Check out these quick tips by Eleanor Hicks, founder of Designerly. She’s doing some amazing things and she’s just the kind of mom entrepreneur we love to hang out with. Stay tuned for more pieces of wisdom from Eleanor…  The Founding Moms is a community for mom entrepreneurs. We share a wonderful – yet hectic – work-life balance. We know we thrive better together. We’re a community of learners and motivators. And we want you! Check out TFM for free.

Already a Founding Mom? Read Eleanor’s article, then check out this list for some more opportunities to learn about Sales this month.

6 Growth Opportunities For Your Sales This Quarter

As an entrepreneur, you’re most likely excited about the upcoming new year and setting new goals for your business. However, this year isn’t over yet. You still have one quarter left to finish strong.

Either way, avoiding neglecting any quarter is imperative as you don’t want to miss out on profitability for your small business. Therefore, every quarter is equally important and approaching each one will help you focus on maintaining your momentum.

In turn, your efforts will lead you down a more successful path and make it much easier for you to keep going.

Every business has growth opportunities they should take advantage of to increase sales. Let’s look at what they are so you can hit your sales goals in the next quarter.

1. Assess Your Current Sales Figures

To improve your sales in the next quarter, assessing your current numbers is crucial. Therefore, you’ll need to update your accounting software to compare this quarter’s profit and loss statements to last quarter’s.

Then you can determine how much you need to earn in the next quarter to ensure you’re keeping up with your annual sales goals.

Other things you should evaluate in the last quarter include:

Check the progress you’ve made in your annual plan. Focus on both the wins and challenges.

Gather client feedback and analyze it.

Ask employees for input.

Assess data related to sales, expenses, customer churn and operational effectiveness.

You can also use your analysis to conduct your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats study to guide yourself in the next quarter.

2. Follow Up With Past Prospects

Your best bet for healthy new quarter sales is selling to prospects. You’ve been able to vet and present them with your sales pitch. Now it’s time to follow up with your unsold customers.

Consider making a list of the customers you haven’t sold to yet. Gather those prospects from the past year and give your most recent ones a call first. That way, you have a better chance at closing.

While you’re speaking to prospective customers, you may offer them an incentive to reel them. Yet, before you approach your customers, getting clear on their objections is crucial.

Most customers have objections for highly specific reasons, such as too high pricing. It will also help if you compile the most common protests and craft responses to help customers move past objections.

These responses will help you provide more value and feel more confident when contacting cold or warm leads.

3. Consider Offline Marketing

Have you ever considered using a traditional marketing strategy? Sometimes businesses focus so much on the digital elements that they forget about the offline marketing aspect.

Some of the ways you can market offline includes:

Advertising in local newspapers.

Find endorsements from influencers in your community and give away free products.

Offer free products to radio stations in exchange for advertising and publicity to listeners.

You could also discover any popular places or events in your area. Giving away free products or launching an ad campaign with an immersive experience at these places is a great way to promote your business to prospective customers.

If you want to make more sales this quarter, it helps to seek opportunities that enable you to showcase your business. You never know if you’ll find a new customer or an organization that wants to collaborate with you.

4. Make Room for New Inventory

If you own an e-commerce business, you can easily boost your sales in the fourth quarter by promoting products with less demand. If you have overstock, consider discounting them to make sales, even if it’s a small profit.

Promoting these products will help you move your inventory to make room for a new one with higher demand.

You don’t have to give those products major discounts. Yet, ensure you give them enough of a deal to make the product look more enticing. You can market your products by emailing your subscriber list and posting them on social media to help you clear out your inventory.

5. Ask Customers for Referrals

Instead of focusing on lead generation, you could consider relying on word-of-mouth referrals from your existing customers. Word-of-mouth is more organic than a lead generation since your referrals receive information from people they trust.

In turn, those potential customers are more open to listening and looking into your business.

Therefore, it’s better to ask your existing customers for referrals. Otherwise, you’re missing out on a potential sales opportunity. Of course, you must ensure you’ve established a good relationship with your customers first.

That’s how you’ll know if it’s worth the trouble for your customers to recommend your products or services.

6. Keep Track of Your KPIs

The desire to achieve business objectives is natural for all business owners. However, you can’t push to scale if you don’t know your figures. That’s where you must keep a close eye on your KPIs (key performance indicators).

Knowing your numbers will help you focus on the key metrics. In turn, you’ll know where your expenses should go to boost your overall growth objectives.

The best way to monitor your KPIs is to find a suitable growth dashboard. For example, Google Analytics is excellent for monitoring your traffic and other numbers.

As soon as you monitor your business’s metrics, you’ll find it much easier to stay on track with your sales.

Boost Your Sales This Quarter

The fourth quarter isn’t just a necessary period for optimizing your sales performance. It’s also a closing chapter to reaching your annual sales goals.

Ensure you take time to plan for the new quarter while you review your third-quarter sales. Then take advantage of these sales opportunities to make the most of your success this year.

Eleanor Hecks is the founder and managing editor of Designerly Magazine. She’s also a web design consultant with a focus on customer experience and user interface. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dogs, Bear and Lucy. Connect with her about marketing, design and/or tea on LinkedIn!

Already a Founding Mom? Check out this list of goodies all about sales.

Chase Those Sales Video Course by Annie Warshaw

This blog post from 2015 (an oldie but goodie, but oh so relevant), “A Confused Mind Never Buys: Bringing Clarity And Focus To Your Sales Conversations”

So You Wanna Sell On Amazon Video Course by Kathleen Kobel

Explore this recent question in TFM’s The Chat (members only)

“There’s been a lot of discussion lately about whether to put your pricing on your website, marketing materials, or anywhere on display for customers to see.

Not counting you retailers – are you putting pricing on your website? Your one-sheets? Do you wait until the buyer is ready and email it out at the end of the conversation? Only verbally? How? When? Where?…”