11 things to do to help meet year-end sales goals

Can you believe you only have slightly more than 3 months to meet your annual sales goal? If you're like a lot of business owners, you're about ready to hit the panic button. These months mean make or break, and it's time to stop messing around and get serious about your sales and marketing.

Added benefits -  any action you take now will be cumulative and put you in an even better position for next year!

If you know you've got a good sales team and things still aren't going well, it's time to see what you can do to provide more support to them and help generate more leads. A few actionable suggestions:

1. Segment your known customers into lists based on behavior and interests, and develop targeted campaigns to reach each list more effectively.
2. Make sure all of your communications push benefits instead of features.
3. Increase cross selling, either by automated product suggestions on an e-commerce site or by training your sales staff which products or services lend themselves to cross selling.
4. Critique all of the copy on your website and marketing materials. Is it talking to prospects about them and their issues, or is it all about you, who you are, and what you do? Nobody cares about you. They care about how you can help them.
5. Think about what a customer will see if they enter your site on a page other than the home page. Will they know what to do next or will they have no reason to stay on your site?
6. Set up traffic funnels on your website that help move various visitor types through the sales process, so they're more knowledgeable and ready to buy by the time they talk with a salesperson. This saves the visitor and sales staff time, and most people would rather find out as much information as possible on their own before they have to talk with sales.
7. Review all of the calls to action on each page of your website. Do they clearly tell the visitor what you want them to do next? How can they be worded more effectively? Are they in good locations on the page? Should you add CTA's to other locations?
8. If you're not already doing it, begin to capture leads on your website by offering something of value in exchange for the visitor's contact info.
9. Once you've started capturing leads, set up lead scoring on your site and configure it to notify sales when a lead reaches a certain score.
10. Set up notifications to alert sales when a hot lead visits a specific page or completes a specific action on your site.
11. If you have an e-commerce site, set up abandoned shopping cart reminders to prompt shoppers to complete their purchase.

These are just 11 things you can do, but at this time of year the most important thing is to do something! Don't just sit there and let the rest of the year fly by, and go into January licking your wounds. Take charge now and enter the new year a winner.