I still thought it wise to touch on this point just to make sure you give this some thought and make sure you have taken advantage of this opportunity as much as possible in your business.

In almost any business, you should always attempt to offer incentives to any employee that has any sort of contact with a customer.

It’s obviously standard practice to offer incentives or commissions to sales persons who are responsible for generating sales in your business, but it doesn’t stop there.

You need to understand that every customer contact point is always an opportunity to generate more business and you need to take advantage of every customer contact point you have.

Its certainly not only sales people that have regular contact with customers. You could have financial people, receptionists, technicians, service providers and many other types of employees who have regular contact with customers.

Taking advantage of as many of these as possible can have incredible impact on your business, and not only from a sales point of view.

A customer contact point can be used for all of the following:

1. Provide details on additional products or services that may offer additional value to your customers.
2. Request feedback on your quality of service, eg. Get a testimonial, complete a customer survey.
3. Request feedback on additional services your customer would like to see you provide, or changes to your service that would provide them increased value.

All of these can be of value to your business, from generating additional sales, to getting valuable feedback on your quality of service or additional services you can offer.

By offering all employee types incentives for performing certain actions when in contact with the customer, you gain the benefit of the customer responding to the action (accepts offer, provides feedback etc) and the employee gains whatever incentives you have defined.

Some examples:

1. A receptionist mentions a special offer you may have running at that point in time and tells visitors or callers if they want to take advantage of this they should email, call etc Mr Salesman and use coupon code XXXX. A unique coupon number per employee allows you track who generated the lead or action.
2. A fitness trainer staff member can make recommendations for specific health products that will further benefit the customer, and all they need to do is visit XXX website address or call XXX number and quote that unique coupon code to take advantage.
3. An accounts receivable employee can be given the power to offer customers increased payment terms on outstanding invoices if they take advantage of XXX offer right now. Or if they take advantage of offer XXX, they will receive a 10% discount on a previous outstanding invoice.

Every employee is a potential salesperson. Empower them to make offers, recommendations or receive feedback from customers, for a little incentive and you have a powerful additional sales force that can really have a big impact on your future sales.

This strategy also makes for very happy and productive employees who will go above and beyond in their job because now they have the incentive to do so. You get the business benefit, and at the same time, a very happy employee base, who will think twice about moving over to your competitors who don’t offer any types of incentives in their business.

The idea is to be able to generate reliable stable revenue from your customer base which puts you into a stable financial position as its now very easy to be able to forecast your revenue and thus create reliable future plans for your business and spend.

I don’t think I need to further emphasize the benefits of reliable monthly income, as I’m sure you can think of many right away.

The service plan or “maintenance contract” is usually something that is used in your more traditional service industry, such as IT for example. Whereby service companies sign contracts with customers at fixed monthly or yearly fees for X period of time.

With a little imagination however we can easily put this to use in any other business, I don’t really care what it is, there is always an opportunity to offer a recurring billing product.

Where possible, you should always offer something similar in your portfolio as its these recurring plans that offer you the peace of mind and reliable income in difficult times.

For example, a fitness or bodybuilding trainer can offer current customers a dietary program that monitors their measurements and weight and makes monthly adjustments to their diet plan based on their changing macronutrient requirements for R150 a month, or whatever it is worth to you.

Even though many customers could easily do this themselves, people are inherently lazy and would rather have somebody do this for them for a small fee, even if all they are really getting out of it I peace of mind.

With enough customers, these small monthly billings add up to good extra revenue.

Try to take advantages of opportunities for making your customers life easier by offering small additional services for a small fee. As an expert in your own business, I’m sure you can identify many opportunities for recurring services you can offer your customers for an additional fee.

Actions 1:

1. Investigate opportunities in your business where you can offer recurring monthly services to existing customers.
2. If you are considering offering your own service that takes up time: Calculate at what it price it would be worth it to you to offer these services, based on the time and admin it takes. Would you customers pay this price? If unsure, test it out on a few choice customers!

For example, if you are considering offering a certain service for a certain free, for a certain number of customers, and this would now take up 6 days of your time each month, will it pay you enough based on what your time is worth?

Lets say you used those 6 days to rather perform your core service, would you receive more revenue?

You need to calculate whether offering additional services is really worth your time or not, or you could be doing yourself a disservice.

If you already have an existing business that generates sales, chances are you are leaving a lot of money on the table by not attempting to optimize generating additional sales from existing customers.

It’s a fact that it is very much easier to sell something to somebody who has already made a recent purchase with you.

Psychologically, once a customer makes a purchase from you, they have give you their approval and trust, and will be far more likely to make another purchase from you, since they have already gone through the mental process of deciding if they should buy from you or not.

Once the first purchase was made, and the product offered value to them, you now have their trust.

Therefore with good marketing and follow up communications it’s very easy to get at least 30-40% of first time customers to purchase something additional from you again.

You will now want to set up an automated process (if possible) where you send additional communications to these existing customers with the purpose of generating additional sales. This is called making sales on the back end or back end sales.

The front end is the product you try to sell to a new prospect, which will then put them in the back end sales funnel (which can be completely automated) where you will market additional services or products to them.

In the following articles we will go over the different methods and strategies for making additional sales on the back end.