Selling is probably the hardest part of running a business.
Acquiring customers and selling repeatedly to them is not easy work.
Some business owners have a stack of items that they are selling, sitting in their shop or their house for so long. They are looking for ways to dispose of it.
But here’s a simple truth – Selling is not that hard, especially if you commit to doing really simple but repetitive tasks that drive sales.
Selling online is even easier than selling physically because a single post can reach thousands of people in just a few hours.
Whatever it is you are selling, product or service, you can sell it online, by doing this simple thing today.
That simple thing is: MAKE AN OFFER – A SWEET OFFER
Let’s use this example: Imagine that you are a housewife and you found a major importer of stockfish. You bought from the importer, a bag of stockfish ears at 120k and they look really good. Now you want to sell that stockfish in bulk to home users who cannot get such bulk offers easily.
You have done your maths. If 21 people can buy a paint bucket of stockfish for 10k Naira, you will make 220k on that bag and that’s a good profit of 100k. (These are dummy assumptions, I do not sell stockfish nor know anything about it).
If you are able to get more and more people to keep buying from you like that, you would be able to make no less than 200k profit in a month and your family will be happy for it – Again, these are your assumptions from your maths.
Now follow these exact steps:
First, create a sweet offer, something that others are not doing. In making an offer, first, consider who your target market is.
The person who would most likely buy a paint bucket of stockfish ears for 10k would most likely be a married woman with kids and a family, who belongs in the middle class and doesn’t like to enter the dirty market. Now you have a picture of who you are targeting with your Offer.
Then go-ahead to create something that will excite that your target customer.
Here’s my own offer:
A paint bucket of stockfish ears + an ecopy of 20 Nigerian soups book + a free pack of buttermint sweet to excite the children – all for 10k, delivered with so much love within 48 hours from when you order.
(I must have struck a deal with the writer of the ebook. Maybe her ebook sells for 2k each, I would have signed a deal to use it and drive my sales and pay her 500 Naira for each copy I distribute.)
Then buttermint sweet is 200 Naira a pack. So my bundle costs me 700 Naira extra.
To further sweeten the Offer, I will remove the fear of trust by using any of the 8 methods that I taught.
Then I take all the items in my bundle (Stockfish + Pack of Buttermint + Ebook) and go to those Instagram businesses that offer professional product photography services. They charge 1000 Naira per picture and I will take 3 or 4 amazing, top-quality pictures of my offer and my core product which is stockfish.
That’s it. I publish my Offer on every possible social media channel I can lay my hand – Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter – and I write beautifully about my Offer.
As I sell to each customer, I get their WhatsApp number and build a relationship to continuously sell to them. My target is to build a list of no less than 100 repeat customers.
I keep pushing out more and more offers on my status. Publishing old offers again and again. Writing about my stockfish, using my professional pictures to make my social media pages look great, growing my repeat customers list using WhatsApp and improving my business.
At some point, you will have constant daily orders, a repeat customer-base and a very happy business, even from home.
Making Offers is the single way to sell to 10 or more people online.
Sometimes, you do not even need to add anything extra to your core product. Just show the product nicely, state the price, state the delivery timeline and explain the product – people will buy. An Offer can be that simple.
You are not selling that stockfish because you have not brought any Offer online. You are busy telling all your neighbours, church members, family and friends that you sell stockfish.
When they ask about the price, you throw out that answer that has kept many people down the drain, “When you come na” or “When you are ready na” or “It depends on quantity”.
These answers are terrible and do not lead to any sales. Crystal-clear offers lead to sales.
Stand up now and create your Offer.
I love you!
Chioma Ifeanyi-Eze
