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How to sell more to current customers

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As a mature business you may be less interested in chasing new customers and more interested in earning additional money from your existing ones.

Selling more to customers is a popular strategy because it costs less than selling to new customers. Your current customers already trust you, are comfortable doing business with you, have invested in systems or paperwork to transact business with you and, like you, may favour existing relationships over riskier new ones.

Consider these tips to increase your revenue from existing customers.

Upsell
A friend of mine owns a successful automotive repair shop with a stellar reputation for honest, fast and expert repairs. The garage is especially busy each autumn and spring as drivers request installation and then removal of their winter tires. After doing a bit of customer research, my friend introduced a new service to these customers: onsite tire storage.

He tells me he really likes the passive income from this new service. He’s simply charging rent for hundreds of tires sitting on shelves. And, because he’s hosting the tires, he’s pretty sure those tire owners will ask him to install their wheels next season.

Pay attention to what else your customers need and give it to them.

Focus on lifetime relationship
Transaction-focused managers fuss over profits earned in each deal, while relationship-focused managers think about the lifetime net value of each customer. Plenty of opportunities open up when we plan to sell to customers for 10, 20 or 30 years instead of once.

Canadian menswear retailer Harry Rosen wants customers to buy many suits over their lifetime. To do that they don’t nickel and dime customers for small services, opting instead to bring customers back into stores again and again by offering free lifetime alterations to any suit purchased in any Harry Rosen store.

Show-and-tell
Remind your customers regularly about everything else you do.

Often, as a supplier-customer relationship matures, the customer develops a narrow view of what that supplier does because, well, that’s all the customer has ever purchased from the supplier.

“Your design agency does printing? I didn’t know that. Please supply a quote.”

Schedule a show-and-tell session to enlighten your best customers about products or services they aren’t buying from your business – yet.

Make money when they do
You may feel comfortable enough with your established customer to try a performance-based compensation arrangement. Rather than charging your usual flat-fee, you may determine there’s more money to be made by sharing the end revenue with your customer – putting some “skin in the game.”

For example, a marketing firm may believe so strongly in its recommendations that it strikes a deal with its client to be paid a percentage of the financial gains realized by implementing that advice.

By all means, continue to bring in fresh customers, too. But consider focusing on doing more business with existing customers so that you may take advantage of your well-earned reputation and relationships.

For more information, watch the short video Four Ways to Grow Your Business.

Are you selling more to existing customers? Got a question on this subject? Please add a comment below.

By Roger Pierce


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