Imagine spending thousands of dollars on web design, bells, whistles, a flash intro, and an array of colors. Firstly, this is a big waste of time, money, and effort. Also, this is like building a gaudy and non-functional house without a foundation. Your web site is a key sales tool. Fortunately, web sites do not have to be pretty in order to be effective.

In the above-mentioned case, no forethought is given to the first step in building a web site. The first and most important part of web site construction is your cover page, sales process, and the least expensive ways to send targeted traffic to your web site.

Unless your web site is just a hobby, it should function as an automated 24-hour sales person, seven days per week. Your Internet sales letter is much more than a business card or company brochure. A properly constructed sales letter is a separate entity and can possibly close sales by itself.

When you have an idea about a great Internet product or service, have researched the demand, have chosen the best URL, and developed an outline of your proposed site – your next step should be to develop an award-winning sales letter. This proposed sales letter should be packed with unique content that drives visitors to you and captures their interest.

Your sales letter should thoroughly describe the benefits of your product or service. At the same time, your product or service should solve a problem that your potential clients have encountered. Therefore, any successful sales letter will have to fulfill a genuine need.

The right sales letter should develop trust from the very start and tell an interesting story along the way. This is not a guarantee of an instant sale, but the start of a relationship – built on credibility and trust. Your prospects visit your site because your product or service has sparked an interest.

Prospects visit your site for a multitude of reasons – but do you know why? Do you know the top reasons why your existing customers choose you, over your competition? This knowledge is essential when constructing a sales letter for your web site.

Lastly, when deciding how to construct your sales letter, you have many choices, but choose wisely and research your choices. If you decide to hire a sales copy writer, make sure his or her previous works have produced results or are persuasive in content. If you decide to purchase the least expensive writer available, do not expect good results. When seeking out a sales copy writer, you will get what you pay for.

Copyright 2006 Paul Jerard / Aura Publications

How to increase sales volume is something that just about every business owner, sales manager, and sales professional cares deeply about. And while it might seem that sometimes you have to be more lucky than good for everything to work, the reality is that there are clear things that can be done to improve sales volume.

Clearly Identify the Target Prospect

One step that often does not get enough attention in developing a sales strategy or even during execution is spending a decent amount of time on identifying what your target and ideal prospect look like. While you can likely sell your products to a large audience and many different types of prospects, in order to get your sales strategy and execution in hyper-drive, stop to think about the prospects that fit best and then have a laser focus on that segment.

When trying to identify the ideal prospect to go after, consider characteristics like industry, size, geography, title, attitude, income, current processes and systems, etc. Once have these characteristics mapped out, try to maximize your time with prospects that match up well with these.

Increase Interactions with Prospects

One of the most important ways to improve how to increase sales volume is to increase interactions and communications with prospects. At the end of the day, you can have the best product at the best price and if the prospects do not know about you, you cannot expect any revenue to come from them.

Increasing interactions with prospects can be driven by your sales and marketing strategies. From the sales perspective, proactive tactics like cold calling and professional networking are effective strategies to increase interactions and scheduling appointments with prospects. On the marketing side, tactics like search engine optimization and use of social media can increase the inbound flow of leads and help to impact how to increase sales volume.

Effectively Qualify Prospects

Time is one of your most valuable resources and you must protect this resource by only spending time with prospects that have a high probability of purchasing when working on how to increase sales volume. Just as prospects will be looking at you to determine how good you fit with them, you should spend time qualifying them to see how well they fit with you.

When working to qualify prospects, ask them questions about their needs, their ability to purchase, and their decision making authority to measure how much of a probability exists that they are going to purchase from you. If their questions are not what you want to hear, you may need to either move on or make the decision to not spend a tremendous amount of time trying sell to them.

Find Pain

At then end of the day, prospects mainly make changes and purchases to resolve a pain. If there is no pain, there is not a great need to change and this can make selling to them difficult. You still can sell to a prospect that does not have pain but these are the types of prospect that can stand to sit on the fence and disappear when it is time to pull the trigger.

To improve revenue, focus on trying to find pain that the prospect is experiencing in the areas where your products and services impact and focus on this throughout the sales cycle. If there is no pain, there may be a decision to move on to improve how to increase sales volume.