3 Ways to Improve Your Sales

It’s Q4, and you know what that means – everyone’s checking to see if they’ll hit their sales goals for the year. And the clock is running out. If your figures need a bit of a boost before 2016 rolls around, there’s no better time than the present to get things moving.

The trick is to look to your existing customer base. In B2B, there are very few ways to quickly generate significant revenues among people who don’t know you already. But if you focus on the people who already buy from you, increasing sales is easier than you think.

 Here are three surefire ways to boost your sales in the next three months: 

 1. Educate existing customers about your full line of products and services.

I’m constantly amazed by how many companies have customers who just buy one product or service from them, even though they have multiple potential offerings for that customer.  If a lot of your customers only buy one thing from you, you have an incredible opportunity to generate sales of your existing products and services to those existing customers. 

To do this, you can run a marketing campaign once a week, bi-weekly or monthly to promote one service to your existing base. Combine that with a contest among your sales team to drive sales of a particular service or product on a semi-monthly or monthly basis. 

Keep in mind this should be about education, not brash promotion.  No one wants to be hard-sold on a professional service or business product.  But thousands of people have budget to use before the end of the year, and if your company can help them solve a problem that’s on their radar, they’ll be happy to spend that budget with a company they already trust – yours. 

2. BUNDLE YOUR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

One way to increase your share-of-wallet among existing customers is to bundle together products and services that typically work well together or are bought by other customers at the same time.  Which of your products are often needed together by other customers?  Just like a new phone often needs a charger, which of your services can be bundled?  It’s a great way to introduce new products to customers, or to grab more of their share of wallet and squeeze out competitors.

Think of this as similar to the Amazon ‘Other Customers Also Bought’ offer. You can structure it formally and offer an appealing price to existing customers to buy additional components when they’re placing an order, or you can keep it informal and mention the potential bundle to customers. Either way, it’s a great way to introduce products to a receptive market and increase your sales.

3. ACTIVATE INACTIVE CUSTOMERS

Get back on the radar of customers that you haven’t done any business within the last 12 – 24 months by doing an email campaign.  If you stick within the two-year limit, you’ll be CASL compliant so no worries there. Many customers may have simply not had a need in the last while and have forgotten about the great relationship they had with your business in the past. Or perhaps they’ve got budget they didn’t think they would have, and would benefit from making use of your services in this fiscal year rather than next year. If you did good work for them in the past, chances are they’ll want to buy from you again – you just need to be on their radar!

Your existing customers are the likeliest way to increase sales in the short term. But ironically, they’re also the most commonly missed opportunity. So why strive for other audiences and miss out on relatively easy revenues? If you want to maximize your sales THIS YEAR, talk to the people who already know and like you.