Strategies for Increasing Unit Sales: Tips and Tricks

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In today's competitive market, every single unit sold matters. But, with competition mounting and global markets reeling from one supply shock after another, it can seem like business isn't quite booming like it was before.

Whether you're opening a new business or towering over the competition from atop your tower of success, one thing's true: increasing sales is becoming ever more challenging. However, by focusing on increasing unit sales and implementing proven techniques, you might be able to ease that burden.

Unit Sales: What They Are and How They Work

Unit sales are a key performance indicator (KPI) that refers to the total number of units of a specific product that your business sells within a given period. This is typically represented with phrasing like the following:

• "We sold 5,000 of the branded baseball caps last quarter."
• "Last year, customers only bought 12,609 vials of Chemical X."
• "200 units of blue sweatshirts were sold between January 1 and February 28."

The unit sales KPI is a critical measure for businesses. With accurate unit sales data, you can gain insights into the following and more:

• Sales trends
• Perceived product quality
• Product popularity
• Customer preferences
• Customer price sensitivity

The insights generated can further help improve decision-making processes in production planning and inventory management. For example, if a product's sales are growing, now might be a good time to scale up production of that product. On the other hand, if unit sales for a product are dropping, it might be time to reevaluate your marketing strategy.

Unit sales are a simple metric shrouded in intricacies. You must understand what they are and how to calculate them ((hyperlink the "How to Calculate Unit Sales for Your Business" article)) before reading on. And if you have any questions, I encourage you to contact me.

4 Tips for Ensuring Data Accuracy

As with any KPI, a contextual view of the data is critical to ensuring data accuracy. Data accuracy, in turn, is critical for mitigating risk in the decision-making process. The following four tips have proven useful for me:

• Regularly update your records. Keeping a real-time record of your unit sales in an easily searchable format can avoid data pile-up and break down silos.

• Automate manual processes. Leveraging technology like inventory management software or CRM systems tends to produce fewer human errors than traditional spreadsheet management practices.

• Cross-reference your data. Verifying data in context with other KPIs like gross revenue, cash flow, and marginal contributions can help proactively correct discrepancies and reporting errors.

• Conduct regular audits. Auditing your data on a routine basis can help ensure the sales process is always informed by up-to-date and accurate data.

How To Use Metrics to Increase Sales

The metrics you use in tandem with unit sales can substantially increase the accuracy and overall utility of your data insights. Some of the most important metrics related to unit sales are as follows:

• Sales volume: the total amount of money generated from the sale of a specific product. This KPI enables you to track which products are generating the most income.

• Market penetration: your total customer base compared with the total potential in your market. This KPI tells you what percent of your market your goods are currently saturating, which can help you prevent additional goods from being produced for a tapped market.

• Percentage of revenue from new customers: the revenue generated by new customers only. This KPI is best used when drilling down into unit sales to determine whether most of your business results from existing customers purchasing similar products or your marketing strategy driving sales conversions.

Leverage the Power of Social Media to Increase Sales Volume

Social media offers a platform for you to reach new markets, promote your products, and connect with potential customers in meaningful ways. Today, there are more than 4.2 billion active social media users. Given that more than half of the entire planet is on social media, you can see why it's considered a crux of any digital marketing campaign.

Marketing teams frequent platforms like TikTok, Reels, Facebook, and Twitter. However, sales reps might find LinkedIn one of the most useful social media platforms for boosting business growth.

Case Study: Wendy's Twitter

The Wendy's Twitter account is a hilarious case study of what it means to connect with potential customers. The company's witty, humorous, and tongue-in-cheek tweets frequently go viral, especially the company's "Twitter Roasts" campaign. Wendy's uses Twitter to bring the concept of celebrity roasts to their nearly four million followers in a campaign that nets the company millions of impressions every time it's reintroduced.

The challenge with analyzing impressions is that it can be challenging to correlate them with an actual uptick in unit sales. However, since 2012, researchers have well-documented the positive effect of social media on sales efforts. So, although it's impossible to know the exact conversion rate of impressions to sales, we at least know there is a positive relationship between the two.

Develop a Robust Sales Strategy

A robust sales strategy outlines your sales goals, identifies your target market, and details the specific sales plan you'll use to reach potential customers. Here are four steps for developing one:

1. Understand your target market. Begin by identifying your target audience and performing market research to understand their needs, preferences, and purchasing habits.

2. Set clear goals. Define what you want to achieve in clear, measurable terms. For example, "This plan seeks to increase unit sales by 10 percent YOY."

3. Determine your tactics. Match your sales plan to your market research. Task your salespeople with determining which approaches, like direct selling or digital marketing, would best reinforce their sales efforts.

4. Train your sales team. Educate your salespeople to ensure they have the tools and knowledge to succeed in increasing sales revenue.

Case Study: Apple

The tech giant Apple understands its target market exceptionally well and has tailor-made its products to cater to their needs and preferences. Apple's clear goal of providing high-quality, innovative products to "change the world" fosters zealous customer loyalty.

People from all walks of life are willing to pay a premium for Apple products because of the company's sales tactics. Those tactics include a strong online presence, rigorous design trials, and high-budget launch events filled with emotional and compelling storytelling. As a result, Apple consistently reports high unit sales on almost all of its new products.

Train Your Sales Agents and Strengthen Your Sales Team

An educated sales professional is a force to be reckoned with in any competitive setting. Information is power, and a sales team that wields power with confidence and deliberate intention is more capable of driving sales.

Motivate your team by fostering a culture of perpetual learning and development. Training can cover all of the following and more:

• Product knowledge
• Sales techniques
• Business development
• Target audience personas
• Market research

Case Study:

Salesforce, a leading CRM platform, places significant emphasis on training its sales agents. The company offers extensive training programs covering various subjects, from general sales strategies to personalized techniques and practices. As a result, Salesforce's sales team is well-equipped to drive its own unit sales and those of the businesses that partner with it for training.

Offer Incentives to Improve Sales Performance

Incentives can take various forms, including customer discounts and commissions for salespeople. Offering time-sensitive special offers to both internal and external actors for taking a desired action can foster a sense of urgency, driving an increase in unit sales. These offers can be broken down into two categories:

1. Customer incentives. Offer discounts, deals, or loyalty rewards to attract new customers and encourage existing customers to purchase more of your products.

2. Sales team incentives. Offer commission, bonuses, or other rewards based on sales performance to motivate your sales team to sell more units or fetch higher prices.

Case Study: Zappos

Zappos is an online apparel retailer that offers an incredible 365-day return policy. This fosters a sense of confidence in potential customers and reduces the anxiety of buying clothes online. Customers can buy and see for themselves instead of worrying about whether the product will fit.

This policy operates under the time-tested sales belief that once the customer has the product in their hands or on their feet, they'll be more likely to keep it. As a result, unit sales are rarely depressed due to consumer hesitation.

Master the Art of Upselling to Increase Sales

Upselling is a sales technique that encourages customers to purchase a more expensive item, an upgrade, an add-on, etc. This results in a higher-price transaction and more units sold. But it's an art that can come across as tacky or reduce customer loyalty to your brand if done poorly. Here are a few tips to increase your ability to successfully upsell your products:

• Know your products. Understand the features, benefits, and price points of every product you offer, and you can more easily identify and facilitate upsell opportunities.
• Individualize customer needs. Personalize the sales process to each individual customer, recognize their needs, and suggest products that will genuinely add value to their lives.
• Know when to take no for an answer. Know that people will often say no at first. Urging them to change their mind once is acceptable if done politely, but pushing can make your customer uncomfortable. Uncomfortable customers rarely become return customers.

Case Study: McDonald's

A classic example of upselling is McDonald's famous phrase, "Do you want fries with that?" By adding this simple phrase to the end of every transaction, just before finalizing a customer's order, McDonald's successfully upsold millions of customers daily. This, in turn, led to significantly higher unit sales.

However, sales professionals will be quick to point out that the styling of this phrase is "easy to say no to." It doesn't hold up to scrutiny when selling goods at higher prices. Rephrase the question where "no" is the desired answer in those cases. For example, "Is now a bad time." Find ways to work this concept into the sales context, and you'll master the art of upselling in no time.

Identify and Address Customer Pain Points

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Listen to resolve, not respond. This tip applies more to your customer service team than your sales team. However, if you're operating a small business, chances are that those two teams are one and the same.

By listening to your customers and taking their complaints to heart, you can reevaluate business strategies to improve the overall customer experience. Offer solutions to their problems aimed at both meeting their immediate needs and also building trust and long-term brand loyalty. This can leave customers with a positive feeling about your brand, encouraging return business and preventing a fall-off in unit sales.

Case Study: Amazon

Amazon, a global e-commerce giant, is renowned for its ease of dealing with customer support. Any time an issue arises with a product, such as shipping the wrong item or the item not matching the vendor's description, Amazon issues a full refund with no other questions asked. The company further improves ease in the user experience by enabling customers to return defective products without any of the original packaging — UPS partners package it on their behalf, free of cost.

The convenience of correcting errant orders and the repeat validation provided by Amazon's customer support team encourage customers to place a second order and stay loyal to the brand long-term. This long-term customer loyalty further drives unit sales.

Understand Sales Velocity

Sales velocity is a measure of how quickly your business can drive leads into sales conversions. Simply put, it's the speed at which you can make money. To calculate sales velocity, collect the following data:

• Number of opportunities (A)
• The dollar value of your average deal size (B)
• Average conversion rate (C)
• Number of days in the average sales cycle (Days)

Once you have that information, use the following formula to calculate your sales velocity:

• (A x B x C) / Days = Sales Velocity
• (50 x $1,000 x 0.15) / 30 = $250 a day.

Case Study: HubSpot

HubSpot, a leader in inbound marketing and sales software as a service (SaaS), continually optimizes its sales process to improve sales velocity. The company leverages its own SaaS and CRM technology to identify opportunities, increase deal sizes, improve conversion rates, and shorten sales cycles. This internally focused approach empowers the company to increase both sales velocity and unit sales.

Implement Technology to Boost Sales Performance

Researching and staying abreast of emerging technologies can position your company to outlast the competition and survive economic disruption. For example, artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for decades. However, AI development just took the biggest leap in its history.

Models like Google's PaLM-2, Open AI's GPT-4, and Seamless.AI's proprietary software can substantially improve lead generation and market research processes. By researching whether an AI model or other technology matches your business context, you can gain access to advanced tools for boosting sales performance and streamlining the entire sales process.

Case Study: Google

Google exists for this exact reason. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Alta Vista was the go-to brand in web-based search. However, as Internet adoption rates increased and the market began to be flooded with technology, Alta Vista was slow to adapt. The startup Google, however, reacted with a sense of urgency and agility.

Google adopted new technologies and leveraged them for product development, sales, and more. They targeted top buyers in advertising and quickly increased unit sales related to paid search advertisements.

Customize Multiple Techniques to Increase Sales

Driving unit sales involves a comprehensive, multi-faceted approach. But no one approach is right for every business. To succeed, you must understand your customers, refine your sales strategy, motivate your sales team, and stay on top of technological advancements.

The most effective plan will always be the one that is tailored to fit your unique business needs and market conditions. Keep your salespeople learning, stay flexible, and remember to view any challenges as opportunities for growth and learning. Where you feel the most pressure is where you want to be to facilitate business growth. And, as always, if you need more help or information, you're welcome to contact me directly.