Bundle Your Services For Increased Sales

There are basically only three ways to grow your business.  You can increase the number of prospects you have, you can convert a higher percentage of prospects to customers, and you can increase the value of your customers by having them buy more or purchase more often.  Let’s take a quick look here at having your customers buy more.

In some ways, this is a variation of “would you like fries with that”.  The point here is to increase the value of the sale.  But many businesses don’t know or understand how this applies to them and what they offer.  I am just a simple ________ or I just provide _________ service.  No way, you may be leaving a lot of money on the table.

I recently was doing some consulting for a local service business.  This business offers services that you might use for your wedding.  Initially they had a simple wedding package which included a certain number of hours of service.  You could purchase additional hours of service beyond that if you wanted to.  The problem with this model is that people see the base price and then they want to make sure they go “over” that as little as possible.  When they do go over and you process their charge, they always feel a bit ripped off because in their mind, they had the base price that you initially suggested.  Even though everything is on the up and up, they were aware of the extra charges and so on, they still have a bit of a bad taste in their mouth.  Here is what we did, we created three different service levels.  The basic one, a middle one and an extravagant one.  The purpose here was not necessarily sell everyone the most expensive package - though that would be just fine too - but rather, to sell them the middle package.  Many people, by the way will often purchase a “middle” package.  They don’t want to feel like they are too cheap to spend money and they often don’t need the most expensive thing you sell.  When we bundled the service, we did not simply add extra hours of service and charge more accordingly, we added more service and also a few extra perks that they would not get if they just took the basic package and paid extra for extra time.  Remember, the point here is to offer a whole extra buying opportunity for them.  The base package included 4 hours of service for $600, the middle package includes 7 hours of service plus some extra perks for $900.  The customer gets way more stuff for only half the money extra.

It makes it a lot easier to sell too.  When someone calls in to book the service, we can say, well, if you only go over the basic package you are paying almost the same price as package #2, but if you book package #2 in the first place, you also get this and this and this.  Needless to say, package #2 has become our best seller and by doing that we have pushed what would have been a $600 sale up to $900.  That is the value of a package.

Pricing As A Leverage Point

The process of interacting with your customers can be complicated – depending on the nature of your business. The up-side is that there may be points of contact or times in your interaction when you can boost your revenue. We call these “leverage points” because they can be used to take an existing relationship and leveraged for profits.

Let’s look at one…

Pricing can be an interesting point of leverage. Now, this can depend on what you are offering and the type of business you run. If you are selling candy or bubble gum, you may not have many options this way. But, if you do any kind of consulting or even in many service industries, you have some leeway here. There are a few things you can do with your pricing.

You can increase it. This is one of my favourite ways to make more money. Just charge more. Now, your price has to be justified and backed by your service, but it has been my experience that if you charge more (and support it), you can change your clientelle into people who are happy with what you are doing. You may be able to specialize your service or offer guarantees that appeal to yoru customers. Many business people are under the (false) impression that they will get more business by charging less. All they are doing in this case is selling themselves on the cheap. People are happy to pay for quality and you may find that the people who are happy to pay more give you less grief. And if they complain as much as the cheaper people, at least you are getting paid for it

My position is that if you offer a good service, charge accordingly. And if you aren’t getting enough business, then look at how to improve your marketing. Don’t cut your price. You just haven’t found the customers with deeper pockets yet.

You may be able to offer your service with different service levels – good/better/best and cause your service to appeal to a broader range of users. Can you take your base product or service and add to it and sell it at a higher price? Offer a couple different levels and see what the response is from your clients. You might find that your customers expect more – and are happy to pay for it.

You may be able to offer specialized pricing or package of services to appeal to a certain niche. This may be a demographic or even a specific location or group of people depending on your service. You may or may not be charging more, but the fact that you offer something directly to that group of people will appeal to them and make them feel special. As though you are the only service for “them”.

It never hurts to review your pricing and look at how you can change it to appeal to a different audience.