Graham McGregor: What easy sales opportunities are right under your nose?

Look a second and even third time for these easy sales opportunities you may be missing. Photo / 123RF

I had a phone call from my 80 year old father-in-law last week.

Pop told me that he had lost his favourite hammer and wondered if I knew where it was?

He explained that he always put it away in the same place in his garage and now he couldn't find it.

Pop is a real collector of stuff and his garage is crammed with thousands of items that he has accumulated over the years.

I called around to his home and spent an hour looking in his garage for his much loved hammer but couldn't find it.

Then two days later I went back again and found his missing hammer in 3 minutes. It had fallen down behind some empty paint tins that I hadn't moved in my first search.

It was under my nose the whole time but I only found it when I looked a second time.

It's exactly the same thing in marketing.

Many businesses have great sales opportunities that are literally right under their nose. Yet they often miss these sales opportunities because they are not actively looking for them. (Or they look for these opportunities only once and don't see them.)

My marketing recommendation this week is look a second and even third time for these easy sales opportunities that you may be missing right now.

Here is a good example:

Many years ago I sold investment properties and most of the clients I worked with bought one investment property to start with.

Then occasionally some of these clients would buy a second investment property a year or two later.

So I only ever recommended to my clients that they buy one investment property to start with.

Then I met a new client who loved the idea of owning investment property and asked me if it was possible to buy three investment properties to start with.

His bank was quite happy to lend him the finance to do this so my client bought three investment properties to start with.

A little light bulb went off in my brain as I realised that some of the clients I was talking with could potentially buy more than one investment property if that was something they wanted to do.

So I made a tiny change to my sales presentation.

I explained to clients that when buying investment property some people chose to buy two or even three properties to start with.

While others chose to buy only one to start with.

And what I found with this small change in my approach is that a good number of clients chose to buy more than one investment property to start with.

So my sales increased with very little effort.

The good news is that the more you look for these easy sales opportunities that are 'right under your nose' the more of them you will find.

"Nothing is more expensive than a missed opportunity." - H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Action Exercise:

1. Spend ten minutes this week looking for easy sales opportunities that you are not seeing right now. Look several times!

2. One easy sales opportunity that is worth testing for some businesses is to send out a special type of email to all their existing clients once a week.

If you do this right, you'll get your clients looking forward to every weekly email you send them and you'll make some easy sales with very little effort.

The key is to do it right.

I'm helping a number of different businesses to test this special type of weekly email in November to see how well it works for them.

If you would like some details on how this same strategy might work for your own business just contact me using the email address at the start of this column and tell me three things.

What types of products and services do you sell? What is the approximate size of your email list? Are your customers businesses, private individuals or a mixture of both?

I'll then give you further details without obligation.

- Graham McGregor is The Added Value Marketing Expert™. Register at his website www.addedvaluemarketing.com and Graham will give you a free copy of his brand new free guide 'Easy Sales with Added Value Marketing'. (This guide contains ten time tested strategies that any business can use right now to create easy sales and delighted clients and is with Graham's compliments.)