How Do You Make More Sales?

Sounds simple enough, but what do you mean when you sale more sales?

Is it;

• More transactions?
• More customers?
• Increased average order volume (AOV)?
• More $$ in the sales row of your profit & loss statement?
• Because understanding what you mean by more sales will help you design the strategy to achieve it.

If you don’t want to, or don’t have the capacity to handle more clients/accounts, but you do want more sales (and profit), then doing tik toks to bring in new customers probably isn’t the way to go. You’d be better off working on increasing order volumes, or frequency of customer purchases. That is a very different set of actions required than trying to get new customers. That is why it’s important that you understand and define what you mean by more sales.

Well contrary to what a google search or a marketing agency will tell you, there’s only 2 avenues to make more sales;

• Volume
• Price

Volume

Volume can then be broken down into 2 categories, Existing customers and new customers. When most people think of growing sales, they will immediately think of ways to acquire new customers. But there are a range of tactics to grow your sales by focusing on the customers you already have.

Existing Customers

How can you get existing customers to buy more? Well it can only be one of these ways;

Increase their order size &/or the frequency that they buy from you

How can you get your customers to buy more? Well if you’re in B2B sales, start thinking how you can help your customer increase their sales. If they buy supplies from you, or you’re a and they increase the volume of their sales, then they will need more of what you sell.

If you roast coffee beans, how can you get the coffee shops who buy your beans to sell more coffee? Train the baristas? Get them the best machines, help them with advertising/marketing?

Cross/up sell other products or services

You want fries with that? Bundling products is a key component of sales growth. If you sell coffee, up sell the muffin. If you sell printers, cross sell the ink. If you sell business tax returns, cross sell bookkeeping.

If product/service A is heaps popular, work out what the natural add on for that is that your customers could benefit from and offer it to them. Every single customer. Every single time they buy product A. Make it part of the process. You’ll get way more No’s than Yes’s but the Yes’s you do get will grow sales.

New Product or service

If there’s something you should be offering that you don’t, or you’ve come up with this awesome idea that could really help your customers. Launch it to your existing customer base.

Acquire New Customers

The bread and butter of sales and marketing agencies worldwide. SEO, PPC, Billboards, TV, radio, sandwich boards, chicken suits et al, ad nauseum.

But you could also;

Buy/Merge a competitor or complimentary business

Like an accounting firm, buying another accounting firm, or buying a bookkeeping business, mortgage broking or financial planning business.

Voila. More sales. Instantly. Not without risk, sure. But what is in business?

Launch a new product/service at new customers

If you’ve got a thing that is great, put it in front of new customers and make them existing customers.

Price

Put your price up. Simples. But use with caution. Price increases have massive leverage and go straight to the Net profit line (assuming you don’t lose too many customers/sales).

Changing your price from $100 to $105 for the 20,000 widgets you sell a year, makes an extra $100,000 profit (before tax).

But you can’t keep raising prices indefinitely. There is a market cap to what you can charge (unless you have a monopoly). But prices must go up at times. Nothing costs the same as it did 10 years ago. Even in the last 12 months, things up have gone up 5- 7%. Why can’t your prices too?

So there you have it. The non-marketing guide to making more sales.