Ask the right questions

Increasing your prices is one very effective way of adding profit straight to your bottom line, each increased price sale is making a bigger contribution to your overhead and your profit. But how about other ways to improve your bottom line?


Staying for the moment with the sales process, there's two other ways to add profit. The first, and most obvious, is to sell to more customers, but of the three that's probably the hardest to achieve. Every business absolutely has to have an effective marketing plan, otherwise it can never grow to it's full potential. Yet the vast majority of small businesses we see do little if any structured marketing. You can have the best product in the world at an incredible price, but if no one knows about it, you're not going to sell much. We'll be coming back to this, in depth, in later blogs.


However, consider this, aren't the easiest people to sell to your existing customers? The relationship's already there, they know you and are hopefully comfortable doing business with you. I went into my local hardware store the other week to buy a new torch having dropped the old one in a puddle. I chose the torch, went to pay, and the owner immediately said, "do you need some batteries for that, Steve?" What do you think I did? Of course I bought the batteries, increased the value of the sale, and the contribution to his profit. It was so easy for him to ask that very natural question, but it had a big impact on the profit in that sale


MacDonald's always ask "do you want fries with that", don't they? "Do you want to go large with the Coke?" Asking the right questions in their case adds millions to their profits every year. Can you ask the right questions of your customers? Can you  get them to buy from you more frequently? Of course you can! Try it today.