Graham McGregor: How many fishing lines do you use to make sales?

With 20 fishing lines you will probably catch fish on at least some of your lines. Photo / Thinkstock

Marketing consultant Graham McGregor on how adding new fishing lines could help make more sales in your business.

I have a simple system I use for success in selling.

I call it the 20 fishing lines approach.

If you go fishing, you are more likely to catch fish if you use 20 fishing lines rather than just one fishing line.

With 20 fishing lines you will probably catch fish on at least some of your lines.

I treat making more sales the same way. I recommend that you use at least 20 different sales approaches to increase your sales.

If you are consistently using a wide range of approaches every month to increase your sales, I guarantee that you will always have great sales results.

The reason for having 20 ways to make sales is simple:

If you have 20 things you are doing to make sales, in one month maybe 5 or 10 of these may not work as well as they normally do.

But even when this happens, it still means that in this same month 10 or 15 fishing lines are working well to make sales for you. So you will still make good sales.

I have consulted with hundreds of sales people and business owners and discovered that many have about 5-10 things they do consistently to make sales. And these 5-10 things are usually the same things all their competitors are doing. It's no surprise their sales results are not as good as they would like.

Here's how to use this 20 fishing lines idea yourself:

1: List all the things you are doing consistently to make sales in your business.

2: Identify at least 5-10 new things you could be doing to make more sales in your business.

3: Now pick at least two of these additional ways to make sales and take action on them this week.

Once you have two more things you are doing consistently to make sales, you can then add one or two new things the next week and so on. If you can consistently do even 5-10 new things to increase your sales your results can be astounding.

Here's a good example:

When I first met with a client who was a personal trainer he had one main way of making sales. He waited until someone contacted the gym where he worked and requested the services of a personal trainer to get them in better shape. He would then talk to this person and hopefully persuade them to use his services. Because he was only relying on this one way to make sales, his income was not only poor ($19,000 in a whole year) it was also very up and down. Some months he would make twice as much money as in other months.

With my personal trainer client I had him focus on doing six new things to increase his sales. The first was one page tip sheets to position himself as an expert and get potential clients to contact him. He also used client testimonials, improved his sales presentation, asked for referrals, put up his prices and did add on sales of other products like vitamins and supplements.

Doing these six new things increased his income from $19,000 a year when I first met him to over $193,000 a year only 18 months later.

There are always new things you can do to increase your sales.

The trick is to look for them and then test them in your business on a regular basis.

"Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish." Ovid, 43 BC - AD 17

Graham McGregor is a marketing consultant and the creator of the 396 page 'Unfair Business Advantage Report.' www.theunfairbusinessadvantage.com (This is free and has now been read by business owners from 11 countries.) You can email Graham on graham@twomac.co.nz