Harvesting the Low-Hanging Fruit

How the everyday sales that you miss become easy pickings for your competition.

by Barbara Burke

Would an apple grower who owns acres of apple trees routinely pick only the fruit at the top and the middle of the tree, leaving the low-hanging fruit to fall to the ground and go to waste? Not one who wants to stay in business. The same principle applies when hundreds of sales opportunities are missed everyday because those on the front line who deal with customers by telephone don’t ask for the order, leaving low hanging fruit to go unpicked or even worse, harvested by the competition.

Companies are re-thinking the conventional wisdom that says that selling is the exclusive purview of the salespeople. Savvy companies recognize the myriad sales opportunities available for the picking in everyday phone interaction with customers. A well conceived soft-sell program using a proactive consultative approach will add sales as well as be perceived by customers as a valuable extension of caring and conscientious service.

Selling Becomes “Win-Win”

A good illustration of consultative selling success is the case of a large midwestern horticulture company that specializes in the sale of tulip bulbs by catalog. At this company, the idea of add-on selling originated as a result of the caring attitude of their front line staff. Early one year about three weeks into their busy season, management was baffled when they couldn't account for a dramatic jump in the sale of bulb food. They traced those extra sales to several of the more seasoned order takers. It seems that as a courtesy they where asking those customers ordering bulbs whether they had an adequate supply of bulb food on hand. Sure enough: about 50 percent of the time, this simple question resulted in an add-on sale. That first year those extra sales accounted for an impressive $1.5 million in revenue. By the next season they partnered with a consultant to design and oversee the implementation of a formal upwelling program. By year three, incremental sales accounted for a whopping $5.6 million in added sales revenue.

You don’t need to be a big catalog company to harvest easy-to gets sales. Take, for example, a leading manufacturer of pet food products who discovered that their order size increased dramatically after incorporating a suggestion-selling component into their order capture approach. Each inbound service representative was trained to introduce new products as part of their normal phone conversation with customers. They also began to inform those customers who were very close to qualifying for free shipping if they added a few more bags of pet food to their order. Those additional bags of pet food accounted for an increase of eight percent in over-all sales.

Look for Sales in Unlikely Places

There are sales to be had even in businesses that aren't normally associated with having anything extra to sell. Take, for example, one gas and electric utility located in the Western U.S. Recognizing that with rapid deregulation of the utility industry they would have to do business very differently, this utility systematically re-engineered their internal processes. They extended that re-tooling to customer service and established a centralized call center to handle customer service calls from their large base of residential customers. The change didn’t stop there. Customer service representatives shifted their emphasis from passive problem solving to proactive consultative selling. Each representative went through extensive training to learn to identify customer problems and match those needs with the right service or product designed for the residential customer. The new “inform and educate” service approach was a hit with customers who signed up for programs such as the automatic bank pay, a service that automatically deducts the customer’s monthly utility bills from their checking account. While the customers enjoyed the convenience of automatic bill paying, the utility benefited from increased cash flow and a reduction in collection costs. By the end of three months, the bank pay program tripled in size.

Calculate Your “Missed Opportunity” Ratio

How do you know if your business is missing sales opportunities that are ripe for the picking? Try this easy experiment. Take a few minutes next Monday morning to listen to a random sample of incoming calls. With our calculator ready, total up those potential sales and multiply their dollar value by the thousands of calls your company receives every year. Do the math assuming a closing ratio of 33 percent. The number looming in your calculator’s digital display represents the bushels of low-hanging fruit you leave unpicked. Let’s hope your competitors aren’t rushing to stand under your tree with their baskets in hand.