I don’t know which activity has more possible solutions available, those promising miracle cures to lose weight or miracle cures to increase business sales. Now I don’t promise any expertise on weight loss, but I did learn a long time ago that everything you do in business to increase sales must fall into one of three Strategic categories:
1 – Sell your current customer more of the same product
2 – Sell your current customer a new and different product
3 – Find a new customer to buy your product(s)
That’s it, everything about growing sales has to fit into one of those three categories, full stop. It is difficult for most companies to do an outstanding job at more than one or two of them at the same time – doing all three requires an almost impossible split focus. There are a tremendous number of tactics for each, but before starting out, I like to break down my goal into the simplest possible terms. In my experience, the world divides into two types of people, complicators and simplifiers. If you have not guessed by now, I fall in the latter camp. Projects have a way of complicating themselves from the start, no need to complicate things more before you begin. I like to have a clear a statement of the task before I start, and then refer back to it frequently to get the right things done with the best results.
1. Sell your current customer more of the same product.
For sure this is the simplest of the three. You are already did it, so just do it more and/or better. Tactics range from volume discounts and shorter shelf life to increasing volume requirements via quantity and frequency. Then there is expanding use occasions and purposes (think duct tape, yellow sticky notes and Windex as universally used in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”) For the sake of simplicity (I like simple) I include premium pricing here too. You might be limited to selling the same amount, but no need to let that hold your business growth back, there are numerous ways to sell the same product for more money, which can under the best circumstances increase value to both your business and customers. If you think about it, all customer retention activity fits here too. They buy your product today; you retain them by having them buy it again tomorrow.
2. Sell your current customer a new and different product.
For nearly all businesses, this is more difficult than selling clients the same old product. After all, it means coming up with a new product, but you do have a relationship with the customer already, so it is generally easier than starting from scratch with a prospect where there is no relationship. Once again, the ways to do this and the degree of linkage to your current product are limited only by your imagination. There are hundreds of existing solutions in other categories from tightly linked line extensions, service support contracts, bundling discounts (I should not have started this list, it never stops…) to completely new lines of business including connecting new parties to your customer and actually selling access. Again, done right, it creates more value for both you and your customer.
3. Find a new customer to buy your product(s).
Frequently (but not always), the most expensive and risky of the three, this involves either finding non-users of your business sector and converting them to users, or enticing existing users away from your competition. Of course, prospecting outside the business sector is expensive and when taking customers from a competitor, you can expect to cause a competitive reaction that will impact activities with your own existing customers.
All businesses engage in all three strategies to grow sales, but less often measure and evaluate the success and costs associated with each. I am pretty ruthless in working with both my sales and finance staff to understand the true cost of growing sales by whatever tactic across all three strategies.
In the practice of growing sales, as we find ourselves bogged down executing sales programs that seem to be complicating themselves at an exponential rate. I find it really helpful to review the original objective, and ask how many of the complications are really required to meet the goal. The answer is usually much fewer than we are dealing with, so I start cutting back to minimum necessities. I encourage all my staff to evaluate their sales growth tasks in the same straightforward fashion. It helps a lot when we all see the same task/goal and share the same simple terminology.
