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Friday, October 23, 2009

How to increase your sales rate

Are you struggling to get clients for your business? Or have you ever wonder why your clients prefer your competitors even though you have a quality product? Salesmanship is an essential skill that every business should have. The better their sales skills, the more profits they will likely to have.

Always be honest and ethical. You should never ever lie to your customers. If one of your customers finds out that you are dishonest, they can tell many other people about you. However, if the find that you are honest with them, they can tell other people how good of a person to do business with.

Never lose contact with your customer. If you get a lot of customer that loves your doing business with you, always keep in contact with them. You can do this by sending a birthday or Christmas card to them every year. Let them know that your business still exists. Customers are real people and they sometimes forget. Just give them a quick reminder to know that you care for them and you still in business.

Always give value to your customer. Don't try to extract as much money from them. Instead, your products or services should give tremendous value to your customer. If you give more value, the customer can't help themselves and keep buying your products. Customers can tell that they are being used straightaway.

If you are in this situation then a good first step is to check the market to see what your competitors are offering. You may find that if your client could go someone else but they would be unlikely to get the same level of service. Alternatively, you may find that you are about the same but that does not mean that you cannot still increase rates provided you have something additional to offer. Ideally something that does not cost you a lot of money but is valuable to your client and worth paying extra for.

The technique I use with clients makes it much easier to negotiate changes is rates. I call the technique 'Terracing' and it involves creating multiple service levels.

For example, I was working with an adviser who was attracting lots of clients based on low rates but frustrated that he was not making enough money from it. His service level was much higher than it needed to be, yet he was uncomfortable with charging more or taking away some of the services.

One service that he was providing was traveling to see clients rather than them having to come to see him. During the traveling time he was stuck in the car and not earning. He did not charge for traveling time. We worked out some service packages and gave them each a name, list of contents and price. There was a service package that had the current pricing but excluded some things like traveling which went into a higher level package with a higher price.

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