How good would it be to increase the ‘value’ of each customer that you sell to?

If you had an average of 100 customers per day and you were able to increase their value by just £10, that’s an additional £1000 through your till!
An easy way to increase a customers value is to ‘up sell’.

Up selling is only acceptable if it will benefit the customer. Up selling for the sake of increasing the tills weight will soon result in a reputation of poor service and hard nosed selling which is not welcomed by the customer.

Quite often a customer will visit a store with a preconceived idea of what they want. They could have based that information on their current model (if it’s a replacement), external information sources, or simply what they presume. Your customer may have plenty of information but is it up to date and accurate? Quite simply ‘we don’t know what we don’t know’. If your customer doesn’t know what is available to him, he can’t ask to buy it.

The secret of up selling is in creating a level of interest with your customer about a higher priced product. Your role is to introduce to them, ideas they may not have previously considered, ideas that will spark their interest because it could potentially:
a) save them time
b) save them money
c) deliver better results
d) appeal to their personal needs of wanting to own the latest technology or fashion.

To do this successfully you need to know what would ‘spark their interest’.
This can easily be identified by:
• asking relevant questions,
• putting suggestions to them
• picking up on the needs they have already revealed to you
• listening carefully for any piece of information, (no matter how small or large), information that will give you a better understanding of needs they may have in the future, or of a desire to own something if they knew of its existence. It could be new technology, a feature, a design, a product or even a colour.

We don’t know what we don’t know, and until someone enlightens us about what we don’t know, how can we know if we want it or not?

Example: a customer wants to buy a new lawn mower. His latest machine, now broke after 15 years, simply cut the grass and had a grass box for collecting the cuttings. When the salesperson approaches him, the customer is looking positively at a similar model. It is priced at £89 and he is happy to purchase it.

The salesperson can now do one of two things:

1) Process the transaction and thank the customer – great that was an easy sale!

2) Spend a few minutes in conversation with the customer and ask some questions that help him understand how the new mower will be used.

The conversation reveals to the salesperson that the customer wants two features to satisfy his two needs, an electric mower for ease of use, and a grass box to save time. Through the conversation he has discovered some additional ways he can help his customer. He takes the customer to an alternative model on display and explains:

1) “Considering the size of your garden, this model will save you time and effort. It is wider than the model priced at £89 so it won’t take you as long to cut your lawn”.

2) “As you can see it has grass combs that will cut close to the edge of your lawn. That will save you even more time, time you would normally spend trimming the edges”.

3) “A quick adjustment here offers you ten height settings, seven more than on the model at £89. We all know how quickly grass grows in the summer so if you can cut it lower with this facility you won’t have to cut it as often”.

4) “Just feel how lightweight this machine is. Can you imagine how much easier it will be to use?”

5) The salesperson has also acknowledged his customers age, approx. 66 years and concluded that he would enjoy owning a model that would save him time and be easier to use in years to come. So he explains this to the customer

Finally the salesperson says:
“You are getting all those benefits for just £30 more than the one you were looking at”.

His customer was unaware of what was now available on the market because he ‘didn’t know what he didn’t know’. He could easily and happily justify spending an additional £30 if it was going to make his life easier.

If up selling is executed correctly increased revenue and improved customer service go hand in hand.