Improve Your Selling by Thinking Ahead

For most salespeople, selling is all about getting customers to walk out with a product. If the customer buys one item, it is a successful sale. For advanced salespeople, just getting the customer to walk out with one item is not enough. Instead, a customer buying one item is only a sign that there is more than one sale to be made.

To make an additional sale, some forethought is required. You need to think about what your customer is buying and what they are going to use it for. For example, if a unshaven man comes in to buy a razor, you can assume that he is wanting to shave.

Making a second sale is easy once you have an idea of what the people is wanting to do. What could an unshaven man buying a razor also be sold? Think shaving cream. We know that the man will want to shave straight away, so checking that he has shaving cream might result in an additional sale.

A similar idea can be used to sell more of the same product. If you recognise that a regular customer is buying shaving cream for the 4th time we can assume that they are going to want more later. This action of thinking ahead means that we can now sell the customer a larger container of shaving cream. If there are no larger containers, we can always reduce the price for the customer if they by more.

Thinking ahead can also be used to compete with your competition. If you know that a customer is going to check the price of the competitors product, you can save them time and also make a sale. First you need to check out the prices of the competitors products in the morning. Later on when a customer is looking to buy one of your products, you can say what the competitors price is and then offer a price that is lower.