As a mature business you may be less interested in chasing new customers and more interested in earning additional money from your existing ones. It’s certainly easier to upsell extra products or services to your current customer base than to find new shoppers.
Selling more to customers is a popular strategy because it costs less than selling to new customers. Your current customers:
Consider these tips to increase your revenue from existing customers.
Conduct informal research on your current customer base, with the intention of finding out what they’re disappointed they can’t purchase from your business. Engage with your customers through social media channels to find out what they want.
Ideally, you want to be selling the right products or services to the right people. By passively enquiring, you should get some ideas on how you can sell more to your existing customers.
Pay attention to what else your customers need and give it to them. For example, a successful automotive repair shop that’s particularly busy each autumn and spring due to drivers requesting installation and then removal of their winter tires, could be introduced a new service – onsite tire storage.
By effectively charging rent for hundreds of tires sitting on shelves, passive income is created from this new service.
Transaction-focused managers fuss over profits earned in each deal, while relationship-focused managers think about the lifetime net value of each customer. Plenty of opportunities open up when you plan to sell to customers for 10, 20 or 30 years instead of only once.
Remind your customers regularly about everything else you do.
Often, as a supplier-customer relationship matures, the customer develops a narrow view of what that supplier does because that’s all the customer has ever purchased from the supplier.
Schedule a ‘show and tell’ session to enlighten your best customers about products or services they aren’t buying from your business – yet.
You may feel comfortable enough with your established customer to try a performance-based compensation arrangement. Rather than charging your usual flat-fee, you may determine there’s more money to be made by sharing the end revenue with your customer – putting some ‘skin in the game.’
For example, a marketing firm may believe so strongly in its recommendations that it strikes a deal with its client to be paid a percentage of the financial gains achieved by implementing that advice.
By all means, continue to bring in fresh customers too. But consider focusing on doing more business with existing customers so you can take advantage of your well-earned reputation and relationships.