UPSELLING IN YOUR BUSINESS

HOW TO UPSELL  TO YOUR CUSTOMERS AND CLIENTS

How do you persuade your customers to make an additional purchase at the point of sale, have you trained your team on all the useful techniques. If you do not utilise upselling in your business to its full potential you could be losing thousands of pounds worth of sales and a large percentage of this additional sale is profit. Upselling is how we persuade our customers to make an additional purchase at the point that they buy – either at the till face to face or at the point where they order online. All the major retailers have this down to a fine art, where they offer buy two for a discounted price, the customer thinks they are wining, you know you have won. Its a win win situation.

Upselling is very powerful and relatively easy because your customers have already made the important buying decision by making the decision to purchase from your business and the actual amount he or she is prepared to spend is often flexible.

Upsells are nearly all profit so you can offer a substantial discount on the upsold items and still be making a lot of money, you have already covered your biggest costs, which are marketing, staff and overheads.

The biggest and best exploiters of upselling are the fast food chains. Who ask “is that large or super” and of that upsell 85% is profit and though a single transaction does not offer a lot do it a million times a day and it makes a very large difference.

The fast food brands drill this upselling into their staff from their very first part of their training and continually enforce it daily, that is why you will have noticed that the server will always offer an upsell. You should be doing the same in your business. You need to train your staff the correct phrases like was that a large one or would you like a cake with that.

The fast food chain is an example to the mass market and you don’t have to follow this example. Your business may have some more affluent buyers and it can work just as well to offer an expensive upsell. So if your core product/service is £100, your upsell could be £500 or more. The fact that the majority of your customers won’t want to spend £500 is irrelevant. The question is can we get 5% or maybe 10% to go for the high end upsell. If we can the impact on your profits can be substantial. The only way to find the best price for your upsell is to test the market.

As well as upsell we should look at product “bundling”, which is where we sell linked products together, such as toasted tea cakes and pots of tea or meal deals such as sandwich, crisps and a drink, at a discount and therefore increase your customer spend.

There is another very important reason to do upsells and product bundling. The purpose of getting more money from each customer is not just to make more money for you and your business it also means you can spend more per customer to acquire that customer at the outset. The purpose of a customer is not to get a sale. The purpose of the sale is to get the customer so we can make more money selling to them again in the future.

So let’s brain wash our staff into upselling and look at products we can bundle together as packages.