Third easiest? You’re probably wondering “What about the first and second easiest customers to sell?” The first easiest customer to sell is your existing customer; those folks who have already bought into you, your company, your products, and services. There’s a saying I heard from my good friend, mentor, and coach, Scott Manning, that goes like this… A buyer is a buyer is a buyer. For simplicity, I am using the word customer but it could be client or patient just as easily.
The second easiest customer to sell is a referral from an existing customer. Someone who has experienced you and all of your offerings and then invites a friend, family member or associate to do business with you is almost as good as it gets.
Before I clue you in on the third easiest customers to sell, I want to share a couple of points that I heard from Jay Abraham, one of the highest-paid consultants on the planet. Jay said that there are only three ways to grow your business:
To get more customers.
To get your existing customers to buy more.
To get your existing customers to buy more often.
I’ve added a fourth to his three, which is simply to improve on any one of the three. Those four are foundational and you should have an established strategy behind each one for your business to make sure they happen on a regular basis.
Of the four, the first one, to get more customers, is the one that most people focus on in their business. Sometimes it is the only customer businesses work to get. It’s the most difficult and the most expensive to execute successfully. Knowing that, why does getting customers to buy more, to buy more often, and to improve on all three take a distant back burner to getting more customers?
Now to the promise of the third easiest customer to sell… it’s the lost customer. Those customers that for whatever reason have left you or you have left them; they no longer buy from you.
You need to have a strategy, a campaign, to communicate with these people in an effort to win them back. It makes sense. They know and are familiar with you, your company, and your products. You should keep track of why people stopped doing business with you and categorize those reasons and act on them.
Just so you know, when price is given as the reason, it’s probably not. I’ll bet you a cup of coffee on that one. Get around the price issue: When you hear it as the reason they left, simply ask, why else or why in addition to price they left. Usually, price is the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Something else happened somewhere else. Find it!
Give your attention to all the easiest customers if you want to increase sales and business.