Struggling to meet your quota as a salesperson? Or maybe you’re a small business owner, just simply looking for easy ways to increase your revenue. Whatever the case may be, stick with me until the end of this article because I’m about to go over five simple ways that you can increase your sales starting today.
Be sure to stick until the end, because I’m going to tell you the easiest way that I’ve been able to bring in several hundred thousand dollars more in additional revenue.
Method 1: Bundle your products
The first easy way to increase our sales is to bundle our products. If you’re ever wondering why cable companies did so well before Netflix came along, it was because they were bundling channels together. You can pretty much bundle anything. In fact, companies do this all the time. When you go to McDonald’s and you get a happy meal, that’s an example of a bundled product. If you want an easy way to increase your sales, think about how you can bundle your products. If you offer things like services, this might come in the form of offering more sessions upfront and locking that revenue in now, as opposed to later on.
So in other words, you can give your clients a potential discount for ordering 10 sessions with you, as opposed to just the upcoming one. Or if you offer a product, it might come in the form of adding a professional development or training into your client’s contract. Anything that you can do that can provide additional value to your customer than what value you’re currently providing to them is something that can potentially be added to your bundle.
Method 2: Introduce scarcity
The second main way that we can increase our sales is by introducing scarcity. If there’s one big takeaway from Robert Cialdini’s book Influence is that human nature is compelled to take action more frequently when we feel like something is super rare or it’s a scarce event. Just look for example, at the global situation, when things were closing down for the first time you would go to the grocery store and you see that there was little to no meat left, there was no toilet paper or so pre-fills.
And so naturally, if you were that person in the grocery store and you saw that there was only one or two soap refills left, you would be the first one to grab both of those if you could. The same thing applies in sales. When we feel like there is a limited opportunity for us, then we are more compelled to take action on it than to delay that buying opportunity to a later point in time.
Now you want to tell a fine line here. Personally, I hate the online marketers that add those countdown timers that are complete bunk on their sites for their landing pages, for their courses, in which they’re saying that there’s only 15 minutes left and then you refresh the page and it starts all back over again.
However, there are simple things you can do to introduce scarcity into your sales conversations just based off of the particular time in the month it is. For example, if it’s the end of the month, you might want to look at the middle to the end of your pipeline and then send your prospects a potential message along the lines of, “Hey, Mr. or Mrs. Prospect, it’s the end of the month and I just want to let you know that my manager is letting me choose a few key people that I feel like could really benefit from our product or service if you implemented them this month, as opposed to next month. To make that decision easier for them, my manager is letting me choose three people to get a discount, as long as they sign their contract by Friday. Do you think that would be something that could interest you?”
By doing this, we’re introducing a trigger point in which there is going to be a decision made by our prospect that might not have otherwise been made before. To do this, you don’t even have to necessarily mention a discount or a promotion. Instead, you could just mention that, you know, you’re starting to see a lot of client uptake and you want to make sure that they get the same care and attention that the other clients that have joined you are getting today.
Method 3: Stay consistent with giving value first.
The third method to increase your sales is to stay consistent with giving value first. What I mean by that is a common mistake that salespeople often make is making their ask way too soon. In other words, they ask for the sale before they’ve actually given their prospects enough value for their prospect to feel like they’re ready to make a buying decision. An easy way to remember, to give more is to remember, to give 90% of the time and then ask 10% of the time.
By doing so you’ll make sure that by the time that you’ve gone through 15 or 20 correspondences with your prospect, your prospect is going to feel almost indebted to you because of all the freebies, case studies, resources and questions that you’ve answered for them and time that you’ve also dedicated to their particular discovery of your product or service.
Make sure you have a consistent cadence down as to when you’re following up with your prospects and adding more and more value. Do me a favor and don’t fall into the trap of what a lot of salespeople do, which is simply following up on a prior meeting without adding any additional new insight into the conversation.
Being annoying does not had value. So sending an email along the lines of just following up with you is not something that you want to do.
Method 4: Introduce multi-year deals.
The benefit of a multi-year deal is obvious. If you are locking them in for a longer service period, they will have more time to realize the value of your company’s product or service. For you it also means that you’re going to have a longer period of time to actually build a relationship that means something for you and your customer. If you don’t already offer multi-year deals, think about how you might introduce this into your business.
From my experiences, a customer that locks into a multi-year deal is more likely to try with you through the years and actually realizing the value exchange that your company provides than a customer that’s just on a one-year contract. The reason why is because the customer in most cases is going to already have paid for the bulk of the contract, if not the entire contract in the first year.
So as a result, they don’t want to feel like they’re wasting money and they want to give you an honest shot. To sell more multi-year deals, you typically have to compromise something in order to get a customer interested in signing in long-term.
Two simple ways that people typically do this is by offering a small discount for each year that they tack onto their multi-year deal. Or to simply offer a lock in pricing structure in which the customer knows not to expect any increases in pricing for the foreseeable future.
Method 5: Ask your existing customers.
This is by far my number one way to increase sales easily. And the reason why is because it is far easier to sell an existing customer on your product or service than it is to sell a new customer. By that point in time, you’ve already built up some trust and hopefully given a ton of value in terms of what your company is providing for your customer.
To do this, it’s super simple. All you need to do is reach out to your existing customers and schedule a check in call. From here, you can assess their needs once more. It’s going to be very similar to the first time that you sold them. Except the only difference is that this time you are an established vendor with them. So as a result, they’re going to be more compelled to listen to potential offers that you have for them, that they might not necessarily have been open to the first time that you are selling them.
I recommend simply pulling a list of your 20% most active or most loyal customers and scheduling check ins with them. Naturally from the conversations that you’ll have with them, there will be opportunities for you to introduce more products or services that you currently aren’t actually giving to them.
Big takeaways
There are two things I want you to remember from this article:
- The first one is that creativity is at the root of increasing sales. If you’re in a rut, most often than not it’s because you’re continuing to do the same sales actions that aren’t working for you. So if they’re not getting your results, you can’t expect that there’s going to be a different outcome the hundredth and first time that you do that.
- The second thing that I want you to remember is that it is always easier to sell an existing customer on something than it is to find a new customer. So, identify opportunities that you can give additional value to your existing customers. And that can be a super low lift way that you can increase your sales by 20 to 40%.
If you found this article helpful, be sure to check out my YouTube channel to get new videos every single week I’ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Feel free to also share this with anybody that you know, might benefit from learning about these five simple methods.