SYNOPSIS IN POINT FORM
• Upselling – increasing the value of a sale
• The Nibble – adding on a small extra purchase at the end
• Various Options – give different priced options to choose from
• Bundles – create combined packages to increase the price
• Cross Sell – offer other products and services
• Consumables – include products and services which need to be repeatedly purchased
• Subscriptions – tie down clients to a regular purchase scheme
• Loyalty – create loyalty schemes
• Incentives – devise sales incentive schemes
• Referral – reward client referral
FULL ARTICLE
We accord a lot of effort to the aesthetics of our business establishments, to the selection and training of our staff, to customer care, to the quality of our marketing material and campaigns and to the professionalism of our entire operation. And ultimately we do all this for one main reason – to increase our sales.
Ironically however, in many cases we totally ignore the most straightforward and effective means of increasing our sales – that of employing better strategies and techniques in the sales processes themselves.
Here are ten easy ways of easily and effectively increasing your sales, which you may try applying to the sale of your products and services.
UPSELLING
Fast food establishments have long mastered this technique, epitomised by the famous phrase ‘would you like fries with that’. Upselling may be practiced in most business scenarios, whereby the customer only intended on purchasing certain predetermined items, however based on your suggestion, they were convinced to purchase more. There are different ways of planning this procedure. One of the most obvious is to establish what most customers purchase from you and then which of your other products may be easily and somewhat logically matched up with them. Alternatively just try to offer a higher and more costly option to that initially selected by the client, especially if you offer different sales levels of products.
THE NIBBLE
The nibble differs from upselling, in that while upselling is usually part and parcel of the overall discussion and main selling process, the nibble comes after, at the very end and seemingly after all sales decisions have been made. So after you have hopefully succeeded in upselling and find it hard to try to up the sale yet again there and then, let the client think that the sale is now closed. As you proceed to conclude the last formalities, just craftily slip in a small additional item which you present as something the client simply cannot refuse. Imagine purchasing a nice array of cakes, paying up at the cashpoint and being told that they are short of change, so would you be fine with taking some sweets instead of the loose change.
VARIOUS OPTIONS
Giving differently priced options is one of the most established sales techniques there is. Our mind usually works on a binary system of option A or option B. If you don’t give any options, then the client will automatically consider the two options of yes or no. This is obviously risky and what you really want to do is to shift their options to small sale or medium sale, or ideally to medium sale or big sale. By giving such options most people will focus on the two presented and often forget that there is the ‘no’ option. A common trick is to offer a very high option and a much more modest one, simply to portray the lower one as excellent value in comparison.
To be continued…