Grow Your Business By Increasing the Value of Each Sale - 29 Ideas to Spur Your Brain

By Keith Longmire
Posted Monday, January 31, 2005

There are 3 ways to grow any business:

- Get more customers

- Get more from each sale

- Sell to each customer more frequently.

That’s it - everything else boils down to some variation of these 3 activities.

Most owners and most managers want to grow their business. Most of them concentrate exclusively on getting more new customers.

Odd really.

There is lots of marketing research that is pretty consistent in pointing out that it costs somewhere between six and twelve times as much to get a new customer as it does to sell to an existing customer.

And once you have a customer it is generally pretty straightforward to get them to spend more each time they buy from you.

What’s that?

Your business is different. There’s no way to get customers to spend more.

Maybe so.

But I don’t think so.

Here are 29 ideas for you to stick in your brainstorming pot, stir for a while, and then see what comes out at the other end.

Price

1. Raise Your Prices

2. Sell Value, Not Price

Sales techniques

3. Up Sell

4. Down-Sell

5. Cross Sell

Add value

6. Back-End Sale

7. Extended Warranties

8. Service Contracts

9. Consult For Your Own Product

Make the sale easy

10. Terms And Financing

11. Set Up An Account

12. Try Before You Buy

13. Work With Pre-Payments

Give more

14. Develop an exclusive product or service

15. Expand Your Product Range

16. First Time Buyer Incentives

17. Concentrate On High Quality Prospects

18. Use Package Deals

19. Sell Bulk

20. Incentive Builders For Big Purchases

21. Offer Greater Variety

Sales force

22. Sales commission structures

23. Set Solid Sales Goals

24. NLP Techniques

25. Sales Scripts

26. Keep In Touch With Customers

Educate your customers

27. Demonstrations

28. Educate your customers - make sure they know your full product range

29. Audio And Visual Demonstrations

Still don’t think you can get more from each transaction with your customers?

We like a challenge.

About the Author
Keith Longmire is the owner of JKL Business Growth Solutions. JKL specialises in bringing main stream business improvement and marketing solutions into the reach of smaller businesses. The Business Growth Solutions web site is designed as a source of information for all matters to do with Small Business Development