Lisa Wight – a hugely successful business coach who made £80,000 revenue in her first year of trading – shares her insight into how you can sell more to your clients.
A lot of people focus on new business generation when they think about getting in more revenue. But actually upselling and cross-selling to current clients can be a very easy way to increase income. You just need to do it in the right way. Hard selling to an existing client can damage a relationship. If you want to know how to get the balance right, and you’d like to know how to sell more without being too sales oriented, then read on…
The first thing to establish is that upselling and cross-selling means that you already have this client -you’re already working with them. They are using one of your services, but you want to increase the level of work they do with you, so now you’re going to offer them more services.
If you’re not familiar with the differences between upselling and cross-selling, let me explain. Let’s say you sell cutlery. If someone was already buying a plastic fork, to upsell you’d need to sell them a silver fork. Upselling is where you’re essentially selling the same product, but it’s better quality.
Cross-selling is where someone’s buying a fork already, but then you move on to also sell them the spoon and the knife as well. So you’re selling them other products which are linked.
One of the main reasons why sales gets a bad rap is because sales people are viewed as just trying to ship everything they’ve got to anyone. They stereotypically don’t care whether it’s a fit or not. So the first step to not being seen as salesy is for you to be really clear on why you’re selling what you’re selling. And that comes from talking.
Questions
If you want to know more about the power of questions, please do take a look at my recent blog which shared a lot of detail about this. But for now I’ll touch on the key elements.
Asking questions allows you to find out the challenges your clients are facing and this, in turn, allows you to determine which of your products and services are best suited to helping them overcome these challenges.
For example, it might be that they’re doing group coaching with you, and you want to upsell them into one on one coaching. The reality is that they will get a lot more benefit from one to one coaching. They will be able to achieve their targets a lot quicker because they’ll be getting focused support from you for a whole hour, instead of getting your more generic group support.
Alternatively, maybe you’ve got a mastermind that is around goal setting and keeping people on track. If you’ve got a client who is struggling with this, your mastermind could be perfect.
It’s all about identifying products and services that you offer and how they could best benefit your clients.
Sharing and Talking
Sharing and making people more generally aware of what you offer is a great way of side-stepping the sales pitch.
When you meet with your clients, let sharing be part of the natural conversation. Share with them what you have been up to with other clients. Say things such as, “This week I’ve been running my goal setting mastermind and these are the results that people are getting, which is really exciting.”
You’re sharing a story without it being a direct sales approach. If you understand your clients well enough, this should resonate with them and pique their interest. All you need at the start is for them to be aware of this extra support you offer.
If the conversation is more naturally covering the topic of, say goal setting, you could take the opportunity to run the idea of how else you could help your client. Say something like, “I run this mastermind and I’d be more than happy for you to come along if you like. You can just do a test to see whether it’s of interest. I could give you 50% off as a trial.”
Rather than the discount being a pushy offer, it’s instead a friendly gesture to see if this other service could be of use to them. Don’t push any harder than that. It’s not about putting the pressure on. It’s about planting the seeds. They may bite on that first occasion, or it might be in the next month when you see them, or the next session.
Other Expertise
I was a business coach, but my background was marketing, so I also helped clients out with marketing strategy. I used hubbix to coach clients, and I would go through the marketing questions and they would often get really overwhelmed by simple questions such as do you have a marketing strategy? Do you have a competitor analysis? What are the pain points that you’re solving for clients?
Often they’d share that they didn’t know how much went into a marketing strategy and they might feel swamped by the amount of work involved. If this did happen, I would say to them, “Look, it’s not a problem. I specialise in marketing strategy as well, so I’m more than happy to help.” This is the perfect way to offer more, and it seems as if you’re doing the client a favour.
By just asking the questions and going through the business strategy, I was creating a buyers’ market. They were asking me to help rather than me outwardly offering my service. This is subtle selling, whereby you are crystal clear on what the client wants to achieve and you can cleverly align what you offer to help them achieve it.
This whole approach allows you to talk around your services and products in a very neutral, informative and friendly way, which will lead on to clients asking you for more information. And this can work so well for business coaches. Because first and foremost, the relationship between you and the client is a personal one. People buy from people, and that is so true when it comes to coaching. If you go in with a hard sales approach, it just won’t work.
Structured Approach
Using hubbix opened up a lot of opportunities for me, as I would work through a structured process with clients, and it naturally allowed gaps and challenges to appear. It was up to me then to consider what services or support I could offer as extra value to clients to help overcome these challenges. But if you don’t have a structured way of working through meetings like this, it’s much harder to naturally bring in extra things.
If you’re interested in finding a more structured approach to your client sessions that could allow for an easy pathway to upselling and cross-selling, why not take a look at hubbix? We can give you a demo, or try it for yourself with our free 30 day trial.