Going the Extra Mile – Because it’ll be worth it!

As a freelancer, especially a techie, you have a unique opportunity to offer your customers something they can’t always get from the big boys – you. Personal, smiley service, and taking the time to see if there’s anything extra you can do for them. Sounds good? Good for your customers, but what’s in it for you? Well, taking the time to see if your customers have everything they need from you can also be seen as an opportunity to pitch your other services. It’s a theory used the world over in sales, the ‘Do you want fries with that?’ of the IT tech business, but, as well as upping your customer spend, you’ll be increasing your customer satisfaction as well. Read on for the inside info on “upselling” and customer satisfaction improvement!

“Upselling” – is the process of using the sale of one item – or service – to sell another. So, just as in the “fries” scenario, if you sell a complete system to someone (or you build to order or whatever your particular penchant is within the IT tech game), what else can you do for them? Do they need a health check on their other machines, or maybe they need the new one adding into the network? If you go out and do a software fix, do the machines you are repairing in fact need more memory or some other form of better hardware to make the software run more quickly? Is it time for a data clean, a hardware clean or an antivirus definition update?

Some things you do, depending on what they cost you, what they are worth to the customer, and what they would be priced at if they were an initial enquiry, may ideal to offer for a very reduced price. And if you think about it, you are doing two things – adding to your income (you don’t have any extra administrative overheads to deal with to get this sale, it won’t have cost you anything more than your time to get it) and adding to your customer satisfaction.

How can you identify these extra services or goods, and make sure that you are not caught on the hop (e.g. by offering a service you can’t do before your next call, or maybe offering a part you don’t have with you)? Simple – prepare to upsell, and you’ll be able to prepare what you need if you get the sale.

Make a list of the customers you’ve serviced over the last month/three months/six months. What were the jobs? Could you have done anything more for those customers? Do you have a ‘core’ business item (a thing you mostly do) and would this be added to by offering another service? How much of this business are you going to be doing over the coming months? Will you have to buy any stock to do it? Will this put you out of pocket or can you absorb the cost (in case your upselling doesn’t work)? Think about all of this, and, if you can come up with some key areas, you’ll be able to try them out on your next call/fix/build, and practise your winning smile, excellent communication skills and honed sales skills by trying to upsell to your customer. However, beware not to push too much, or to overdo the offer. It can be a fine line between jogging someone’s memory that they really could do with a virus update and having them running screaming, hands over their ears whilst you babble technical sales jargon at them….so use your words carefully.