Follow up
Are you wasting the opportunity of turning a prospect into a paying customer or client? For example, say in you’re in the service industry. What systems do you have in place to make sure you’re following up on leads that come your way? You can get so busy in the “doing” that this important step is left to chance. It’s like leaving money on the table for someone else to find. Put systems in place to make sure you are following up each lead in some way.
The saying “the fortune is in the follow up” is so true. This is something that can not only set you apart from your competitors (clients and customers are craving for this type of attention) but also continually feed clients through your marketing funnel.
Increase your prices
It seems quite obvious doesn’t it? But think of it this way, imagine you’re in retail and you have 1000 stock lines and you raise the price of each item by $1. Let’s say you sell on average 100 stock items a day. That would be an extra $100 per day, $700 per week or $36,400 per year just by raising your prices by $1 across all lines. Now just imagine if you sold more items than that, or raised it by $2 or $5 or $10. Now that’s what I call the power of numbers!
So what if you‘re in the service industry? Do you deliver services by hourly rate? How about changing the model so that your hourly rate is only known to you (and used to quote) and you provide proposals to clients with the total price, rather than listing out the hours and hourly rate? The potential benefit is that if you’re more efficient at delivering the service, you’re in effect increasing your hourly rate by working fewer hours than estimated. This of course can also work the other way. So it’s important to always review completed proposals to measure your estimated hours against actual hours.
Upselling
The name of the game in retail is to increase your average daily sale – the average $ amount that each person spends. So in retail the customer is at the counter purchasing a pair of shoes. How could you upsell that? Simple, a pair of socks, stockings etc, you get the drift. You can set up your point of sale system to prompt messages when you sell certain items that you deemed have an appropriate upsell. For example, a belt with jeans, a muffin with your coffee. Perhaps you stock small, medium and large sizes of products. Obviously the larger size is of higher value and should provide a higher margin to your bottom line. So create scripts for sales staff to make sure they try and upsell to the larger item.
Just think, if you could increase your average daily sale by just $2 and you average 100 transactions per day? That’s an extra $200 per day, $1400 per week or $72,800 per year for very little effort. So plug in your numbers and see what effect the power of numbers can have on your results.
What if you’re in the service industry? How can you effectively upsell? This is where analysis of your marketing funnel can reveal opportunities. Perhaps you have been working with clients for some time but have not yet developed the next phase of working with you. Maybe it could be progressing from a short term one off project into a longer term retainer like arrangement. You need to ensure that you have a clear path for your clients to progress towards, should they wish to continue working with you on a longer term basis. Or perhaps you can cross sell your client into other services your business provides. For example an accounting firm currently providing taxation services could cross sell clients into advisory services.
Package your products and services
If you can package up your products or services into packages and programs this can be a great way to increase your sales. For example you sell your services on an hourly basis and then you package your services together to create a 6 month program with certain steps to it. If a prospect can see greater value within a longer program and more certainty to what is being delivered, you can serve them for 6 months rather than scrambling to find hourly clients continually.
Products can often be packaged up to create another “whole” product as well. Think hampers for food and homewares, gift packs for special occasions. The beauty of gift packs is that it makes life simple for those purchasing – quick buying decisions. And you can potentially combine slower moving product lines with faster moving more popular product lines to get those slower moving items out the door!
Add a distribution channel
Maybe you’re in retail and you’re currently only selling to the end consumer. What about branching out and adding wholesaling to your distribution channel? You could then see your product in other retail stores gaining more exposure and selling more products. Tread carefully though, as retailers are looking for high margins when onselling products from other businesses. You need to make sure that your wholesale price for retailers is worth it.
Or maybe your business is online. Another distribution channel would be adding an affiliate program. This would allow others to promote and sell your products or programs for you and receive a commission for each sale.
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