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Don’t Keep Your Customers From Buying!

Guest post by: Kerri Salls

Article Overview: Customers buy more if given the chance – and buy more frequently too. Dynamic business growth can’t flow from a rigid linear strategy. You have to think logarithmically. Don’t keep your customers from buying.

Don’t Keep Your Customers From Buying!

Sounds simple. You might even react by telling me about all the selling approaches you do use, and the sales scripts you use or the up-sell strategies you have in place. Yet, the truth of this statement hasn’t changed for businesses for decades – probably longer. Most sole proprietors, entrepreneurs and solo professionals put limits on the amount of business that their customers want to do with them.

It sounds self-defeating and it is. Of course it doesn’t happen by design. But it might as well happen by design because the result is just as damaging. Countless profitable sales you could make, you don’t. Countless clients are denied the opportunity of receiving full, satisfying service. Countless opportunities to grow your business and increase your personal fulfillment get wasted.

As the owner of the business, who wants to maximize the bottom line, you don’t want to miss even one more opportunity to build the relationship with the clients you already have and do more business with them. Those clients are your greatest asset. They are also an asset you can leverage immediately, simply by creating more opportunities for them to buy from you and to buy more frequently.

In sales, you are always seeking new clients – but this is absolutely the most expensive way to grow your business. It takes the greatest investment of time, money and resources to draw them in. It does work and you need systems in place to keep this running as a well-oiled machine.

A second way to grow is to entice your current clients to buy more frequently from you. That could be more offerings they keep coming back for, or it could be to increase how often they buy the product or service they already enjoy or benefit from. So if you have a core service which clients all purchase, why not create a back-end product you can add on; or repackage your offering to keep them coming back more often – think hair dressers!

The latest trend in customer relation management software is not an off-the-shelf package you install in your computer but rather access to your data, secured and always accessible, at a third party site. For this security and accessibility from any internet connection, you pay a monthly fee. You will keep paying monthly because you value not just the CRM software to serve your clients and prospects, but the security and universal accessibility. As the CRM provider adds features and benefits, you will extend your monthly order to include those as well.

A third way to grow is to give current clients more opportunities to increase the size of the purchases they are already making. ‘Super-size it’ mentality. In retail, this is the premise for in-store specials like: buy one, get the second at half price. Or after trying one of your services, say reiki massage, offer to extend the benefits with another modality in the moment. Consultants can extend their offering with a package of services that they bundle together.

When a business settles into the habit of limiting sales – often unwittingly, it’s often because we think of marketing the same as sales. In sales, we see prospects move through the pipeline of the sales cycle. But to get them there, we can’t assume all our clients will fit perfectly into our familiar but narrow marketing tunnel. We need to broaden the end to create a marketing funnel to draw in more clients and prospects.

Customers buy more if given the chance – and buy more frequently too. Dynamic business growth can’t flow from a rigid linear strategy. You have to think logarithmically. Don’t keep your customers from buying.

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Article Tags: sales, sales script, selling approach, upsell strategy



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