The Edge Marketing

Up selling your customers is simply providing the next logical solution to your customer's next logical need. It's your job to always create that next logical need and continually sell and sell. There's always one more thing to sell.

One of the major mistakes I find in dealing with small businesses is that they believe once their business has provided their product to the customer, that's the end of the process. There's nothing that can be more wrong with your business.

Every sale needs another sale because every need that's satisfied will create still another need sometime in the future. The conclusion that you should draw is that you must create the up sell and continue creating up sells as a never ending logical step in the launching of an effective marketing mission.

You might say, I don't have any product or service to sell as an up sell. My answer to that is, develop one.

Even if you don't produce the product or service, someone else does and that someone else gladly will pay you for allowing them to get at your client base so they can up sell your customers. There's always something else to sell them.

The practical implications to up selling will most likely result in forming joint venture relationships. Businesses today operate differently than it ever has.

Another good example can be seen in the mail order flowers. On the average, there's actually 6-10 days from the cutting of a flower before a customer receives it and puts it in a vase in their home, whether as a gift or simply to brighten up their home. The lag time is caused by the traditional distribution system of wholesalers distributors and retailers. A real entrepreneur working literally years on an idea for flower delivery up to 9 days, created a direct from the grower to the customer via Federal Express. Today that generates $10,000,000 in sales. What was the entrepreneur's product? It was an idea worth $10,000,000.

That business is merely a series of relationships between a catalogue company, Federal Express, and several independent flower growers throughout the United Slates. It's a business of joint ventures. Even though this guy didn't actually have the product or service, he created one.

This leads to find Your Business Within Your Business. A real powerful concept is to challenge yourself, your clients, vendors and employees to constantly search for new businesses within your business.

There are an unlimited number of offshoot businesses you can create. You could have an offshoot of consulting to those people that you sell to. You could then communicate and market and also do seminars and workshops.

For car dealers, they would provide extended warranties and insurance to new car owners. For a contractor, whether it's heating and cooling, pools, pest control or whatever, they can also provide annual service contracts.

An example would also be a pool contractor for instance might use up selling through the offering of an annual service contract to clean and service a pool four times a year. This can dramatically improve his bottom line. In fact, this can actually double the value of the customers by added income of 40% to you while they sign an annual contract.

Let's say the service call for a pest control or a pool service call is $100 and there are 100 customers per year. There's a gross of $10,000, which is $100 per customer. The Up sell strategy is an annual contract where you're going to visit four times a year. The cost for each visit to the customer is $100, so the total cost at this point is $400 (before giving a discount).

If they buy today, you give them a discount of $150, of which $250 is the cost to the customer. If you close just 40% of these people, your new revenue is $10,000. 40% of 100 is 40 people times $250 which is the cost of the annual contract.

So, the new value of these 100 customers is $20,000 $10,000 for the service call ($100 x 100 customers) and another $10,000 for the 40 people who paid $250 for the annual contract. The value per customer is now $200. You made $20,000. You still have the same 100 customers. They're now worth $200. That's double the value.

What service can you up sell to your clients? Virtually every business can add a newsletter or an extra month of a diet plan for half the original price. Maybe a consulting service could be provided. The possibilities are endless. Let your creative mind work for your business instead of limiting to just one product or service.

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How to Create an Up selling Advantage for your Business By Abe Cherian Copyright © 2005

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