Take this challenge:

What will make our clients consume more?

Companies can often have a way to sell more of the same to their existing customers without compromising future revenue. Here are some examples of that. Can we apply it too?

Your toothpaste

Remember that toothpaste company that enlarged the hole at the top of the tube to make consumers buy it more often? Or have you noticed that the grocery store in your neighborhood started to use larger shopping carts? Both examples reflect small, yet brilliant changes that work like magic and help companies sustain a significantly higher level of sales than they used to have. The headline question is asking if we apply that kind of magic to our type of offering and business environment. Here are ten additional, hypothetical examples, of which five relate to products and the other five relate to services.

Selling more of the same products

1. A drug company may be able to let its consumers download an app to remind them to take their pills on time. One pill that you didn’t take today, will not make you take two tomorrow, and your next purchase can wait another day, or move over to the next quarter.
2. A manufacturer of dairy products can add great recipes on labels, to encourage additional usages of its products.
3. A distributor of oranges can provide retailers with a cheap juicer, as a giveaway for their clients.
4. A distributor of propane can also market devices that use propane for other purposes, such as heating water.
5. A manufacturer of coffee machines may be able to make it clean itself more frequently. This more frequent noise may remind people that it’s time for another cup.

Selling more of the same service

1. Those who provide machinery maintenance services can remind their clients when it’s time for the periodical service.
2. Business consultancies can benefit from just keeping their clients aware of the variety of projects they support.
3. Providers of cloud services can help their clients transform more of their business processes.
4. Dentists can provide their clients with before-and-after photos of plaque cleaning to encourage them to schedule a cleaning more often.

What this magic is not about

Please note the following clarifications for what this magic is not about:

1. It’s not about cross-selling, i.e. selling our clients with additional, different products or services (we will soon circulate our cross-selling challenge too).
2. It’s not about upselling, i.e. selling our clients a product or service of higher quality or functionality.
3. It’s not about selling to additional clients on top of the existing ones (yes, we have a challenge dedicated to that too).
4. It’s not about increasing our capacity for being able to handle the current levels of demand (you guessed right, we will cover that too). We would like to create higher levels of demand through existing clients.
5. It’s not about selling more for lower prices or stuffing our clients with large stocks. Doing that will erode our profitability for this quarter and exhaust our sales for the next one.
6. It’s not about playing around with ethics. A brilliant solution is also ethical. In fact, it should create a win-win situation.

Mind the slippery slope

Mentioning ethics, the line can sometimes be dashed, and crossing it may greatly damage our reputation. In extreme cases, it can also have legal implications. Here are two “Don’ts” to keep in mind:

1. We don’t want to compromise the quality of our product.
2. We don’t want to provide our consumers with directions of use that will make them waste much of our product.  

This challenge is all about bringing our existing clients to buy more of the same, in a way that creates a win-win situation without compromising future revenue. Can you come up with a new way that we may be able to apply?

Good luck!

© Dr. Sharon Gotteiner, Corpocheck.org. All Rights Reserved. This publication is intended for individual use only. Please consider joining the Enterprise Plan for integrating our materials with the organizational innovation process in place.

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