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Selling more to existing clients
If we say to an entrepreneur 'It's much easier to sell to an existing customer than to a new customer ", he often answers: "Yes, I know that: That’s obvious! ", but if we then ask him: "What's your plan to sell more to your existing clients?" it often gets very quiet! There simply is no plan!
The domain of deep-selling, cross-selling and up-selling is a nice opportunity to earn more money from existing clients. A brief explanation and some interesting examples direct from daily life:
My wife recently wanted to buy a new car and her choice fell on the Citroën C1, so she went to the Citroën dealer.
The salesman said hello and asked: "What can I do for you madam?"
My wife answered: "I would like to have a C1 please", after which the sales guy replied:
"Would you like one C1 or do you want two C1’s madam?"
"Two C1’s ," my wife asked, "why two?"
"Well, one for yourself and one for your husband?"
Strange story of course, this is not how cars are sold. Anyway, this salesman was deep-selling, he sold ‘more of the same’, which is often seen in companies with substantial startup costs in order to produce something. But once the machine is running, the extra costs of an additional batch is rather low. The seller could easily give away a small amount of the additional margin by proposing a larger number of products to be delivered.
Good example: print shops will almost certainly not only give you an offer for the quantity of printed products you asked for, they will also offer a larger quantity at an interesting extra price. We know companies that consequently deep-sell and by doing so have a sales increase of more than thirty percent!
Now what’s cross-selling? My wife enters the Citroen showroom again and asks for a C1.
The salesman replies: "Of course madam, do you want your C1 with air conditioning, radio-CD player, sunroof, metallic paint, alloy wheels?”
This salesman is cross-selling, he sells relevant accessories, which is very common, because in car sales profit is above all made not in selling cars but in selling the extras.
Finally, the concept of up-sell: my wife ordered a C1 again at the Citroën dealer. The salesman’s answer:
"Oh madam, I think you are much more a person for a C3”.
This guy sells a more expensive option: selling up.
There is another phenomena, in fact opposite to up-selling: Imagine your client finds your proposal far too expensive: you could offer a cheaper version, which is called down-selling.
Now there is always one of these three options that can be worked out in any kind of business. Sometimes two, occasionally even all three possibilities. By using one of these possibilities in your company, it is very well possible to substantially increase sales within your existing clientele, without having the need for any additional sales or marketing budget.
So be creative and make a plan!
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Diez iez Vietnam
This book is about the story of life of prof. Adrie van Gelderen. I met him on one of my PUM missions where he was a local representative of PUM. Adrie told me he had a manuscript of his story of life and asked me my opinion about publishing it. I promised to read it and give my comments. And indeed I did: I told him that his book would not be a profitable cash cow, however, publishing your own literary thoughts will give tremendous satisfaction, it's fun to do and it's not expensive at all.
Now Adrie was seriously ill at that time and unfortunately he passed away before we could take his book into production. So we, being Adrie's friends, decided to publish the book posthumously and donate all the refunds to his 'affiliate-foundation'.
'Diez iez Vietnam!' is written in English. A copy can be ordered by clicking the link.