The shortest path to more sales is already sitting dormant in your business right now.
Typically when we think about growing our sales, we put on our marketing hats on and think of all those prospects out there who are currently not buying from us. We think about all the marketing channels, advertising, social media, flyers and mailers and phone calls. And while some of these may be relevant, they are rarely the shortest path.
You already have people buying from you, who trust you and are happy with your business. Or at least I hope you do. How can you leverage this further? Here are three keys ways:
- Referrals – before you spend any money on marketing for new customers, evaluate how well you are doing at servicing the heck out of your existing customers. If you are doing an outstanding job and they love you, you are well within your rights to ask for a referral. Make the ask appropriate for the relationship and make it easy for them to give. Be specific and grateful. If people ever feel pressured to give a referral, it will generally leave a bad taste. Be tactful and most important – make sure you are worthy!
- Testimonials – as per the above point, when your customers love your business, capture that in the form of a testimonial. Many testimonials provide marketing leverage and it also solidify for your customer, how they feel about your business. There is something about committing to a written statement that makes a feeling real. Following up with a referral request after a testimonial is given can work well.
- Add on sales – What else do they need? If you are in tune with your customers needs, odds are there are other things they need that you could be helping them with. This may be a natural extension of your existing offerings or it could be something outside your current scope of expertise. If you can offer the service directly, great. And if not then you can partner with someone who can. An example of this was a client of ours who did waterproofing. He’d had a couple of people ask him if he could recommend a window supplier. So he starting asking any customers who had old windows if they had thought about replacing them. If they said yes, he referred his ‘partner’ business to come and quote. Once the sales was made, our client received a commission on the sale.
Thinking time.
Think about this … if you and your team made a habit of looking for these three opportunities in your existing customer base, what could be possible? I’m not saying you should never pay for advertising but I believe if you can’t get these three working for you first, there may be a problem in your business model.
