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I am convinced that in any business there is both a 'hard' and an 'easy' way to higher sales and profits.
The hard way is to invest huge amounts of time, money and effort to produce very modest increases in sales results.
So you try a lot of things, spend a lot of money and the results are frankly disappointing.
(We've all done this in our businesses.)
The easy way is to look for simple things you can do that will produce extraordinary sales results with virtually no effort.
The key words here are 'look for'.
In other words you have to make an effort to 'see' the world in a new way.
In this new way you are looking for simple action steps you can take that will produce amazing increases in your sales and profits with hardly any effort.
The good news is that there are dozens of these simple actions steps you can take in your business that will produce extraordinary sales results.
Here are 2 examples to get you thinking:
Sometimes a simple change in the way you explain what you sell is all you need to give your sales a real boost.
1: A different explanation increases sales by over 500 per cent
In the book "Yes-50 secrets from the science of persuasion" there is an interesting example of a new sales approach taken by a home improvement firm that sold expensive hot tubs.
These hot tubs sold for around 7,000 pounds so were a big ticket purchase for most people.
This firm did two very simple things differently and this increased their hot tub sales by over 500 per cent.
First of all they began telling prospective customers, that many buyers of their top of the range hot tub model reported that owning it was like adding an extra room to their house. (A number of their clients had made this type of comment after buying a hot tub so it was genuine feedback they were sharing.)
Secondly, they began asking these prospective customers what it would cost to build an extra room on the side of their house.
When you compared the cost of a 7,000 pound hot tub with the much greater expense of building a new room on your home, the hot tub seems far less expensive in comparison.
This made it a lot easier for clients to justify purchasing it and sales increased dramatically.
Maybe all you need to do is change 'who' you sell your products and services to and your sales could immediately increase.
2: The franchise company that focussed on an unusual market:
A large franchise company I heard about began looking at the characteristics of their most successful franchisees.
They discovered (to their surprise), that a large number of them had short haircuts.
Now that was pretty unusual; so they decided to dig a little bit deeper.
Further research revealed that the majority of these franchises (with short haircuts) came from an armed services background like the air force or army.
The reason these franchisees were so successful was because they were used to following orders from their armed services background.
So they tended to do everything they were told to do in their franchise manual and got excellent results when they did this.
The franchise company began to focus more on getting people from the armed services into their franchise business and their sales went through the roof.
There are dozens of simple ways to get huge boosts in your sales with almost no effort at all.
The secret to finding these 'no effort sales boosters' is to actively look for them.
And when you find some, try them in your own business to see how they work.
"Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?"
Bernice Fitz-Gibbon
Action Exercise:
What are 3-5 simple things you could do in the next month that could potentially increase your sales by at least 25 per cent with very little effort?
(Hint: there are dozens of logical and easy to implement answers to this question.)
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