what they’ve said as a testimonial on your website.

Ask the questions then Test Your Results

Take that client feedback and test your results by tweaking your sales pages. Since I'm a big fan of split testing everything, understanding and utilizing split testing (or A/B testing) for your landing pages to help you make better-informed decisions about what products are in higher demand is a must-do. The process may even help you avoid future sales slumps altogether if you use it consistently in your business.

Create an Exclusive Subscription Program

It doesn’t really take much effort to create an exclusive subscription service for your audience, but it can yield impressive results that offer you income month after month for as long as you continue offering content worthy of your audience.

Whether your interests and talents are better used for creating video content, audio content, webinars, extended newsletters, membership forums, or other types of groups, the key is in delivering stellar content to your subscribers each month. This generates buzz, drives subscriptions, and can help see you through minor stalls in sales as they arise.

Get creative…Cultivate New Product Ideas

Continuous product generation is a great way to drive sales for your business. Sales slumps offer you ample opportunities to assess the products you currently have on the market today, explore competitor offerings, and look at products you’ve offered in the past to help cultivate new product ideas that will help you generate sales now and drive sales in the future.

In fact, you could start working on your next product right away and offer a “sneak peek” at the first chapter, a workbook page, or some other aspect of your new product to people who order any of your current product offerings.

Not only is this an ingenious way to motivate sales, but it also works to generate interest in your upcoming product well ahead of your release. Even better, invite feedback, questions, and suggestions from your audience about what you can include in your upcoming product to make it more relevant to them.

Consistently Over-deliver

There is one overlooked tactic that invites your audience to buy your products time and time again. Consistently over-deliver. This means that every product you create delivers more than promised and offers a few surprises and bonuses along the way.

The idea is that if you give your audience more than they expect every time they buy, they will ultimately always expect your product to be worth the investment. You encourage them to buy future products by giving them exceptional products today

Try New Marketing Methods

Sales slumps sometimes occur because your audience has become immune to your current marketing strategies. Try shaking things up a bit and adopting new approaches for delivering your message about new products you have available.

For instance, if you typically rely on email newsletters alone, consider branching out and writing a feature blog post about your latest offering. Don’t stop there, however. The more options you utilize, the more profound your results tend to be.

Think of all the tools available at your disposal for spreading the words about products, services, and launches. They include YouTube videos, webinars, Instagram posts, Facebook Live sessions, Twitter announcements, Facebook posts, forum announcements and so much more.

If one thing isn’t driving sales and getting results, move on to the next thing and use them in combination with one another for even better results.

Cross-Promote Your Own Products

The odds are good that you have multiple product offerings available at any given time. Use your existing products to promote new and upcoming products. It doesn’t take much time or effort to add an excerpt, sneak peek, or special preview at the end of your product to help your audience see the other valuable products and services you offer.

Some savvy marketers simply include a video announcement of exciting products on the horizon or newly available to help drive sales and generate interest in the other products they offer.

You can even transform your efforts by making special offers at the end of the day to people who have already purchased one of your items with special discount codes for loyal customers who keep coming back for more.

Get to Know Your Competition

Now is the perfect time to start exploring your competition in greater detail. Subscribe to their mailing lists, follow them on social media, study them until you know their product offerings and services as well as you know your own.

Start by identifying three to five competitors who most closely match your own business. Then make it your mission to know as much about their business practices as you know about your own. The goal is to understand their strategies, the promotion tools they use, and the types of relationships they build with their audiences to identify areas in which you can improve upon what they offer.

Your ultimate goal in this is to identify ways in which you can add value over what your competition has to offer. It’s not simply their products and services you need to offer. Those are great places to begin. However, they are only a small window into the big picture you want to know about all your competitors. Ultimately, you want to make sure you offer more complete products, better service, a more pleasant buying experience, and greater overall value from your products – those you offer for free as well as those you sell.

Make sure, though, that you don’t find yourself following your competitors and reinventing the products they’ve created. Instead, use what you learn to inspire you to create something new and different that sets you apart from all your competition.

Put Your Followers to Work on Your Behalf

It’s easier than you think to put your own followers to work for you. One of the most effective methods for doing this is to create an affiliate program. When you do this, you pay your followers a “commission” for each of your products they sell to their audiences, friends, family, and followers.

The process costs a nominal fee for whatever affiliate platform you choose to use and can help you correct a fairly significant sales slump fast. That’s only the beginning. You can also ask your followers for testimonials on how they’ve used your products and services to improve their own lives, businesses, and relationships.

Since the hard work of creating your products is already done at this point, creating an affiliate program for people who sell your products serves to help you get even more profits from your efforts by addressing new audiences through the hard work of people who already know and like your products.

Sales slumps can be devastating for your business if they aren’t promptly addressed. Implementing these 15 ideas can help you generate fast sales that get your business moving forward and create momentum to drive even more sales for your business. Use as many of these ideas as possible to create unstoppable momentum for your business!