If you are managing a small business, there are things that you need to take care of so that you don’t lose potential customers.
In this article we have mentioned ten reasons that may make you lose potential customers for your business.
With fast decreasing attention span and overloaded information, it’s a difficult process to attract a prospect for your business. But, once you do; you must make sure not to lose it at any circumstance.
And to make sure that you don’t lose potential customers; you must have a strong foundation in place.
When you are selling something (even the most innovative product for that matter), you can expect potential customers to turn down your offer.
It happens with the best of the businesses, but if your business suffers from constant rejections, you might want to see if there’s anything wrong with how you are handling potential customers.
You will never lose sales opportunities if you steer clear of these pitfalls:
01. Focusing More on The Brand and Not on The Value
Building a solid brand identity is great, but customers go beyond the name and image to find out if you have what they want. That said, never focus too much on image-building alone.
In every interaction with potential clients, you need to demonstrate the long term value that your products and services can provide. Highlight the features of the product or service itself to keep your prospects glued in.
02. Having a Sloppy Website
It is a must to have a website for every business theses days. If you don’t have once; your customers will consider your business outdated.
Also, you will lose a big section of potential customers that could have access to if you had a website. We have a simple and step by step process to create a website here.
You can follow this article and create a website where you can publish all the details of your business and the value perspective to your potential customers.
But, not having a website is probably better than directing them to a website that loads very slowly, looks cluttered, and lacks any valuable information about your products.
Because this might damage the image of your business parmanentely.
You will need to fix these problems immediately or risk losing prospects. That said, it helps to optimize your website’s user-friendliness by opting for an attractive and functional design.
03. Contact Details Are Not Clear
You have a website to display the detailed of your product, you have clearly mentioned the value proposition, but the contact details of your business are not clear or the contact form on your website is broken.
How will your potential customers get in touch with you?
So, you will lose those valuable interested customers just because you are not careful about the call to action and contact details of your business.
You have to make sure that you have clearly mentioned the contact details of your business in the contact us page or at multiple locations of your website to make it easier for your customers.
Clear call to action makes a big difference to any business. So, you must learn how to optimize your website for maximum conversion.
04. Restricted Hours of Operation
If you do your business looking at the watch may not work anymore. The potential customers will come to you at their convenient time not yours.
So, you have to make sure that your business is open around the clock.
A website makes it relatively easier for you to be active and functioning at all time. A nicely created business website can do almost everything a human can do.
It can present your business, capture the leads, you can automate the process of nurturing the potential customers through your website.
Hence, it is very important to plan your website properly and automate as much as possible.
You can’t afford to have a restrictive timing for your business, else the potential customers will move to your competitor.
05. Not Making It Safe for The Customers
When we talk about not making it safe for the customers, it primarily represents the money-back guarantee that you offer or the return policy.
If you are selling some kind of product, a no question asked 30 days money back guarantee will give the customers that extra confidence to buy your product.
A clear return policy is the need of the hour, so think in this line and create a customer-centric policy for your business.
06. Avoid False Claims
This is self explanatory. You will surely lose customers if you make any false claims about your product or services.
Under promise and over delivery is always better than the other way around.
A customer will be very happy when you over deliver on your promize, it will increase your sales with word-of-mouth marketing done by your customers.
So, make sure that you don’t offer any false claims to your potential customers and deliver more than you promised.
07. Being Unresponsive
Can you afford to be unresponsive? I’m sure not. You will lose customers at the speed of light if you are unresponsive.
You must be very active and respond to your customers immediately so that they feel valued. It is understandable that you can’t be m,annually present around the clock. So, you can hire someone or you can automate the process.
There are a number of tools and services for this purpose these days.
For example, if your potential customers get into your business through the email subscription blog, services like Constant Contact will give you in-depth automation.
You can create a series of automated emails to grab the attention of your prospective clients.
08. Lacking a Process for Nurturing Customers
Before your prospects decide to purchase an offer, they need a great deal of information from you. Potential clients should be nurtured using a good mix of emails, blogs, videos, and other types of content that can help them make an informed choice.
According to ClickFunnels.com, nurtured leads are bound to make 47% larger purchases. Without lead nurturing, you could easily lose opportunities to more aggressive competitors, so make sure to keep your audience engaged using the right mix of marketing materials you have in store.
09. Going for a Hard Sell
Hard selling isn’t necessarily bad, but it can be off-putting to certain customers who are very careful with their money.
If anything, hard-selling is like playing a game of Russian roulette: you don’t know exactly what people want, so you press the trigger and wait for the result.
It does work with prospects who are indecisive, but the same can’t be said if you are dealing with high-rollers who want more information. If you do use this tactic on high-value prospects, then it won’t come as a surprise if they don’t respond to your follow-ups.
10. Not Taking Care Of your Customers
Taking care of your old customers, offering them great support is as important as getting in the new prospects. In fact, it is more important than getting new sales because base customer experience and bad reviews can ruin your business completely.
So, you must try to offer a great experience to your existing customers. There could be technical issues that times that happens with any business but you have to be honest and proactive with your customers to letting them know.
If you are honest to your customers, they will forgive you for small issues. Never at any circumstance you should try to hide things or cheat your customers.
Final Word
If you want your business to grow, it’s imperative to attract and engage potential customers until they are ready to seal the deal. The least you can do is to alienate yourself from your audience and lose opportunities in the process.
