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By Jay Abraham
And professional services? There is much you can do to jump-start your business. Most people don't realize it, but the greatest service any professional or service organization can render to a customer or client is to schedule annual or semi-annual or, more preferably, quarterly reviews where you examine the client or patient's present situation.
For example, if you were a financial planner and I was at a point in my life where my family and my assets were such that I needed to start protecting them in a more earnest way, you would be in an excellent position to recommend to me that I change my insurance coverage-- perhaps to umbrella liability.
You would also be in a position to suggest to me the mental strategy I need to adopt. You would be in a position to advise me on needed changes in my investment portfolio. So, if you are in services of a professional kind, invite your clients to sign on for a series of prepaid (or partially prepaid) quarterly revenues.
Let's move onto another interesting facet of selling - the "upsell"...
A lot of you have written and asked me to help you incorporate "up-selling" into your sales activities. So, let's get right to it. Here is an easy-to-adopt upselling scenario:
You are selling a service. You have persuaded the customer or client to say "yes." The agreement, the search, the purchase agreement is about to be signed. What do you do?
Well, first of all you recognize that you've already taken the client through the arduous and delicate process of developing trust in you. They now trust you in an advisory role. You are - in their eyes - an expert.
So you say to them: "Before we formalize the agreement, I'd like to make one more recommendation, if I may. I recommend you consider not just doing ________, but _________." (Here you are moving the customer from the existing service they were originally going to buy to a
superior service.)
Then you say, "Here's why I recommend that," and then you go into a simple one- or two-sentence explanation of the additional value they would gain by upgrading the transaction. In other words, you talk about the superior results they'll see!
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