UpSelling Your Customers
Upselling 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 then continually sell, sell and sell. There’s always one more thing to sell.
One of the major mistakes we 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 than thinking that way 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 an upsell and continue creating upsells as a never-ending logical step in the launching of an effective marketing mission.
If you say, “I don’t have any product or service to sell as an upsell.” My answer to that is, develop one. Even if you don’t produce the product or service and someone else does that someone else will gladly pay you for allowing them to get to your client base so they can upsell your customer.
There’s always something else to sell to your customers. The practical implications to upselling will most likely result in forming joint venture relationships that we talked about.
Business today operates differently than it ever has. Another good example can be seen in the mail-order flower business. 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 worked literally years on an idea for flower delivery up to 9 days fresher, created a direct-fromthe-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 catalog company, Federal Express, and several independent flower growers throughout the United States. It’s a business of joint ventures. Even though this guy didn’t actually have a product or service, he created one.
There are always opportunities. Business in the new millennium will continue to develop along these lines.