Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

Increase sales & profits quickly

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Here’s a powerful marketing tip, which will show you how to massively increase your sales very quickly.  It’s also a super-fast way to boost your cash flow and sky-rocket your profits!

In order for us to begin, I need to ask you something:

“What additional, valuable products or services ‘could’ you offer to your existing clients, which they would be happy to pay you for?”

This is a key marketing question; because selling additional services to an existing client is easily, the single fastest way to MASSIVELY increase your sales and profits! It’s an exceptionally high leverage marketing activity, because the return you get is totally disproportionate to the amount of time and effort required.

The reason the results are so amazing, is that you already provide a GREAT service to your clients and they already trust you.  This means that buying an additional product or service from you is a VERY easy decision for them to make. There’s no risk attached because they already know how brilliant you are!

Selling additional services to existing clients

Here’s a recent example, based on a client of my marketing program. This particular client came to me because he needed to quickly and dramatically increase his cash flow and profitability.

His company provides IT maintenance services to around 120 local, small businesses.  I suggested he find another service to offer his existing clients – before thinking about winning new clients.  He said that a few of his clients had asked if he provided an online data back-up service; which he did not.  So, he looked for prices, to see how much it would cost to provide the service and found that he could make an average profit of around £500 a year, per client, by offering this service.

I sent out a well crafted marketing email to his clients and in just 48 hours, we generated £21,000 of pure profit for him! Because this is an annual service, payable in advance, the end result was an immediate, MASSIVE cash flow boost!

Leverage the potential of your existing clients before looking elsewhere

Before you spend a penny seeking to win new business from new clients – make sure you are not missing out on a windfall profit opportunity from within your existing client base!

Selling additional services helps retain clients too

Not only does offering a wider spread of services to your clients make them more profitable to you, they are also far, far less likely to leave you for another provider.  To replace the provider of one service is relatively simple, but to replace a service provider who looks after 3 or 6 or more of your needs is a very different matter.

When you provide more services to a client, you also provide more value and the marketplace ALWAYS rewards value!

Selling additional services to existing clients is easy and extremely profitable, so what’s stopping you?

Your marketing mix part 1

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There’s a common marketing myth, which is REALLY hurting a lot of salespeople and business owners!  The myth is that there is a single, all-powerful marketing technique that they need to find; which will be the answer to their marketing woes.

Your marketing mix

However, successful marketing requires a multi-pronged approach – not a single ‘magic bullet’!  This multi-pronged approach is what we call your marketing mix.

Your marketing mix should consist of numerous different marketing activities (at least 4 or 5), which will combine to provide the leverage required to generate all the sales and leads you or your business need.  Most businesses rely on a single marketing activity or perhaps two.  Yet, when I speak with the owners of successful businesses, I always find they are using at least 8 or 10 high leverage marketing activities – often more!

By the way, when you hear the term ‘high leverage marketing activities’, it simply means activities that produce the ‘highest or best’ results for the least amount of effort and risk.

For example

Obviously, it costs you the same amount of time and money to send a mail shot or marketing email; whether or not it generates new business for you.  You leverage the mail shot or marketing email by making sure you it contains a compelling offer and that is is sent to a targeted audience, with an endorsement from one of their trusted contacts.

Compare this to the typical small business mailshot, which goes straight into the bin or is deleted; because it has a generic offer, sent to a group of people who do not know you and without any trusted endorsement!

Designing YOUR marketing mix

In the second and final part of this article, I am going to show you how to design a marketing mix for YOUR business.