Let's be honest: the 21st century has been a series of struggles – or at the least a rollercoaster ride – for many businesses. As we weather the economic fallout from coronavirus, it's even more important to fine tune your conversion rate and make each sale count. However, despite hard work and dedication, for many businesses the same objections and barriers come up time and again, with promising inbound leads falling by the wayside. Get better sales results from today by overcoming these essential barriers.

You may or may not have already heard of buyer personas - but what are they really, when you move past the jargon? Here's the lowdown on what exactly buyer personas are, and how they can help your business generate more leads, sales and revenue.

If you own a small or medium-sized enterprise (SME), you may still be handling sales yourself, particularly if you haven't been in business long. That means you'll almost certainly have run into ‘gatekeepers’. These are the people who protect key decision makers by deflecting your sales calls or emails, often front of house, reception, or customer service staff. So, how can you get past them so that you can seal the deal? Here are five tactics you can use.

If you own a small business or start-up company, you might not have a dedicated sales or marketing team in place. That means you'll need to drum up business yourself, potentially with the support of a marketing agency or business development partner. Working with a garden-variety agency may bring you increased web traffic or sales leads, but without in-depth sales knowledge, it can be tricky to deal with prospects' initial objections to your proposition. However, if you give up too soon, you could miss out on lucrative deals. Here's how to tackle four of the most common arguments that salespeople hear.

Not all customers are worth the same to your company long term. In order to get the most out of your business, you'll need to understand Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) and use it to your advantage as you shape your sales and marketing strategies.

Good sales performance is the lifeblood of businesses of any size. With the growing power and accessibility of marketing and sales automation platforms – HubSpot being the leading example – improving sales has become an increasingly data-driven process.

These affordably priced platforms have placed an advanced sales management toolkit at the disposal of even small businesses, enabling ambitious sales strategies without huge staff and operational expenses.

With travel restrictions and the banning of large public gatherings, 2020 has been a non-starter for the traditional face to face networking events on which so many businesses depend for sales. Conferences, trade shows, seminars and expos – from the international to the local scale – have been cancelled or postponed around the world.

Whenever the concept of mindset is addressed in the context of business and entrepreneurship, it refers to personal beliefs and how they influence one’s journey to success. Business leaders, SME owners, and decision makers with a growth mindset are more inclined towards putting efforts to achieve something, even when it is challenging.

People with a fixed or self-limiting mindset, on the other hand, are comfortable with their status quo. They believe that what they have now is enough for their business to succeed and that it is unnecessary to increase efforts in pursuing a goal. This mindset is often enough to limit your results from sales initiatives and prevent you from fulfilling your true potential as a business.

Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is what defines the uniqueness of your business in a competitive marketplace. In other words, it’s what distinguishes your business from competitors X, Y and Z, and is the reason for a prospect to choose your service over theirs.

From your USP flow all the core messages and value propositions you use to make sales. A lot rests on your USP, and it is essential to make it as strong, compelling and clear as possible, regardless of how crowded or niche your sector happens to be.

For a business starting out, the prospect of attracting the right type of customers, with the value you need to grow your enterprise, can be daunting. Fortunately, digital technology allows you to target very specific markets with valuable content and highly tailored marketing messages. You no longer have to rely on word of mouth referrals, cold calling or scattergun advertising.

Yet, simply reaching a market is not enough to turn leads into customers.