SALES - How to Increase Yours Sales Income - Part 1

SALES

How to Increase Your Sales Income – Part 1

By Nikki Viljoen – Viljoen Consulting December 2008.

Before we walk down this particular road together, let it be understood that I am no sales guru! In fact as I do the research for these articles I am learning! For me, being an Internal Auditor, it is all about logic! So here we go on this particular journey together.

I have no doubt that there are many ways in which to increase income generated from sales, be they sales of product or sales of your services.

Logic must tell us that one of the easiest would be to either increase the price of your product and/or your service or alternatively increase the number of units of product you sell or the number of times that you sell your service.

Within these two components there must be several variations on how to either increase the price of the product and/or your services as well as how to justify these. I have no doubt that we have all looked at these at some stage or another. I want to explore all the other avenues that are open to us.

1. Relationship selling. For me, all my business is about building relationships, so it stands to reason that in doing business this way, I increase the probability of doing repeat business. Apparently in the ‘good old, bad old days’, the way to sell was to give a presentation and then close the deal. Nowadays business is done by building relationships and building trust with your clients. In the building of the relationship, it is certainly very important that we focus on ‘what the client needs’ rather than what we think the client needs. The focus appears to have moved from what we can provide to what the client needs for us to provide. Building these kinds of relationships with clients ensures not only repeat business, but also life long relationships with clients. Again, for me this is far easier than trying to find new clients all the time – not that we should not be looking for new clients all the time, however that said, it’s just easier to do business with someone who is already familiar with what you do, how you do it and the quality of the work that you produce. So for me this is a no – brainer – build trustworthy long life relationships with your clients.

Next week we will look at some more way in which to increase your sales.

Nikki is an Internal Auditor and Business Administration Specialist who can be contacted on 083 702 8849 or nikki@viljoenconsulting.co.za