7 Tips on How to Increase Sales

Introduction

• Do you want to retain your existing customers and create new customers for a lifetime?
• Do you know how to increase sales? 

Read this complete article to know tips on how to increase sales and create loyal customers. These ideas will help you retain your existing customers and create new customers for a lifetime.

Tip #1: Customer’s Name is the Sweetest Desert to Him

The first workable tip to increase your sales is connecting with your customers by knowing their names. 

Customers love to hear their names from others. 

If you are a small shop owner, you should give a personalized touch to your customers by greeting them with their names.  Apply this little tip, you will get big results.

In a survey of 100 people, it was found that the waiter’s tip increased by 14% when he gives a good-quality mint along with the bill at the time of clearing. 

When there were children along with the customers, waiters bring candy for kids instead of mint and this increases their tip to 27%.

Though it won’t cost much, if you give your customers some specialized, personalized and customized service, they will come to you again and again, which will help you increase your brand value, brand equity, and sales.

Tip #2: Co-Creation of Innovation with your Customer

Whatever changes you are planning to bring in your products or services, you should take extensive feedback from your customers. Your customer should feel that he/she is also part of the innovation. This model is called the ABCDE model.

A- Analyze the needs of the customer.

B- Brainstorm the actual requirement of the customer.

C- Co-create; involve your customer in the product’s creation. 

D- Deliver 

E- Evaluate

This is one of the reasons for Subway’s success, as the customer creates its own customized meal. Co-creation empowers the customer and if the sandwich does not taste good, then also the customer doesn’t mind as he himself was involved in creation.

There are two ways of innovation – ‘Manufacturer Led Innovation’ and ‘User-Led Innovation’. Let us understand these two types of innovation with the help of an example of 3M Company (a multinational company).

When you co-create with the customer, the acceptability success of the product increases many folds, as seen in the above example.

Tip #3: Customers Love Loyalty Program if you make it easy for them

• A customer is ready to take your service again if you give them the right reason to come back.
• You can give two types of benefits, either financial benefit or emotional/psychological benefit. 
• Suppose you have three categories of cards, namely, Ruby, Emerald, and Diamond. A customer will get ready to take Diamond card if you make him feel that Ruby and Emerald's cardholders are inferior to him. You should make him feel like a king!!!

Tip #4: Frugal Wow and a Delightful Surprise

Don’t sell your product as a product, sell it as project management. Remember there are three pillars of Project Management - Scope, Time and Cost.

Scope includes deliverables, specifications, objectives, exclusion, constraints, and characteristics. Here, you need to see whether you can under-commit or over-deliver your customers.

In case of Time, you need to see whether you can deliver your commitments before the given timeline. 

You must know, India is a very cost-sensitive or price-sensitive market, so if you can give some discount or scheme to your customers they will keep on coming to you.

Tip #6: Create a Purposeful Emotional Story

Now lets us know how to increase sales by creating a purposeful emotional story.

According to the Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), humans forget the data, facts, and figures but remember a story. 

Is there any powerful story in your sales pitch or can you create it? 

A story helps your customer to connect with you and your product, which will help to increase sales.

Tip #7:  Sell Experience over Money

You need to sell an experience to customers, not products. Experience creates brand recall value.

Below are some examples of popular Ad-Campaigns who are selling experience instead of product, which is helping them to gain recall value.

There are many brands that do not sell the features of their product but sell the experience attached to them.

If you follow these 7 tips to increase your sales you will see “J” curve growth in your business in a short span of time.