By Laia Cardona, on 28 November 2023
A short-term sales strategy is one aimed at achieving immediate results, typically within a day to a month in the realm of marketing and sales. The actions taken by the sales team to sell in the short term (which we'll explore here) are specific actions intended to increase sales within a short timeframe. However, these actions often do not contribute long-term value.
If you want to discover some of the most effective strategies to include in your sales approach and achieve short-term success, you've come to the right place.
20 Sales Strategies That Will Help You Sell More in the Short Term
1. Value Proposition
The value proposition is an idea communicated to the public by the sales and marketing team to convey the various benefits of the product or service being sold. It's a crucial action that deserves thoughtful consideration and crafting of a compelling message. This is the primary reason potential customers will choose your brand over the competition.
To help you build your value proposition, you can follow the simple formula provided below.
2. Competitive Advantage
A competitive advantage is a characteristic or aspect that makes a brand, company, product, or service stand out from the competition by offering greater benefit or value to the customer. When multiple brands in the same sector have similar features, what matters is not just what they offer but how each one sells its features.
3. Temporary Promotion Limits
It's proven that promotions with a limited duration are more successful than those without communicated end dates. This creates a sense of urgency, adding incentive to the fear of missing out. Some brands, instead of setting a time limit, establish a limit on units (known as a limited edition), creating the same effect and proving effective for short-term sales.
4. Landing Page Promotion on Social Media
Landing pages, or destination pages, are pages hosted within a website created to convert visitors into potential customers. They often offer something to the user in exchange for their information, making them an interesting sales strategy to quickly generate leads. To reach a wider audience and increase conversions, many brands choose to share landing pages on their social media platforms.
5. Demos and Free Trials
A picture is worth a thousand words. Offering the public a free trial or demonstration of what you're trying to sell can be more powerful than any marketing strategy, provided these demonstrations go well. When a customer tries your brand, they start to familiarize themselves with it, viewing what other brands offer with more distance and skepticism. Of course, for this short-term sales strategy to succeed, it must be accompanied by excellent customer service that supports the lead throughout the process.
6. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is one of the most used sales strategies nowadays. It involves collaborating with an influencer or well-known personality on social media to promote a product or service. These profiles currently have significant reach and can sell quickly, a feat that other sales strategies might take months to achieve.
7. Neuromarketing
Using neuromarketing techniques can greatly enhance your short-term sales strategies. These techniques leverage knowledge from neuroscience to understand human behavior in the commercial world and determine what customers need at any given moment to convert. Some well-known techniques within neuromarketing strategies include creating urgency (previously mentioned), avoiding distractions, creating expectations, and building emotional connections.
8. Strategic Partnerships
Standing out from the competition is crucial, but finding support from brands complementary to yours can help you reach more potential customers. For example, if your brand focuses on adult fashion, collaborating with jewelry or shoe brands, all targeting the same audience, could be beneficial, allowing you to share customers.
9. Sell Results
Instead of selling the product itself, focus on the results it can bring to the public—how it will improve their lives. Make it clear to potential customers where they are now and where they could go with your product or service in your message.
10. Exclusive Benefits
You're probably familiar with the phrase, "access exclusive benefits with the purchase of the product." Many brands encourage potential customers to buy by promising unique benefits or joining a community or club where unique products and services are offered. Strategies like these, where, in addition to the product or service purchased, customers receive something extra, tend to work well for short-term sales.
11. Events
While they may require a higher investment compared to other sales strategies, events are an excellent way to reach more customers in a short period. Combining them with an influencer marketing strategy can significantly boost reach, conversions, and brand authority.
12. Testimonials and Reviews
More and more customers thoroughly review testimonials before deciding to purchase a product or service. It's not enough to just provide spaces for customers to share their experiences; actively showcasing some of them on social media, the website, or newsletters, for example, nudges your leads to take the plunge.
13. Enhance the Shopping Experience
Many potential customers who were about to make a purchase ended up abandoning their full carts and not returning to your ecommerce platform. Why? Sometimes, this could be due to a negative shopping experience on the platform, such as errors or an unintuitive process. Improving the shopping experience for customers is an essential action in your short-term sales strategies since customers are already convinced; you just need to make their journey comfortable.
14. Address Pain Points
No matter how interesting you make your products or services sound, if they don't solve customers' problems, they won't be interested in what you offer. Pain points are the problems consumers have, which your brand can resolve. Focus on them to construct your message if you want to sell in the short term.
15. Market Research
To sell more in the short term, it's crucial to stay updated on market trends. We recommend conducting market research periodically to identify opportunities and adapt your sales strategy.
16. Exit Intent Popup
An exit intent popup is an effective and non-invasive sales strategy that involves a popup window appearing when a user is about to leave the page, reminding them to provide their details. This way, you can capture many leads that were about to leave and acquire their contact information for nurturing.
17. SEM Strategy
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a strategy promoting brands and websites online, making them appear in the top search results or in highly visible locations within these results. Unlike SEO, the SEM strategy has more potential for short-term sales.
18. Process Automation
Automating marketing and sales processes may not directly impact a company's ability to sell more in the short term, but it does so indirectly. When processes become automated, many professionals can start dedicating more time to other tasks that bring more benefits to their sales strategy.
19. Know Your Customers
This is the foundation of any sales strategy, whether short or long-term. If you don't truly know who your customers are, what they want, or what their pain points are, your actions will not be truly effective. So, whether you want to increase your sales now or later, getting to know your customers is a fundamental step.
20. Unique Selling Proposition
Don't confuse the unique selling proposition with the value proposition mentioned in the first section. It doesn't aim to communicate the benefits of the product or service (like the value proposition). Instead, it positions the product above the competition, prioritizing a unique benefit.
