I’m sure you’ve heard of Happy Hour, but have you heard about Power Hour? Power Hour is something you should be doing at least once a week during your working day. It’s the time that you carve out of your busy schedule to do the highest-payback tasks for your business. These include items like strategic planning, product or service development, deal-making, and leveraged revenue-building activities.

Chances are some of these power hour tasks may not even be on your to do list. Sometimes it takes some brainstorming and being away from working “in” your business to develop the innovative ideas you need to move your business forward.

To make Power Hour the most effective, schedule it on your calendar on at least a weekly basis (a few times a week would be better). The entire hour should be uninterrupted and free of phone calls, email, and current clients.

Power Hour should NOT include:

• Doing billable work for current clients. This will bring in income, but it will not move your business forward like higher-payback ideas.
• Checking email.
• Answering unscheduled phone calls.
• Putting out fires.
• Routine marketing work, such as going to a networking meeting or creating a web site.
• Administrative work or work that falls into your overhead bucket.
• Supervising employees.

We all keep very busy in our businesses, and if we don’t take the time to occasionally stop and take stock, we often become distracted working on things that are urgent but not important.

The things you do in a Power Hour should be a little bit (if not a lot) scary to you. In fact, that’s why we put them off. But they’re the exact things that will allow our business to really take off when we make the time and face our trepidations.

Some of the things you can consider that would go into a Power Hour:

• Identifying power partners that you can make major deals with to bring in substantial contracts or clients.
• Developing new revenue stream ideas.
• Developing human performance skills such as speaking, writing, or negotiating.
• Working with a coach or doing homework a coach gives you.
• Doing a survey to see how you can look for new ideas for new service lines to serve your customers better.
• Going after leveraged reputation-building opportunities, such as speaking to 1,000 ideal prospects or appearing in the news media.

What can you do that is going to bring in a significant amount of business across a multiple number of clients? If you think of some things, make a note right now.

Power Hour also brings perspective. It allows you to slow down and examine all of the tasks on your list to see what may not make sense to do. As your Power Hour ideas take root and produce revenue, you may very well be able to delete some items on your to-do list that are less profitable. That will free you up so that you’re working less and making more. In effect, you’ve just given yourself a raise by implementing Power Hour.

Try Power Hour for a month and see what happens in your business. If you’re already doing some form of Power Hour, formalize it, expand it, and leverage it so that you’re benefiting even more.

We never think it will happen to us. Becoming a victim of fraud is a horrible experience. It can wreak financial damage, sometimes significant enough to put us out of business. It’s a time-consuming business disruption which often involves accountants, lawyers, credit bureaus, bank executives, and IRS and state tax agents (our favorite people, right?). Worst of all, it’s a betrayal by one or more fellow human beings, sometimes relatives; an intimate violation that can leave us emotionally scarred for years.

The purpose of today’s article is to get you thinking about this business threat, relay some common ways your accounting system can be used to hurt you, and to urge you to make a plan to protect yourself against fraud so you don’t become a victim.

Story time

Here’s a list of just a few common ways that someone with access to your accounting system can make off with your dough.

Paying bills you don’t owe.

If you and your bookkeeper both owe Pacific Gas and Electric, make sure the check is going to cover your account balance and not theirs. It’s a common fraud act to pay personal bills from the company account. According to a Florida CPA, “one bookkeeper promised to repay a company owner $50,000, with a second mortgage on the bookkeeper’s house, when caught using QuickBooks this way.”

Also watch out for repeat requests for reimbursements of the same receipts as well as overstated expenses due to improper use of entering bills versus writing checks in QuickBooks.

PayPal, ATM withdrawals, and petty cash violations.

Make sure you have the same controls on your bank accounts as you do your cash equivalent accounts. It’s easy for employees to abuse PayPal accounts, ATM withdrawals, and other cash equivalents if controls are not in place.\

Lackadaisical oversight.

When the cat’s away….

A Connecticut consultant’s clients were living overseas while a cousin was supposed to be handling their bills. The clients were unable to access their accounts online, so they began asking for bank statements. When they didn’t get them, they suspected something was up. They finally had to request the bank statements from the bank and found that their cousin was paying both the clients’ bills and their own bills from their account. It took four to five years to straighten out, plus a huge bookkeeping bill, and they never recovered all of the lost money.

You would hope people don’t take advantage of you when you are in a weak spot, but it didn’t happen in the next story. A Florida CPA tells of a bookkeeper and manager who stole $250,000+ while an owner was out trying to recover from a liver transplant. They kept money that should have gone to pay payroll taxes. By the time you get the IRS letter telling you of the problem, the bookkeeper and manager can be long gone.

Don’t let the mice play.

Sales irregularities.

A Florida CPA alerted me to this story. When a customer attempted to return an item to the Complete Wireless store in Edinboro, PA, the receipt could not be found. Robert Kerner, a former employee, allegedly pocketed over $19,000 worth of cash sales by deleting not only his sales receipts but the sales receipts of other workers. Journalist Tim Hahn of the Erie Times-News wrote, “Kerner admitted to taking the money in order to pay his college tuition.”

Angry employees.

An attorney who was a client of a Connecticut Timeslips consultant terminated their bookkeeper but let her work a few extra weeks. All of the billing was done in Timeslips. The angry employee deleted billings worth thousands of dollars right before she left. The Timeslips consultant was hired to attempt reconstruction of the damage.

It’s dramatic in movies when the bad guy actors escort fired employees directly out of the building (most recently, Margin Call), but it’s a good thing to do in real life as well.

Collusion.

When the bookkeeper is a close friend of a bank teller, it can spell trouble. When they go in together to draft fraudulent checks and pull money out of a business owner’s account, it can spell fraud. This happened to an attorney in Connecticut; to his credit, he noticed some irregular transactions on the bank statement and blew the whistle. You may wonder like I do how people think they can get away with this, especially when it’s an attorney.

Fraud hardly ever ends well, so the best thing to do is to put measures in place to prevent it as much as possible. It’s never a sure thing to prevent fraud 100%, but it makes sense to do as much as is cost-effective to avoid catastrophic losses that can bring an entire business down.

As always, if we can help you in any way with this, please don’t hesitate to contact our office.

(Thanks to Caren Schwartz of Time and Cents Consultants, LLC for the Connecticut-based stories.)

If you could wave a magic wand and work with any client you wanted in 2012, who would they be and what would your business look like? It’s a fun exercise to think about right as we start a new year.

Let’s begin with your current client base. You may want to create a report of customers that you had in 2011 and list them by revenue collected. Who are your top revenue-producing clients? Are they easy to work with? Do you love the work you are doing with them? If so, you may want to find out a little bit about the type of client you enjoy working with so that you can find more of them in 2012.

Are they male or female? In a particular industry? Have a particular personality trait? Enjoy the same hobbies you do? Have kids? Are they from your alma mater? Do they live in a certain neighborhood that you enjoy?

Look to see if your top clients have characteristics in common. You are beginning to make a picture of who you best work with.

The questions are endless, and you may need to ask quite a few of them before you stumble on what your top clients might have in common. Perhaps they are all dog lovers, pilots, or football fans. Perhaps they have all been in business for less than five years. Perhaps they are all transplanted from the south. Once you see the connection, you will have some freedom and a clear direction to find more people just like them.

Also take a look at what services you like to deliver best. Once you’ve been in business for a while, you may have some work that’s not your favorite, but you keep doing it for one reason or another. In 2012, think about how you can proactively attract clients that need the type of work you love to do. Work that challenges you, is interesting, and is profitable will keep you from burning out. Plus, it will help your entire business and your other clients to seek clients that energize you because you will be happier.

Start by creating another report that shows you revenue by service or product line. What would the ideal 2012 mix be if you could wave your magic wand again?

The intersection of your ideal client and your ideal service/product revenue mix is the sweet spot you want to aim for in 2012.

It’s a simple exercise, yet a very powerful one. As the holidays wind to a close, take a deep breath, wave your magic wand, and think about what would really fulfill you as a business entrepreneur. Then take the first step to creating a business full of the ideal client and ideal work of your dreams.

A colleague of mine recently brought this to my attention. The early snowstorm in the Northeast a few weeks ago reminded her of the city of Yekaterinburg, a large city two hours east of Moscow by air that often sees snow in October all the way through May. The western border of Siberia is a few hundred miles to the east. In Yekaterinburg, there are many small businesses whose owners need to keep their accounting books just like you do. However there are a couple of twists as you might imagine.

The old Russian accounting system was built for one purpose: to calculate taxes. And the tax system is complicated, expensive, and volatile. In the 1990s, about 600 new laws were published every year (just in case we think U.S is the only country that has a crazy tax system). The Russian government has broad powers to garnish business accounts, and many transactions are handled in cash to avoid this capability. As a matter of fact, it was quite common for small businesses to maintain three sets of books:

• One “official” set of books for the government.
• One for payroll which was mostly done in cash.
• One for management to see what was really going on.

It’s interesting to see whether QuickBooks could handle such data requirements. At any rate, it would need to be QuickBooks in Cyrillic to support the Russian alphabet. Microsoft Excel is definitely available in Cyrillic; I’m not sure Intuit has any plans for a Cyrillic version any time soon, which brings up another challenge: there are not too many plug and play accounting systems available in Russian.

Another challenge in the new, turbulent post-perestroika economy — inflation. Lending rates ranged between 130% and 200%. That’s pretty brutal to profit margins. What’s worse, a loan has to be paid back in three months. A company needing cash for several months is forced to find a new bank every three months to pay off the old loan and lend it the money for the next three months.

Until 1992, Yekaterinburg was a closed city: No foreigners were allowed to visit for reasons of national security. Concepts that we take for granted in America, such as profit and efficiency, are relatively unknown in Russia. There is no Russian word for “efficiency.” Imagine describing efficiency to an employee who has never heard of the concept or the word.

The chief accountant, who is often a company officer, is usually educated as an economist, which is the closest profession that Russia has to accounting until recently. There is a great hunger for management accounting and reporting because there wasn’t anything like it.

Sometimes it’s a breath of fresh air to experience a new perspective. In the U.S. we don’t have to keep three sets of books; one is quite enough for most of us. It’s illegal to make payroll in cash in most states. We have about half a million CPAs and far more bookkeepers to help us with anything we don’t understand. Most of them are quite efficient, and that’s a lot to be grateful for.

If we can help you with anything that feels foreign to you in your accounting system, please call on us anytime.

If your accounts receivable balances are edging up and getting older and older each month, then it might be a good time to bring out the aging reports. But what if we looked earlier in the cycle to see what we could do to collect the sales even sooner? Let’s take a look at five potential changes you can consider making that will speed up your cash flow, reduce aging receivables, and possibly reduce lending costs in your business.

1. Get paid in advance.

Getting paid in advance manifests itself in a number of ways:

• Prepaid gift cards
• Deposits
• Prepayment plans
• Monthly or project retainers

If it’s common to get paid in advance in your industry, then all you need to do is focus on doing more of it. If it’s not common in your industry, I encourage you to see how you might apply one of these ideas to your industry. You may be able to invent an entirely new way of doing business within your industry.

2. Increase your cash-equivalent payment choices.

If you’re not already able to take the following forms of payment, then it’s time to sign up for:

• Credit cards, especially MasterCard, Visa, Discover, and American Express
• PayPal
• Wire transfers
• Cloud-based bill payment systems

If you have overseas clients, being able to easily accept wire transfers keeps it simple if the client does not maintain a bank account in your country’s currency. And although most wire transfers still need to be handled manually, you can systematize and automate the process as much as you can by having written procedures for your clients.

Offering a cloud-based billing solution such as Bill.com eliminates the physical writing of checks, and you can approve and send payments from anywhere, even if you are on an airplane. The efficiency cannot be beat.

3. Streamline your time and billing system.

If you can bill faster, you can collect faster. Take a look at your processes and identify the bottlenecks in your billing system. Is it the partner who keeps the invoices on their desk for days before they are approved to be mailed? Is it an antiquated time system that is not real-time? Is it duplicate data entry that can be streamlined? Once you’ve determined your bottlenecks, you can take action to eliminate them.

4. Implement eCommerce.

An online shopping cart can help clients serve themselves and cut way down on your customer service. Today’s online shopping carts can handle one-time payments, recurring payments, and variable bills. The best of them offer a portal for clients to update their own credit card expiration dates, respond to declined card messages, and basically serve themselves. It’s quite fun to come into the office each morning and find loads of cash sales already in your cart from the night before, without any help from you or your staff.

5. Card on file.

For long-time clients, it makes sense to set up automatic approval on a monthly basis by having their card on file. Most busy and successful clients will appreciate the time savings when using this method, and you will have more control and be able to get paid faster. You can also use a hybrid of this method – semi-automatic approval – where a simple email exchange approves the current month’s amount.

Try one or more of these five tips to speed up your cash flow, simplify collections, and lower the amount you need to borrow from the bank to finance your business.

Do your prospects sometimes balk when you quote your prices?  Do you feel you’re losing business because your fees are too high?  The problem might not be your prices; it might be the way you’re presenting them to potential clients.   Many business owners blame a lost sale on price, but only a small percentage of customers are truly price-sensitive and will make a decision based on price alone.   That means the majority of the market buys on value, not price, and that’s what we need to move the focus to when we present prices.

The following are six ideas to help you reduce fee resistance and possibly even raise prices without receiving objections about your fees.   The overall key is to reduce the prospect’s risk of doing business with you while increasing the chances that they will look like a hero after they have hired you.

1. Acknowledge their fear or skepticism.

If your client has just had a couple of failures with other vendors, lost some clients, or laid off staff, he is going to be defensive and skeptical about any proposal that has him spending a large amount of money.  The last thing he wants to do right now is make a mistake hiring the wrong vendor.

The first step for you is to see the world from your buyer’s eyes.  If the budget is tight, you have to acknowledge this elephant in the room.  Show them how your service or product can reduce their pain and fit in with their current situation.  And show them where it falls short, if it does.  Being honest goes a long way and reduces defensive behavior on the prospect’s side.

2. Build vision.

Work with the prospect to see the vision of their problems solved.  Staying at this high level will allow you both to communicate the big picture and avoid getting lost in the details.

3. Gain buy-in before you write the proposal.

“If we can deliver this, does this sound good to you?” is the type of language you want to use during the initial conversations.  As much as you can gain buy-in at every step, do so.  This will allow you to keep one eye on where your buyer stands emotionally as well.

If the answer is “no” to the above question, then you have saved time in the proposal stage.  Don’t write the proposal until you know what should be in it that will be accepted.

4. Give your prospect a choice of  YESes.

In your proposal, create three options: a small, medium, and large, if you will.  This reduces your chance of getting a “no.” Your buyer has a choice of YESes to make instead of a yes-no decision.

For example, a trainer’s small option might be two train-the-trainer sessions, 500 licenses, and no instructor manual.  A medium option is two train-the-trainer sessions, 1,000 licenses, an instructor manual, and email support.  A large option is four train-the trainer sessions, 2,000 licenses, an instructor manual, two days of onsite support, and email support.

5. Use value words in your conversations, materials, and proposals.

When possible, use words like “investment” instead of “expense.”  Also watch your ratio of “you” statements to “I/we” statements.  Always use more “you” statements than “I/we” statements.  List items you will be doing that are included in the fee and list them in the fees sections as “No charge” or “Included.”

6. Compute ROI.

If you’re dealing with larger accounts, calculating return on investment is pretty much mandatory.  Estimate the value of the problems that you will be solving for them, and compare it to the cost of your service.  There should be at least a 10 to one ratio, in favor of the prospect.

Include a per person component, if applicable.  Your fee might sound high in total, but when you spread it across the number of individuals you will be impacting, it can sound really low.  For example, a $20,000 training fee spread over 5,000 participants is only $4 per headcount.  Let us know what numbers you need to make your marketing presentations complete.  We can work with you to compute the number that communicates your value in the most informative way.

These tips will not only help you get what you’re worth, but they will increase your value in the eyes of the client, resulting in a more satisfied client.

Does it seem like you need to accomplish more in less time than ever before? Just about every small business owner I know is overwhelmed with everything they need to do. Many factors are contributing to this feeling: new technologies, increased government regulation, a need to market harder, and less access to capital are just a few examples.

Is there truly a way to find an extra hour each day? Yes, there is, and here are five tips you can put in place to reduce the feeling of overwhelm, free up time, and feel more in control of your business.

1. Get stuff done off prime time.

Most people drive to work between 7 and 9 and come home between 4 and 6. Save yourself 15-30 minutes per day or more by coming in before or after the rush.

Apply this same idea to your weekly errands or times when you need to stand in line. Go to a restaurant a little early (or late) to avoid the busiest times. Go to the grocery store during the week instead of on Saturday.

Doing this for 10-12 errands per week will save an hour a week or more. Combine that with the time you’ll save in rush hour, and you could save as much as three hours a week using this idea. Even if you can apply this idea to only one or two days a week, you’ll still be ahead of the game.

2. Delegate clerical or personal tasks.

Make a list of all the tasks you are doing that a minimum wage earner could do, and hire a college student for a few hours a week. You’ll benefit from systematizing the tasks you delegate – they will get done more efficiently – and you will have freed up a few hours a week once your worker is trained.

3. Practice Power Hour.

Carve out one hour a day to complete the most profitable task for your business. This might be making sales calls, meeting with a power partner, or designing a new service or product to offer clients. It’s best if it’s the first hour in your day. In any case, the time should be sacred, with no checking email, no answering the phone, and no texting.

Your business will really accelerate when you make Power Hour a regular practice.

4. Check email and social media less often.

Turn off automatic send and receive in your Outlook or email application. Instead, close (yes, close!) your email application for most of the day. Check it only at 8am, noon, and 4pm. When you can break the addictive cycle, you will have fewer interruptions, be able to focus, and do higher quality work.

Likewise, if you need to spend time on social media, set a timer before you start. When the bell rings, that’s it! Get back to work.

5. Nail your time wasters.

The only real way to determine where your primary time drains are is to track your time, minute by minute for a couple of days. When you review the log, you’ll be able to see what’s going on and what you can do to prevent time from slipping through your fingers.

When you can use your time wisely, you’ll not only get more done, you’ll get the things done that matter to you.

You might have routines and systems to help a new employee settle in, such as payroll forms and training manuals.  You might also have some procedures set up for when you start doing business with new vendors, such as asking them for their tax ID paperwork and having them submit invoices to your standards.  But what about onboarding new clients?  Most entrepreneurs don’t think about systematizing that process.

You will save a ton of time if you stop and put some systems in place to help you and your new client get off to an efficient start.  The payoff can be extremely high.  If you save a half hour per client and you have 100 new clients a year, then you just saved 50 hours a year, or an hour a week.

Here are a few tips to get you thinking about where you might be able to streamline your new “New Client Acquisition Process.”

First the Paperwork

What forms do you need from every client?  These might include:

• An engagement letter or contract that describes the scope of the work to be done.
• Billing information, which might include a credit card on file and the process they want used to submit and approve invoices.
• How the client found out about you for marketing tracking purposes.

You can further systematize this by having a standard engagement letter, a form each client fills out, and/or a standard pre-written email (forever saved in your drafts folder of your email program for easy access).

The Good Old Days

Way before computers and the internet, all types of businesses used to run credit checks on new customers before opening their accounts.  That might not be a bad idea to bring back!  If so, you’ll need a form for that so that your clients can provide you with the information you need to run a credit check.  Either that or provide them the ability to prepay their account.

Getting Started

Make a list of items you need from your clients to get started.  This will vary depending on what industry you serve.  Here are some common items to get you started:

• Contact information include staff names, titles, phone numbers, and email addresses
• Account names, user IDs and passwords
• Description of their problem if it’s repair-related
• Hardware and software information if it’s a computer-related service
• Any documents you need to complete your project
• Insurance information
• Licenses

Once you have your list, you can create a form asking for all of the information you need from every client.  This will save you tons of time if you are asking for these things piecemeal now.

Instructions

Do you find yourself repeating the same instructions over and over again to each new client?  Write your spiel down or better yet, make a recording so your client can listen in at their convenience and play it over and over again if they need to.

Here are some common implementations of this one:

• Photography studio owners can write down how clients can prepare for their portrait and what to wear.
• Grocery stores can provide recipes for items in their deli.
• Plant nurseries can have instructions on how to re-pot plants.
• Plumbers can provide instructions for how to turn off the water.
• Restaurants can offer menus that disclose ingredients and calories for those who are sensitive or on diets.
• Office supply stores can make a chart of how different products compare.
• Web hosting companies can have screen-capture videos made on how to set up email accounts.

You’ll save tons of time with this one.  What can you think of to save yourself time onboarding clients?

Systems

There’s no doubt you’ll need to enter some information into your sales, order, accounting, or project system in order to set up your new client.  If there’s any way your client can do this directly, then you will have saved yourself a step.  Take a look at where you have duplicate data entry and explore ways to automate it or have the client enter the information directly.  We can help you with some ideas if you need help in this area.

Welcome Packet

Is your business the type that could send your client a welcome packet of goodies?  If so, shower your new client with bonuses and goodies so they’ll have a positive first impression that will last a long time.  These items will include anything that saves your client time and money, and will NOT be a bunch of promotional items with your logo on it.  (If it has your logo on it, it’s not a gift; it’s an ad.)

These items might be checklists, reports, tips, cheat sheets, candy, flowers, liquor (if your license allows it), a thank you note, a stuffed animal, and/or anything else that is a traditional gift.

Take a look at all the steps you go through to onboard your client, and see where you can streamline your systems so that both you and the client will save time.  You’ll also look amazingly organized to the client, which is a good thing!

Is finding enough time to do everything you need to do one of your top five small business challenges?  If so, you’re not alone; just about every entrepreneur lists “time” as a challenge they face today in running their businesses.  It’s not uncommon to feel stressed and overwhelmed at everything you need to do.

Plenty of time management books will help you use your time more productively, but who has time to read a whole book these days?  Instead, here are some quick tips to help you work smarter, ease any stress, and tame the time monster.

The 4 “D”s

You might have seen a strategy that allows you to evaluate how to handle each task or e-mail as it comes across your desk.  Here’s mine:   1. Do,  2. Delegate,  3.  Delete, and  4. Delay.

It’s pretty self-explanatory.  For each task you have, you choose one of the four.  Do means drop everything and do it now.   Delegate means give it to another person to do.  Delete means you didn’t really need to do that task in the first place and you can cross it off the list.  And delay means you’re going to do the task later and not now.

Every single thing that comes into your life can be handled using this 4D filter:  do, delegate, delete, and delay.  It’s a great tool, and I’d definitely recommend trying it if you don’t have a system for yourself. But there’s an even better idea.

The Secret Sauce

Once you’ve applied your formula and you’ve decided on the tasks you’re going to “do” today (the first of the “D”s), there’s another step we can add that will actually start freeing up some time.  With tasks you’re going to “do,” you have two more filters to try:

1. Can I automate this task?
2. Can I systematize this task?

Go ahead and “do” the task the way you’ve always done it.  Then add another step that essentially asks: “Is there a better way?”

Take Your Biz Off Automatic Pilot

It’s funny how we keep doing the same things over and over again the same way, even though our business has long outgrown the way we’re doing it!  Sometimes we don’t think to question whether there are new ways of doing things faster.  We might not want to tackle the learning curve, even though we could save a lot of time in the long run.

Have you ever noticed what often happens when you add or replace an employee?  You’ll see that systems need tightening up or automated. You might create procedures and implement new software and tools with the new employee to make the job even more effective.   Of course, you don’t have to hire a new employee to make this happen.

Workflow Improvements

Frank is a do-it-now sort of guy.  When he needed something, he needed it now.  He was making multiple personal errand trips several times a week to purchase groceries, make dry cleaning runs, do banking business, and mail packages.  His new assistant, Beth, took over all of those tasks and she also systematized everything.  She created inventories and re-order points on all his supplies and even his groceries.  She set up procedures for all her new tasks.   What took Frank 10 hours a week now takes Beth 3 hours a week because she eliminated the redundancy and streamlined the job.  Now that’s a time management tip worth implementing.

More Important Things

The 4Ds, Do, Delegate, Delete, and Delay, are a great way to organize your time.  To save even more time, take a look at automating or systematizing everything you can, and let us know how we can support you.

Won’t it be nice to have time for more important things?

Restaurants do it beautifully.  “Did you leave any room for dessert or coffee?”

The All-Important Upsell

How does your company rate when it comes to the all-important upsell?  Is it smooth like a restaurant waitress who smiles while she delivers her line? Or could it be improved?

The essence of a good upsell is to fully serve your clients needs in a way that helps them and boosts your revenue.  Here are five tips to perfect and track the all-important upsell.

1. Make sure you are upselling.

Once people have chosen to do business with you, you have their trust.  They’ll want to know what else you have to offer.   Sometimes we may feel like we’re bugging the client, but it’s really cheating your client not to let them know what else you can help them with.

Don’t be afraid to add upselling to your communications with your client in a number of places.  If you don’t upsell, you’re often under serving your clients.  A small percentage of your customers will always purchase what you suggest.

2. Get the timing right.

Add an upsell option immediately after a prospect has landed in your funnel.  For example, if they signed up for your free newsletter, offer them your entry product or service on the landing, on your Thank You page or in your first welcome email to them.

If your product or service is relatively small in dollars, add an upsell option immediately after any small purchases. Do this right after the shopping cart has processed their order.  Some carts have an automatic feature built in to do this; all you have to do is select the product you think the buyer would like.

Don’t upsell right after you’ve agreed on a large proposal, but do upsell at the end of that engagement.

If you meet a client periodically, such as monthly or quarterly, always schedule the next appointment before you leave if possible.

3. Get the product right.

Gradually move your client up in price.  If they purchase something for $100, offer them something for $500, but not for $5,000.  If they buy a $5,000 contract, they might be ready for a $10,000 service next year.

4. Create the right language.

Never put your customer in a position where they feel forced to make a decision or feel wrong for not taking the service.  Use language that is benefit-focused when you explain the options, and always let them know that you appreciate their business and the decision is theirs to make.

5. Package your offerings right in the first place.

Services that should be included in the base price, well, should be included in your base price.  Don’t confuse upselling with what should have been in your package in the first place.  That’s how most clients feel cheated during upsells.

Tracking the Upsell

There are a couple of ways you can track your upsell results.  If you offer every client who bought “x” the “y” product, you can compute a conversion ratio based on your sales of x and y, assuming you keep them in separate buckets in your accounting system.  You can do that for every upsell you have at the service line or product line level.

Another more general way to track upsells is to compute revenue per client on a monthly basis and see if it’s on the upswing.  If you need help calculating either of these methods or setting up your services and products correctly to create the upsell tracking you want, please let us know how we can help.

Upselling is a vital part of every business.  Fine-tune your processes with these tips and watch your sales increase and your clients become better served and more loyal.