Are You Ready For The Holiday Sales Rush

Hi and welcome to Live Talking Points with me, Jason your host, Jason S. Bradshaw. Just a reminder, Talking Points is my fortnightly newsletter that's released on LinkedIn and directly to your email. Just sign up@jason sbradshaw.com or on LinkedIn. Now today I want to talk to you about something that many businesses get really excited about, yet they fail to do a couple of really important things. And I'm talking about the holiday season sales rush, which for many businesses will kick off this coming Friday. And in fact, we're seeing Black Friday sales start earlier and earlier each year. So whether you're already in the midst of trying to push your luck last sales push for the year, or whether you're gearing up for the holiday season of sales, this one mistake that most organizations make will be the difference between you getting repeat and referral customers and getting a one and done customer. Now I know that your marketing teams are probably already locked and loaded. The creatives are done, the campaigns are booked and you are ready to empty the warehouses. And that's fantastic. But what happens after the customer places the order? So here are three things that most organizations get wrong at this time of the year that if you get right, will help you to stand out from the pack, will allow you to and your business to have breakthrough success. Number one is to communicate timelines everywhere, early and often. So if you're physically shipping a good or an item, we all know that the postal service is going to have some challenges in getting it there in the normal time frames. We also know that FedEx and DHL and UPS and all the rest of them are probably going to have a few, few hiccups as well, despite them being prepared for the rush as well. The number one thing you need to do is to make sure that if you're shipping a physical good that you tell your customers up front what the shipping time is on your product, the realistic shipping time. We saw this happen in Covid. Companies just kept saying they had 48 hour delivery time frames when that wasn't happening for anyone. Don't be that company that promises to deliver in 48 hours when you know that at Christmas at the holiday season it's 96 hours. Just be up front. It's much better to lose one or two sales because you don't meet their delivery time frame expectations than to have a group of irate, furious customers because you failed to deliver on your promise. Remember, customers want you to get it right. So advertise on your website how quickly you're going to get the physical item shipped to them. Or if it's a digital product and there's some delays. Now usually it's instantaneous, but maybe it's 15 minutes now because the servers are being hit. Just be transparent with that. Number two when it comes to communication is after the transactions occurred, make it really easy for the customer to know where their order is in the process. Has it been picked? Has it been packed, has it shipped? How can they track that shipping? The more information you can proactively provide the customer, the more they're going to trust that they've made the right choice. Now, tying in with that is the term easy. Now some of my professional speaking colleagues would say convenience or make it frictionless, just make it easy, use whatever term you want. But I'm not talking about just making it easy for them to buy. That's a no brainer. Make it easy for them to get information about the progress of their order, how to use their order, etc. After they've placed the the actual order. And then if your item requires something to make it work, like batteries, make sure you remind your customer if you haven't already offered it at checkout, which you should be doing as an upsell. But if you haven't already offered it at checkout and you just don't simply supply it, just make sure you remind the customer that for this to be the perfect gift, it needs to have batteries that can be used on the day the gift is open. Just make the whole process of buying it, receiving it and enjoying it as easy as possible. And then the third one you may have not thought of ever. But how about you equip your customer service teams with the tools that they need to rapidly remedy a situation. So if they normally have a hundred dollar delegation to solve problems, make it $200 or $300 at Christmas so that when the customer calls, it can be one call that resolves the problem. It also means that your customer service teams will handle the inquiry faster, getting a win for the customer and a win for the business. Because you don't have long wait lines and irate customers, the longer a customer waits on hold, the more frustrated they will be and the more irate they'll be, no matter how small the challenge they have for you is. So if you want to have a stellar sales season this holiday, remember, communicate early and often. Delivery timeframes, fulfillment timeframes, the process for which they'll get the delivery, make it easy for your customers not only to know what's happening with the progress of their order, but how to use the product, how to get the most out of the product as soon as that unwrapping experience has happened, assuming it's for a gift, of course, but either way, you still want it to be easy for them. And and then the third one is equip and empower your team members to rapidly resolve customer inquiries during a heightened period of emotions where people are buying not only for their own enjoyment, but potentially to bring joy to others wishing you a successful week and may your business experience breakthrough success. As always, if I can help you, feel free to reach out Jason S. Bradshaw on all social channels or jason sbradshaw.com Take care.