Three Ways to Improve Sales
Three Ways to Improve Sales
Hi Suraj is here. A lot of my clients want to know how to improve sales, how to increase the amount of money they’re making obviously. I routinely tell them there are only three ways, three big picture ways, to increase sales.
1. The first one is the most common which is more customers. How do I get more customers? People hire sales people to go out and generate more customers. They do web marketing, they do mailings, they advertise and so forth in hopes they can bring in more customers.
That happens to be the most difficult way to build your business because you’ve already got a group of customers that trust you and have a relationship with you. It is far easier to work with that existing group of customers to do two things; more transactions with those existing customers or larger transactions.
I want you to look at all three of these rather quickly. The reason getting more customers is more difficult than the other two is that people do business with people that they trust or that they have a relationship with.
These are people that don’t know you yet. They haven’t done business with you. We certainly need to go that route. We always need to be bringing in new customers, but we know this is the most costly and most difficult way to grow a business. That’s part of the pie but unfortunately for a lot of businesses it’s all of the pie.
2. I want you to think more broadly about how can I create more transactions with my existing customers? More transactions with my existing customers, how can I get them to buy more frequently from me or to buy additional types of product or services from me that they don’t already buy?
In order to do that, I’ve talked about it before. You need to understand your customers’ expectations, what their wants and needs are, what they’re looking for. They may be doing business with you and two or three of your competitors on different products or services when they could be getting them all from you but you haven’t communicated it. You haven’t sold yourself that way.
We’ll go into that in further depth in a future post but understand we need more transactions with those people who already trust us, who we already have a relationship with. That’s an easy way to increase your sales.
3. The third way larger transactions. A real simple example of that is go to a restaurant, a quality restaurant with a good waitstaff. What you’ll find is when you order something they’ll say would you also like this or would you like that? Would you like dessert? They bring out the dessert tray. They are trying to increase the size of the transaction with you because they know you’re already in there, you’re happy, you’re enjoying them. It’s a great time for them to see if they can up sell you to other things.
In your own business you may be operating with some customers or clients at this level when they could go up to this level and they might be very willing to go to this level and to take advantage of more products or services that you provide. They’re just not aware of them again.
Think about more transactions, larger transactions, with existing customers as being a very good tool in building your overall sales portfolio and it’s an easy one because again, your current customers already trust you.
