3 Strategies That Can Boost Sales For Your Small Business

In our last blog, we discussed the idea of raising your prices in order encourage a boost in sales for your small business. It may sound odd, at first, considering that higher prices may discourage some customers from making purchases in your store. However, by highlighting the high quality of your products and services, higher prices become more acceptable by consumers. This is especially true if you allow your customers to pay with their credit cards.

Research has shown that consumers tend to spend more when they are able to pay with their credit cards. They not only will they be willing to pay higher prices, but they will tend to increase the sizes of their average transactions. Simply put, credit card acceptance makes it a lot easier for your customers to go shopping worry-free.

There are, of course, a few other strategies to consider if you wish to increase sales for your small business. Here are three:

1. Create bundles with your products and services. If you’re concerned that some of your products are hot sellers while some others are “duds”, you may want to consider creating bundle packages to help move inventory off the shelves. By creating bundles, you can also present the concept of savings to your customers by noting that individually, the products cost more. On Intuit.com, Megan Sullivan suggests this strategy.

“Customers equate a bundle of services with savings, even if the savings are nominal, making it a much easier sell for you,” she notes, “If possible, try to keep your bundles somewhat flexible; a potential customer may reject a bundle because he or she feels that only three of the six services apply to his or her business. If you can stay flexible enough to swap out different products or services to align with multiple needs, you’ll find success.”

2. Get rid of your “time wasters”. There is a belief that the definition of “insanity” is the attempt at doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result each time. Don’t be insane! If there’s a marketing strategy that hasn’t worked for you, stop trying it. For example, call centre employees sometimes get caught up in calling the same customers over and over again without success. Don’t continue down this route as it’s a waste of time.

On MarketingForSuccess.com, Charlie Cook insists that you get rid of “time wasters”. He cites some advice he passed along to Pam, a Kansas City-based voice coach, who increased her revenues by taking his advice.

“When Pat got a prospect on the phone, she’d been spending up to 30 minutes talking to them,” he explains, “She was spending a lot of time every day talking to people who hadn’t spent a dime on her services and weren’t likely to. I helped Pat write a phone script that qualifies her prospects within three minutes so she can quickly determine whether or not they are high-paying coaching prospects and she should continue the call…For the rest of the callers, the time wasters, I showed Pat how to politely end the call before they wasted a fourth minute of her time.”

3. Offer payment options. Allow us to reiterate that when customers are given the option to pay with either credit cards or debit cards or cash, they will be a lot more likely to come to your store for what they need. If you’re not yet accepting credit cards and debit cards, we highly recommend that you contact us to learn more about how our Countertop and Wireless POS terminals can help your business increase its sales.

As well, if you’re looking to upgrade from your current provider, call Canadian POS Corporation at 1-877-748-2884 or email us at info@localhost.