Sometimes, we are our own worst enemies. (In previous posts, I’ve discussed how we often start discounting before we even know if the buyer thinks we are too expensive.) Today, I want to talk about making sure your buyers know about what you have to sell, especially if you really want to sell it to them.
“Bob” (name changed to protect the guilty) runs a fairly successful consulting company. Like many such people, Bob wanted to smooth out his revenue and make it easier to plan for his team. He wanted to move as much revenue as possible from transactional projects to long term relationship retainers. How many of his customers had he offered retainers? Just one. It just wasn’t part of the sales process.
Now there’s an easy way to remember what to offer, whether you are selling yourself or making your sales team more effective. With Mimiran, you can easily create rules to require or suggest that certain products get sold together.
Let’s check out a couple of examples. In the first case, we want to Suggest that whenever we quote an offering whose Category is Generators, we should Include something from the Services Category.
We could also tie the suggestion to a specific product– for example, if the product name is GenWatt 10K, require Industrial Installation.
It’s simple to set up and understand, and while less powerful than a full-blown configurator, it’s much easier (and more cost effective) to implement and maintain.
You can also define bundles of products to sell together that you can add with one click.
This saves sales time, since you can just add a whole solution at once. In Bob’s case, the idea was to always at least suggest something from the Retainer category.
Of course, your sales process may be simple enough that you don’t need to automate it, but if you’ve been looking for a way to do basic configuration and up -selling without installing a full configurator, check out Mimiran. Not only can you put together a quote, you can turn that quote into a killer online proposal.