Let's explore some short-course techniques you can employ instantly to jump-start your business, or at least to get more business flowing into your enterprise.
If you're in the retail trade, get your salespeople on the phone to all of your active customers or clients, and extend to them a purchase option. Ask the customers to commit to a minimum amount of product that they are willing to say that they will buy for the rest of this year.
If they agree, offer them two options. Number one, if they're large enough, they can prepay the whole year's purchase and receive a substantial discount. Number two, if they are not willing to prepay, urge them to give you a target figure they think they will hit. You can give them a discount up front that is only taken away from them if they don't hit the purchase goal!
In other words, let's say I believe I am going to buy 100 widgets from you, and last year I may only have bought two. By offering me a volume discount, I will be motivated to lock in a better price and guarantee you a minimum amount of purchases.
The moral: By making this offering in retailing, you almost always increase the revenue per customer, the purchase frequency per customer or client, and the profit per customer and per transaction.
If you're a wholesaler, do something similar. Offer your customers a sales-assistance program. If they will buy from you, promise them that you will reinvest a portion of their purchase in cooperative marketing support.
You might give them sales assistance, you may give them sales letters you will pay to have mailed out. You might give them promotions you will create. You might give them sale incentives they can pass on to their customers.
The point is this: Asking a wholesaler to buy more of your products just to sit on their shelves does them no good. So say to a wholesaler, "I will create a strategy that will help you sell more goods. I will actually provide you with either the programming, the funding, the letters, the advertising copy, the sales scripts - whatever you need for your salespeople to do much more and make themselves and you a higher amount of money if you favor my business with the purchases."
Manufacturers are in position to go to a customer and suggest that if the customer will lock in an annual minimum-quantity order, the manufacturer will connect to an annual purchase rate. They can lock in purchases and thus are in a position that, if they buy enough goods, they'll lower their price and then can pass on some really profound savings to the customer.
And professional services? There is much you can do to jump-start your business. Most people don't realize it, but the greatest service any professional or service organization can render to a customer or client is to schedule annual or semi-annual or, more preferably, quarterly reviews where you examine the client or patient's present situation.
For example, if you were a financial planner and I was at a point in my life where my family and my assets were such that I needed to start protecting them in a more earnest way, you would be in an excellent position to recommend to me that I change my insurance coverage -- perhaps to umbrella liability.
You would also be in a position to suggest to me the mental strategy I need to adopt. You would be in a position to advise me on needed changes in my investment portfolio. So, if you are in services of a professional kind, invite your clients to sign on for a series of prepaid (or partially prepaid) quarterly revenues.
Let's move onto another interesting facet of selling -- the "upsell"...
A lot of you have written and asked me to help you incorporate "upselling" into your sales activities. So, let's get right to it. Here is an easy-to-adopt upselling scenario:
You are selling a service. You have persuaded the customer or client to say "yes." The agreement, the search, the purchase agreement is about to be signed. What do you do?
Well, first of all you recognize that you've already taken the client through the arduous and delicate process of developing trust in you. They now trust you in an advisory role. You are -- in their eyes -- an expert.
So you say to them: "Before we formalize the agreement, I'd like to make one more recommendation, if I may. I recommend you consider not just doing ________, but _________." (Here you are moving the customer from the existing service they were originally going to buy to a superior service.)
Then you say, "Here's why I recommend that," and then you go into a simple one- or two-sentence explanation of the additional value they would gain by upgrading the transaction. In other words, you talk about the superior results they'll see!
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