Slowly, Slowly, Catchy Monkey!

If you have a wide range of services/products that you provide you may think the best idea is to advertise everything to people and you'll get lots of sales. Yes, this may work, but you're just as likely to confuse prospective customers and you end up selling nothing.

So, is there a better way? Well, funny you should mention that.

It's come to my notice that we're actually now doing a lot better since we stopped trying to push every service we provide to prospective clients.

Now, we've changed. We've looked through the services we provide and picked out the top 3 most popular and we only spend time and money advertising these to new clients (of course, if they come back to us and say "Well, we don't need that, but we need this..." and it's something we do we can push that instead).

But to current clients we get them using one of our services and slowly introduce others over time, when we see there is a need for it in their firm.

So, for example, we do telephone answering for a solicitor. We used to just do this when his assistant was not in the office. This was okay, but when she was there the assistant was spending more and more time on the phone and not able to get on with her work. So we've offered to take over answering all calls every day. We've also added in that we'll contact people to rearrange appointments, etc. As we're in the same building we've added another line, in that if the assistant isn't in and the solicitor has a meeting, we can offer tea and coffee. So the little bits that we do grow and grow, and what was a very minor job that only got us a few pounds a month has now grown into a substantial service that we provide.

This has been repeated with two other clients, providing one service (often the telephone answering) and slowly adding to it, so that within a few months, we're earning three, four, five times the amount we were originally.

So this shows the adage that it is much easier to sell more to current clients. Of course, you have to be able to show why it would be good for them to use you, how it will make their life easier otherwise you'll be seen as just trying to get money out of them by giving them stuff they don't want.

So, think about how you can help current clients and sell more to them and only focus on two or three popular services/products to push to prospective clients.