Upselling techniques are the best way to help you to grow your cleaning business and increase your sales. We’re going to focus on three particular techniques that are easy to start using today.
Upselling techniques are essential no matter the size of your cleaning business. It’s an important element of any marketing strategy because the techniques allow you to increase the profitability of your sales.
However, upselling techniques are underutilised. Indeed, most of the time upselling techniques aren’t used at all. It’s easier and cheaper to sell more to your current customers than to attract new ones – so start upselling today.
When should you upsell?
To increase profits with upselling techniques, you should start by asking yourself some questions: when should I upsell and what do I want to achieve? Once you’ve answered those questions you can started. But keeps these things in consideration:
- Don’t try to upsell every time. Make sure any extras your try to sell and relevant to their wants and needs.
- Maybe it’s obvious, but make sure anything you offer additionally, at a discount, is going to be profitable for you in the long term. Maintain a good ratio between working on full-price and discounted service. Otherwise, you won’t be as profitable as you could be and a lot of your regular customers will be unhappy if you don’t have time for them, and you’ll risk losing them.
UPSELLING TECHNIQUES FOR YOUR CLEANING BUSINESS TIP 1: USE PROMOTIONS OR DISCOUNTS TO SELL ADDITIONAL SERVICES
If you’ve completed a job and the customer is satisfied, offer them a promotion or discount if they book in with you again. Your great service is sure to encourage them to order more of your services. Here’s some examples of offers you could implement:
- Offer a discount after purchase to a regular customer that will introduce them to a service they’ve not used before.
- You could offer a loyalty discount, for example, after three purchases, there is a 10% discount on the fourth purchase. This is a great way to thank the customer and increase their lifetime value.
It’s important to carefully plan any upselling that will involve additional discounted services. To help you, we’ve put together some key considerations for this kind of upselling:
- Figure out the goals for this promotion. You need to define them (Who are you targeting? What do you want to achieve? Does it give more visibility to a forgotten service?)
- Then, use this information to plan the package of bundle you are going to upsell. Think; targets, time period, terms and conditions, process and support.
- Make sure you consider any risks and incorporate these into your plan to calculate the potential profitability of the offer.
UPSELLING TECHNIQUES FOR YOUR CLEANING BUSINESS TIP 2: TAILOR YOUR SERVICES TO SPECIFIC PROSPECTS
You can easily convince your customers to buy additional services when they corresponds directly to their needs. In the beginning, it often makes sense to target a large part of the market because you do not have a steady stream of customers. But, the reality is that it’s not good to try to sell to everyone, and you need to know how to segment your commodity. That way, you’ll have a better vision of the needs and wants of your customers and then offer specific services for the segment of your market that you want to target. It’s not necessary to create something completely new in your catalog, it’s could be a new service added to another existing service. This allows you to enhance your existing portfolio, increasing the price and the profitability.
Once you’ve devised your tailored service, market it to your dream customers. Why not launch the tailored service by selling it in a limited way, like a special edition or a bonus for buying another service.
However, make you sure you do not introduce anything unneccesary. Analyse your customer base. If your customers are already anchored to a certain service (70% of similar profile, for example), then there’s no need to introduce something new because they’ve already found a tailored service. On the other hand, if you saw your customers have different profiles and can be targeted, proposing a tailored service can be a good idea.
UPSELLING TECHNIQUES FOR YOUR CLEANING BUSINESS TIP 3: CROSS-SELL
Cross-selling is a very popular upselling technique in the world of marketing. It’s a simple and effective method you can implement. The goal is to propose a discount on another complementary service or on an external service that you propose in addition to your product, during (rather than after) purchase.
But, you need to do this with caution. Indeed, it’s important to not pressurise customers. It should be proposed as an option and should not disturb the selling process if not chosen.Otherwise, you risk the customer canceling everything.
To realise this, you need to define your complimentary services and know off by heart which one you can propose to which customers. If you don’t have two services which go together, consider offering a complementary service that you can sell alongside your current portfolio.
If you would like to read more about winning commercial cleaning customers check out this blog!
