How to Get the Next Sale

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It’s one thing to make a sale, it’s another to create a customer.

How you wrap things up with your customers before and after the initial transaction or experience will make the second sale, and all future sales, either automatic, probable, possible, or doomed.

Here are six practices (among many) you can employ to make that customer relationship blossom, build repeat sales, and avoid a one-and-done with new customers.

1. Teach customers and clients up front how you work. Don’t be anal about it — don’t require them to bend to your will — but do set the tone. I’ve learned that teaching people how you work with your customers and clients, provided you have expertise in your field and are easy to do business with, can build an immediate preference for working with you over your competition.
2. Learn your customers’ requirements and expectations, also up front. Once you know those requirements, consistently sell to them. Write them down in a permanent location. Never stray unless given permission. Beat whatever time expectations they share with you and follow-up like your life depends on it. If you’re supposed to always work through Linda for coordinating schedules and deliveries, always work through Linda. Don’t complicate things by ignoring the rules, once established.
3. Make follow-up phone calls with everyone: their accounts payable department to ensure that your invoice is crystal clear and that the terms are understood; whoever will receive your product orders to ensure they understand how to read your packing slips or delivery paperwork; your customer to get their feedback on satisfaction of your product or service.
4. Set the customer up for the next sale during the first sale. Do this by not only selling yourself, your company, and by fully understanding your customers’ current needs, but by knowing thier business well enough that they’ll share with you their future plans as well.
5. Be the optimistic one. Be the one they enjoy working with. Be an “up” moment in their day. Be a call they look forward to receiving. For some buyers this means you always share new products and services with them; for others, you’ve got to be very careful about over-selling. But aside from those narrow constraints, you should always be the one who is helping them streamline and improve. In short, don’t be an expense to them, be a partner and a resource.
6. Be easy to reach. Return customer calls and emails within minutes or hours, not days. Your clients should never see the date change on a calendar before they get a return call.

When you simply sell people what they’re already buying but at a lower price, with prettier packaging, or with a nicer delivery person, you’ve cheapened the entire relationship. It hangs by one thread. Instead, appeal to that longing in every business to make things quantifiably and visually better, faster, leaner, or stronger.