Repeat business is the key to ultimate long term success in any business.

Your goal as entrepreneur or business owner is to turn every first time customer into a life-long customer. However, in order to maximize the value of that customer, you need to encourage regular purchases on an on-going basis.

Encourage customers to come back frequently with special sales, events, frequent-buyer programs, credits towards gifts, unique offers or reminders.

In order to make this strategy work best, you need to buy aware of your customers preferences, buying patterns and styles. It’s very different between industries as well as individual customers. A window contractor might only buy regular supplies once every 4 months. So if you’re supplying this outfit with screws, caulking, glazing tape, and the like, you’d better be aware of their buying habits, or else you’ll be wasting your efforts and probably annoying them at the same time, by not being aware of their preferances.

Keys To Success

Constant communication is vital. You want to establish a relationship and to do that you need continuous contact. Keeping in touch with your customers on a regular basis helps them remember the benefits they get from doing business with you. Whenever you’re holding a special sale or event of any kind, be sure to inform all customers and prospects on your list.

You may have to notify them more than once to get them to show up. Keep your clientele informed about new stock arrivals, upcoming sales, what’s hot and what’s not, special guest appearances, seminars, expansion plans, new store openings, etc.

Enticing offers are critical to response. Even the best customers won’t show up repeatedly if there’s not something new or unique or special for them. Make it interesting, inviting and difficult to ignore.

Examples

To renew the buying relationship on a frequent basis, determine the best means of connecting with your customers. A wholesale foods supplier serving cafeterias, lunch counters and restaurants, should be marketing on a weekly (or daily) basis, featuring limited-time specials at reduced prices.

A computer retailer on the other hand, wouldn’t want to contact customers every week. Perhaps a quarterly newsletter would work better in that scenario.

Holding a special event? Try sending invitations out to your customer list. If you hold several sales or special events throughout the year, create a calendar of special events that you can send to give customers advanced notice of those important dates.

The air miles program has become very successful at increasing customers buying frequency patterns and developing loyalty. The lure of getting a free trip to some exotic destination is enough to generate tons of excitement and increase the number of purchases.

Building a database and developing ways to keep in touch with customers and prospects is a good place to start. Then figure out some enticing deals you can create and a way to communicate the value of these deals to those most likely to be interested.

Over the years I’ve read a hundred sales books with all kinds of different approaches and ideas. Some were very good and others left questions about their authors understanding of selling.

When ever I found myself in a slump or things just didn’t seem to work the answer always seem to be in the basics.  A great chef, master carpenter or champion athlete always seems to have a mastery of the basics. So let’s take a look at what this idea of selling really amounts to.

First: Sales is two people, a customer and salesperson, communicating with each other. The customer is communicating their needs, wants and results required. The sales person is trying to understand these so the issue can be solved by their product or service. Just think of this as two people getting together to help each other improve their situations.

Second: Customers purchase products and services for the results they provide. This can be a real challenge for sales people that have been indoctrinated that sales are all about their product. This means saving time and money, preventing problems, solving problems or creating opportunities; that’s what the customer is looking for.  Your product or service is simply a way or method to get the results, so salespeople need to communicate these results to customers instead of the product.

Third: Getting into new accounts, selling new and existing accounts and servicing accounts is all about two people communicating. Getting into a new account is about communicating results that the customer could achieve and communicating it in their language. The selling part is listening, questioning for clarity and communicating the results. Servicing the account is continued communications about the results to date and additional results needed.

Fourth: If we take the selling process, the objection response process or presentation part of selling and take the words “selling”, “objections” and “presentation” away, guess what we end up with. The “Selling” process becomes a communication process that is used every day. The “objection” response becomes a conflict resolution process and “presentation” becomes story telling.

Take this idea of communications instead of selling and see what happens to your productivity. Ask yourself what the potential results of your product could be from your customer’s perspective. Now think about how that could best be communicated to your customers.

We’ll explore each step of the sales process and how communications fits into it in future segments. For now, just think communications.