Sell smart to increase your profits Part 1: Up-selling

Sell smart to increase your profits – Part 1: Up-selling

I’m sure you remember that time you went to McDonald’s and the teenager at the counter asked you, “Do you want to super-size that?” But have you ever stopped to consider just how much money McDonald’s makes by using that simple selling strategy alone?

For instance... Let’s say your local McDonald’s sells an average of 1000 regular meal deals per week, and the average cost of a regular meal deal is $7:

That’s $7000 a week.

Over a year that’s... 7000 x 52 = $364,000

Now let’s say that the price to upgrade a regular meal deal to a large, super-size meal deal is an average of $2. Let’s assume that 50% customers agree to have their regular meal super-sized over a week:

500 x ($2) = $1000 extra in sales per week. Now times that by 52 weeks in the year...
 

That’s a whopping $52,000 MORE in sales over a whole year just by using a 2-second up-selling strategy... and these are conservative sales estimates!
 

Now imagine if you had this kind of systematic up-selling strategy in your business, the equivalent of a super-sizing system. The results would be massive!
 

Many businesses spend countless hours on attracting potential customers and converting them into paying customers but then stop there. The next step from here is to increase the average transaction value and your profits. Up-selling is an inexpensive and very valuable way of increasing your average transaction value, in turn increasing your profits. This simple yet effective way of suggesting a more expensive product with a purchase takes virtually no time to set up or implement. All you have to do is train your sales staff and off you go.

For example, if you sell computers and a customer is interested in one of the basic models. You could suggest to them that buying one of the top of the line computers with stacks of features would be a good buy and save on upgrading sooner. Simple, huh? McDonald’s is probably the simplest and best examples for up-selling with the “Is that a large size meal?” up-sell technique; and yet it is done by teenagers! All the same, it can apply to almost any industry including vacuum cleaners, clothing, cafes, and even when building a house.

There are many ways to up-sell, but before doing so you need to know what the starting point is, that is what your average sale in your business is worth. Once you know this you can get out there selling!

What You Can Do Today:
• Educate and excite your team about the importance of up-selling
• Create a product/service comparison sheet – give buyers an instant snapshot of how various options compare
• Develop a Needs Analysis questionnaire – this will help you to ask the questions to uncover customer’s needs and determine which product is best for them
• Start learning dialogue techniques to encourage customers saying “yes”