The BIGG Successs Show
Increase Your Sales without Spending a Dime on Advertising
How the Hilton Las Vegas could have easily got us to spend more money with them. Plus, how offering good, better, best choices to customers will increase sales. Read our show summary at BIGGSUCCESS.COM.
Welcome to The Big Success Show. Today, we'll discuss how to increase your sales without spending a dime on advertising. The Big Success Show with George and Mary Lynn. We've been thinking a lot lately about opportunities that exist on every sale, and today we wanted to talk about upselling, in other words, selling more of the same thing. We have a prime example. We recently spent some time in Las Vegas. We went to a convention. Viva, Viagra. No, no. Don't do that. Why do I think of that every time I hear Las Vegas now? Gee, I wonder why. It's only all over the TV. But anyway, we stayed at the Hilton in Las Vegas, and when we checked in, the guy at the registration desk asked us if we wanted to upgrade for $25 a night, an additional $25 a night. Which is all he said. He told us the costs, but he didn't really tell us why. Right, so we just said no, assuming that it just meant a bigger room. And we didn't need that because we were going to be at this expone, so we'd be in and out of the room quite a bit anyway. Right, and then a few nights later, we were at dinner with a bunch of our friends, and one of them had upgraded. And she was talking about how she got the spa. She had her own workout room. They had a separate area for breakfast. They had this VIP happy out. Just all kinds of benefits from this little $25 upgrade. Right, and we said at the same time, well, if we didn't know that, I think everybody at the table said that. We'd have upgraded, no problem. So as a business, it's all about getting your employees to not only offer the upgrade, explain what the benefits of that upgrade are, and give us a reason for doing it. Well, it almost seems counterintuitive, but it's absolutely not. And I guess we can give him this. At least he did offer it to us. You know, you certainly have employees sometimes who don't even offer it. Now, I guess we could have questioned what the upgrade meant, but I don't think most customers are going to really do that. Yeah, that's on our job. We made assumptions in our head of what that was, and we were wrong. Now, of course, is the other extreme when it comes to upselling, and that's aggressively upselling. Oh, we've all experienced that too. Okay, so now I've bought in, and now you're telling me why it's terrible that I bought what I just bought, and I need to get this. You know, I don't like that because then I regret that I even bought anything from you. Hey, it's starting to sound like the old bait and switch, Marylin. Yeah, exactly. Well, and I think one of the key things is, obviously, it's important to have something to offer, but it's absolutely vital, too, that your employees know what's in it for them. Help them understand the bigger picture, and/or give them an incentive of some sort. Yeah, and we don't know if the Hilton does have an incentive program or not for its employees, I guess. I might be able to make some assumptions. Yes, I think we could. They might want to think about that or rethink it. Anyway, coming up, how to increase sales by adding yet one more choice. Today, we're talking about opportunities on every sale, and one of those opportunities is the opportunity to upsell to get your customers to buy more of the same thing, and one of the key principles to do that is the old, time-proven, good, better, best offering. I've been reading a book called Yes, 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. No. And they talk about how customers like choices quote that fall between what they need at a minimum and what they could possibly spend at a maximum, unquote. Well, and the thing is, what they show is that when you offer two choices, it seems like the customers tend to choose the least expensive one, right? Right. But when you offer that third, it really leads to an increase in sales. And that third product is going to be more expensive than the other two choices. And what happens is customers will tend to go for the moderately priced products instead of the least expensive. And you know, Marilyn, it's funny, we actually did this with my HVAC business, heating and cooling business, heating and air conditioning. We had service agreements and we had a service agreement. You bought it or you didn't. And so we decided that the service agreement did preventive maintenance. We'd come out and service your air conditioner, your furnace every year. But we decided to offer predictive maintenance as well. Those things that kind of tend to break down in a common way, they're generally very inexpensive. We just automatically go ahead and replace them. Or we had an all-inclusive offering. So if we serviced your equipment, the rest of the year, you didn't spend a dime. And we offered that to our customers and what we found was about 8% chose the absolute most expensive thing. About 12 to 15% would buy the least expensive, but the overwhelming majority bought, as you just said, the one right in the middle. That's right, because you had a compromise choice, that's what they say in the book. And that's very important to customers when they make a decision on a product to buy. Well, another interesting thing is we told more period of our service agreements than we did when we only had an either or, or yes or no option. So present your customers with a good, better, best offering and see your sales skyrocket. Just make sure your employees tell your customers about the benefits of all of them. It would be good to describe that, yes. You can get a written summary of today's show on our site at Big Success, that's bigwith2gsuccess.com. You'll also find a link to the book that we mentioned in today's show. And next time, we'll talk about six great ways to keep a conversation going. And with that said, Mary Lynn, I have nothing more to say. Okay, there we go. Until then, here's to your big success. The Big Success Show at B-I-G-G Success.com. (crowd cheering) [BLANK_AUDIO]