Tips for More Upsells and Better Closing Ratios

Jun 12, 2019

Summary:

In this week’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, hosts Justin Jacob and China Morissette talk about techniques and strategies for getting more upsells and improving your closing ratio.

Main Questions Asked:

• What does it mean to upsell?
• How would you go about looking at a market to see if offer a new service would be a good investment to make?

Key Lessons Learned:

Getting The Upsell

• It doesn’t matter what business you’re in, there are only three ways to grow. You add to your customer base, you increase the number of transactions, or you increase the transaction size.
• If you can increase the average size of your transactions by $50, that can translate to a large amount of revenue at the end of the year.
• The first thing you need to do to earn your customer’s trust is to make sure that your technician is on time. First impressions are very important, your tech has to be on time, prepared, and friendly.
• Covering your feet in a customer’s house can go a long way. It shows that you actually care about their home, and by extension them.
• Always take the time to walk the homeowner through what you’re doing. It shows you to be the expert they believe you are and establishes the trust that leads to the next step.
• The technician can be a major difference for the customer, if they build a relationship with the technician, that can function a lot like customer retention.
• Make sure when you arrive at the home to investigate the original problem first. Don’t jump the gun trying to go for the big sale. An upsell needs to go up from somewhere, without the initial sale you won’t have anything to build off of. Your technician needs to have the technical skills to solve your customer’s problem but also the soft skills to see down the line and articulate what they need in a professional way.
• It takes time to build a relationship and earn trust. Sales is not for everybody though, there are a lot of technicians that aren’t interested in doing sales. In those situations, it makes sense to have a designated closer come in to help the homeowner make a positive decision.
• Presentation can make all the difference. Show the homeowner that you are on their side. Present the benefits of fixing the problem instead of doing a band aid solution.
• Train your technicians to look for the additional parts that will need to be fixed. Those will naturally become the upsell offer.
• If you are running a campaign or a manufacturer is offering something special, make sure your technicians know about it. A special offer may be the thing that gets a customer to commit, but they can’t do that if the tech doesn’t know about the offer.
• Convey to the customer what the cost of not making the big decision today is going to cost them over time.
• Homeowners may need to plan for the expense. Your tech should be able to help them understand what the expense is going to be and leave them with information if they need time to make a decision.
• If the people in your market never answer their phone, or show up on time, those are the things that will set you apart.
• The big brands are very rarely the lowest price. People are calling them because they have spent time building up their brand and reputation.
• We usually understand the benefit of the upsell to our bottom line, but we also have to convey the benefit to the customer. Those are things you have to sell, that you are saving them time and money.
• When you think about what the customer actually needs, that’s going to give you the empathy you need to come up with great marketing.
• If you want to increase your closing ratio, you have to put in the time and the training. If you don’t make an investment in your staff, you will reap the results.
• When you’re finished with your homeowner that needed the service call, go to the neighbor’s houses and check with them as well. A lot of times the equipment in a neighborhood is in the same condition and they may be in the same situation soon enough. Saying you were over at Mr. Smith’s house doing some work can create instant trust and is a great way to find new customers.

Offering Additional Services

• The first step is doing research on the competition. Is there anyone else doing it? Can you do it as well or better? Can you do it for the same price or less?
• Just because no one else is doing it, that doesn’t mean it needs to be done. There may be a reason that no one is doing it.
• If there aren’t many people doing it, but it is something that people have asked about you may have found the sweet spot.
• The following step is putting together marketing pieces that educate the customer on what the service is and why the customer needs it. The extra service then becomes marketing gold, because it’s something that differentiates you from the competition.
• Be careful about jumping into a new technology, you can buy into some very expensive equipment that can become obsolete very quickly.
• Although price is going to be important for a lot of consumers, trust will trump price.

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