Creating sales for your business

Your sales are the key to growing your revenues and profits. You need to find ways of catalysing those sales to grow your business further. This guide outlines some of the routes you can take.

• Developing loyal customers
• Cross-selling
• Up-selling
• Benefits

Developing loyal customers

Loyal customers generate repeat sales for your business which will prove less costly and less time-consuming than looking for and finding new customers. They do this because they are happy with your product/service, the way you do business and your past history together. You can use software to analyse your customer's needs. Work out what they might want and when. Remember to record this information accurately and you can work out when to contact your customers to get them to re-order or to buy more goods.

• Having strong relationships with your customers will mean they will buy more from you
• Analyse customer data to work out how to tailor your sales and marketing to them

Cross-selling

This is one sales tactic you can use with established customers. It means selling an additional product, usually related to the product or goods they've already bought or have come to you for. The customer will be more open to cross-selling if the product is something they actually need, and if they've already bought from you and who are in a buying mood. Don't be pushy - any cross-selling suggestions should be seen as recommendations rather than hard sales.

• Cross-selling is selling a buying customer an additional product
• Don't be pushy - offer the cross-sell as a recommendation

Up-selling

This means selling a better and usually higher value product to your customer after they've originally decided on buying a cheaper product. You need to up-sell the right thing. You can't sell the customer irrelevant products or services. This just alienates them. Again try not to be pushy - offer the up-sell as a recommendation. Narrowing the price margin between the cheaper and more expensive product can be a good way to encourage and up-sell.

• Up-selling is offering a better quality product than the one the customer has decided to buy
• Again, try to frame it as a recommendation rather than a sale
• Narrow differences between the two prices can be effective

The benefits of catalysing sales

By having multiple products per customer you will increase the customer's lifetime value and enjoy the increased profit each customer generates. Again, by concentrating on building loyalty and long-term relationships and selling the right products to customers at the right time you will attract more business and gain market share.

• Cross-selling and up-selling will help you increase profit levels per customer

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