More sales for less effort

If you think of what you do as solving a problems for your customer, what other problems could you be solving for them? And what sort of impact could that have on your sales? You surely know by now that I’ll want to talk you through some figures! Let’s have a look, and I’ll use the same figures as my last blog. Your sale is £50 and your customers buy on average 4 times a year (but you’ve now increased this to 5!). However let’s just stick with 4 times just now. If there was something extra that your customers could buy at that point, and it might be an extra £5, that’s £20 per customer. You’ve got 500 customers so that an extra £10,000 in sales. That’s the equivalent of another 50 new customers.

Now I know it’s easy to come out with figures and I don’t really expect all your customers will buy more every time. But can you see how this is worth considering?

It could be that you offer different levels of service to different customers and that’s how you can increase the average spend. There is evidence to suggest that 10% of customers will always buy the most expensive option. If you don’t offer them alternatives you could be leaving a lot of money on the table. Or they may even go elsewhere for that premium service or product.

We’re all familiar with the upsell, for example:

MacDonalds – ‘Do you want fries with it?’

Restaurants – ‘Would you like a drink while you’re looking at the menu?’ ‘Would you like a dessert/coffee?’

Airport parking – ‘Do you want us to park your car for you?’

Hairdressers – ‘Would you like a treatment to keep your colour longer?’

There’s a whole load of others and I’m suggesting if you’re not doing it in your business then you are not solving all of your customers’ problems. Some of your customers are really short of time and would appreciate something to help with that. Some of your customers trust you and are happy to buy more things from you. Some of your customers like to have the best quality. So why not help them?

To be frank if you don’t help them they may think you just don’t care enough and go to your competitor anyway. And you don’t need to provide it all yourself. There may be a like minded business owner you can join up with and recommend (for commission or not) to your customers. They in turn may well return the compliment.

By thinking in a slightly different manner you might not need so many extra leads or new customers. It’ll cost you less to use your existing customer base, you can do it in less time and you can strengthen you customer relationships at the same time.

More Secrets to Increasing Sales

So how do you get existing customers to buy from you more often? I don’t know your specific circumstance so I’ve got to be pretty general here to try and cover as many bases as possible. But if you look at the maths (I’m pretty keen on this!) it could make a real difference to the sales and profits of your business.

Say you have a product/service you sell for £50 to your customers on average 4 times a year. What happens if you can get them to buy once more from you? That’s £50 more from each customer and you only need 4 of your already happy customers to buy once more from you to replace a new customer. If you have 500 customers then  that’s £25,000 in extra sales right there. Can you see why this could be really powerful?

So how can you go about this?

If you’re in retail and you sell to consumers there’s lot of things you can do and I’m sure you’re already doing some of them. For example if you have a seasonal sale and offer extra discounts to your loyal customers. This could be enough to encourage them to come back to you for some extra bits and pieces they wouldn’t normally have bought.And might just give you the opportunity to sell something else to them while they're there.

A general one we can all use is send a newsletter to keep them informed of what’s new (or the new lines you have) and how you can solve a particular problem they might be facing. You may be able to give them some tips that will generate some thoughts about how else they can use you.

You might even be in the type of business where you can give them a call when you know they may be running out of a particular product. Or you know they have a challenging situation you could help them with. This can be used by personal services too eg hairdressers, dentists, beauticians, gyms/trainers ('hello, haven’t seen you in a while').

None of this is rocket science it’s really just looking at ways we can help customers, because after all we’re here to solve their problems in some way or another.

Next time I want to look at increasing customer spend and how you can increase your sales by solving more of their problems (and perhaps ones they didn’t even know they had!)

Increasing sales using your price

In my last blog I spoke about increasing sales and all the elements that make this up. One of them is pricing and for most of us pricing is difficult. Do you use the following method to price? – more expensive than the cheapest competitor and less expensive than the dearest competitor.

Is that the way to do it? I don’t think so…. we rarely make buying decisions based just on price. If that's the case we wouldn’t buy pre-packaged lettuce (300% more expensive that washing it yourself!), we wouldn’t buy Coca Cola (Pepsi was the preferred option in taste tests!), we wouldn’t buy new cars (we all know 2^nd hand cars offer better value for money!).

So if you don’t buy on price why do you assume your customers buy only on price? I’m afraid it’s all in our mind, so we really need to expand our thinking on this one. After all if you put your prices up by 10% how much more profit would you have in your business? If your sales are £100,000 then that’s another £10,000 in profit. Now you may lose some customers but how many would you need to lose before you made no extra profit?

You would still be less busy for the same profit. What changes could that allow you to make in your business? What other opportunities could you take?

I’m not suggesting you just put your prices up, there are lots of different ways of doing this successfully and this blog is just too short to go into them. I do have free webinar you can listen to that takes you through how to do this. To register go to pricing webinar

Next blog I’ll reveal how getting your existing customers to do one thing could solve your sales problems for ever.