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Most entrepreneurs, salespeople, and marketers are already tracking leads and revenue. There is another metric that’s just as important to track, especially for B2C businesses, that is often overlooked: sales volume.Sales volume is the total amount of units sold in a given time period. This is typically tracked in a given month or year.
In this post, we’re going to share how to calculate sales volume and tips for how to increase it.
Let’s dive in.
As mentioned in the beginning, sales volume is the total amount of units sold in a given time period — typically tracked in a given month or year.
It’s important to mention that many confuse sales volume with total sales.
Sales volume is the number of units sold in a given time period. On the other hand, total sales is the number of revenue during a given period.
Calculating sales volume is fairly simple with this formula:
Total units sold x a specific time period
For example, if you sell an average of 20 pairs of shoes each month, your annual sales volume would be 20 times 12. Or, 240 pairs of shoes.
The first step to increasing your sales volume is to track it using a sales dashboard.
Nancy Kapoor of Grazitti Interactive says, “There are four ways in which you can boost sales velocity. These are:
Smart Sales Managers know that to achieve your monthly and quarterly goals, you have to monitor your team’s sales performance on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. To do that, you need an actionable dashboard that summarizes both team and individual sales rep metrics and allows you to:
If you use the HubSpot CRM, you can benefit from the experience of our sales experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing some of the most important metrics for monitoring your sales team performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in sales reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your HubSpot account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
Here are some additional tips to increase your sales volume.
This is sales and marketing 101 stuff, but it is worth repeating. You won’t be successful in increasing your sales volume if you don’t know your customers.
“Identify your target audience, understand it and solve their problems,” says Jonathan Aufray of Growth Hackers Marketing. “It’s key to understand who your product is for so you can craft the right message. You need to know the problems they’re facing and their main pain points. Once you know that, you can create engaging and compelling content that resonates with your target audience and show them that you have the solution to their problem.”
Robert Green adds, “There are many ways to increase sales volume of a product. The first thing I work with my clients to teach them how to sell more of their products is to get clear with their ideal customers. The data on sales history will help identify the 20% of the customers responsible for 80% of the sales. These are the customers you need to address in marketing efforts with an updated market-dominating position (kind of like a USP but on steroids), and find ways to maximize value to these customers. People do not buy based on features, they buy on outcomes.”
The first step is knowing your target customers. The next part is communicating how your product solves a problem that your customers face.
“When you know your target audience’s pain points, you can leverage content marketing strategy to produce a highly meaningful and impactful story that captures their attention,” says Natasha Rei of Explainerd. “You may have improved your product to meet the market’s expectations; however, ignoring that people seeking solutions for their problem won’t help you make customers. That’s why it’s crucial to offer a product that clearly gives benefits to your target customers. This can be done by understanding their pain points from the very beginning.”
For example, Katie Lyon of Allegiance Flag Supply says, “We approach our sales strategy by listing the challenges of our target audience. In essence, it’s why we started our business. Striving to explain the solutions your product can deliver hits on the prospects’ pain points and, in turn, feeds the void in the market. For example, maybe a customer has trouble with time management, or a common issue is the durability of a typical item, and your product has a time-saving component or an innovative solution to the longevity of that said product. You can then include that in your pitch and market your product or service accordingly. Touch on the pain points and deliver a solution.”
Another key is to think through and communicate your unique selling proposition.
Zarina Bahadur of 123 Baby Box explains, “Sales velocity can be increased by focusing on customer benefits. Think from the customer’s perspective. If you were a customer, what offers would love to have on the products? Try to get near to that goal as much as possible by maintaining your profit margin. Introduce new offers, be innovative and increase your sales velocity.”
A great way to get to know your customers in the early days is to get on the phone and sell 1:1 You might not be able to do this forever, especially if you sell $50 gadgets. But, you will learn a ton about your customers, what they care about, and what drives people to buy.
Nora Leary of Ironpaper says, “Effective one-to-one outreach is a successful sales tactic that offers a personalized approach to closing deals. Ironpaper recently surveyed B2B leaders on what tactics work best in the sales funnel and “effective one-to-one outreach” ranked number one from successful marketers and salespeople.”
While nothing can replace actually talking to prospects and customers, you can gain a lot of insights from in-depth competitor analysis.
“You need to know your competitors and what they are doing differently that is working for them,” says Madeline Hudson of Aquarium Store Depot. “Researching your competitors to develop a better, different sales pitch involves comparing the following:
Once you have the answers to the above you can try out and decide on different, more effective promotions, offer better value for your product, and work out how you can better market and sell your product based on the price. “
Once you have product-market fit, distribution is the name of the game. Expanding your marketing efforts can help you do just that.
“Increasing the marketing of your product is a tried and true method of growing your sales volume,” says Jordan McCreery of Ingrained Media. “Product marketing is vital to product success, but it must be done right in order to obtain the desired results.
It is critical that you understand what drives sales, as well as what does not drive sales.”
This won’t work if you sell to large corporations or state or federal governments that can take months – if not years – to close deals. However, if you sell to consumers, shortening the sales cycle will almost certainly increase sales volume.
“Sales velocity tells you how much time it takes for a business to generate revenue/profit,” says Eden Cheng of PeopleFinderFree. “To increase your sales velocity you should focus on shortening the length of your sales cycle. In short, all the deals should not be treated equally. Huge deals take a longer time to close thus increases the sales cycle. Use the content to your advantage. Having a content bank of blogs, product reviews, and guides makes it easy for the visitor to get the information they need. This way you can spare them simple questions when they are poking around your products.”
If you are still using your manufacturer’s product descriptions on your Shopify or Amazon listings, rewriting your copy to focus on your goals’ challenges and pain points is a great first step.
“The best way to increase sales volume is to craft a compelling product description that emphasizes the benefits and features of the product,” says Gabriel Dungan of ViscoSoft. “A good description tells the customer why buying the product will be a good decision. Highlight ways it can improve a customer’s life, make things easier for them, and showcase a couple of possible uses.”
You can also find ways to personalize sales at scale through audience segmentation and product recommendations.
Ian Sells of RebateKey says, “The best way to increase sales volume is through e-commerce personalization. This includes audience segmentation and individualized product recommendations.”
Creating articles, podcasts, case studies, and/or videos that address your customers’ goals and pain points is another key way to increase brand awareness and sales. And if you are new to content marketing, a great place to start is with testimonials and case studies.
“Case studies can be daunting to undertake at first, but they are well worth the effort,” says Ryan Stewart of Webris, “To do a case study, you must document all the work you do for your clients and have good results.
A simple case study framework includes client, plan, execution, and results. Once complete, you can put your case study into a slide deck and push them out to LinkedIn, SlideShare, and other social media as well as your website and more.
Reviews are powerful assets that create tremendous trust and turn traffic into leads into sales. There are a few ways to generate reviews and testimonials: email your clients an NPS survey and from these results invite testimonials from those who score highest; analyze your social media for the most positive feedback that could become testimonials; study client feedback in emails and reach out to those who have positive messages to ask if they can become reviews/testimonials. It would be best if you also made it a practice to collect reviews in video and written form as often as possible.
The most potent sales pitches are the ones your clients pitch on your behalf. Case studies and social proof are excellent strategies to stand out from your competitors, drive leads, and close more sales.”
One way to expand your content distribution is to partner with influencers in your niche.
“Also known as influence marketing, getting the word of appreciation and recommendation from a social or media celebrity/influencer is one of the best ways to skyrocket sales of a product,” says Julian Goldie of Goldie Agency Inc. “The emergence of social media has paved the way for anyone to become an influencer easily. They are perceived as the trusted and reliable authority for their fans/followers, and those who have followers in possibly thousands and millions will also help sell the product in the same numbers.”
Packages and bundles are not only a great way to increase sales volume, but also average order of value.
For example, Prashant Motwani of Senszio says, “Ours is a slow-fashion business so all clothing is individually made for each client. Increasing sales volume of our products is a question we frequently tackle. Our strategy has been to create bundles or packages which allow us to increase the sales volume across multiple products at one time. We segment our clients into categories that require more officewear and those who require more casualwear. For the former, we would do for example 2 Suits, 5 Shirts, and 3 Ties whereas for the latter 2 Sport Jackets, 2 Chinos, 2 Pocket Squares. We’ve found this to be extremely effective as it’s targeted vs a mass.”
In sum, the first step to increasing sales volume is to track it consistently. Then, pick one or two of these tips to test out at a time.
Looking for ways to visualize your sales forecast data from HubSpot CRM? Watch the video below to learn how to use sales data from HubSpot CRM and our sales dashboard software to find out:
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Jessica Malnik is a content strategist and copywriter for SaaS and productized service businesses. Her writing has appeared on The Next Web, Social Media Examiner, SEMRush, CMX, Help Scout, Convince & Convert, and many other sites.
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