10 Effective Tricks To Increase Sales Productivity and Drive Sales

16 min readAug 7, 2022

“Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.” — Paul J. Mayer

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” -Thomas Edison

First of all, there are only three ways to grow a business and double your sales, by increasing:

The number of customers.
The average purchase basket of customers.
And the number of times customers come back and buy again.

In fact, let’s say you have one hundred customers who buy an average of €1000 with each purchase, buy an average of three times in a year.

This gives :

100 x 1000 x 3 = 300 000 € of turnover

What happens if we increase these three factors by just 10%?

110 x 1100 x 3,3 = 399 300 € turnover

Thus, the turnover increases by 33.1%. And a 25% increase in all these factors almost doubles the turnover to €585,937. It is very simple. But the results can be incredible.

Therefore, here are ten things you can do to increase one of these three factors — or even two or three — from my reading in marketing and sales:

1 — Get customers at a loss

Most businesses generate a substantial profit from customers who keep buying again and again — over the long term. And all those repeat purchases can substantially increase your bank account tomorrow. You would have earned a tiny fraction of that money if you hadn’t brought those customers into your business in the first place.

Acquiring customers on a break-even basis or at a small loss and making substantial profits on their subsequent purchases is one of the most overlooked and underutilized methods of growing your revenue available to you.

But until you identify and understand exactly how much combined profit a customer represents to your business over the total duration of your relationship with them, you can’t begin to know how much time, effort and, more importantly, expense you can afford to invest in winning that customer in the first place. You need to know the total lifetime value of your customer.

Many companies increase their customer base and profits by shifting from wanting to make a large profit upon acquiring a customer, to wanting to make a real profit on all repeat purchases that result from these new customers. A classic example are clever collections like those of Hachette: organized in thematic series and offering things as varied as DVDs, miniatures, model parts, etc., they always see their first issue sold for 1 or 2 €, the second around 5 € and all the others — which can go up to more than sixty copies — between 8 and 10 € most of the time.

It is a brilliant business model, because the entry ticket is low, and often the person who bought the first magazines will want to continue, to have the complete collection or simply build his model in full! So at the moment Hachette offers a series allowing to build the model of the battleship Bismarck. On Amazon, the 1/350th model costs 97 €. For the moment, there are 83 issues of the magazine Building the Bismarck at 6,90 € each, that is — if the price of the first magazine is 1 € — a total of 566,8 €! Since these magazines are sent out at a rate of one per week, it is probably easier for subscribers not to realize the total price of what they are buying, which is much higher than the equivalent in the shops.

Do you think Hachette is making money by selling the first magazine in the series for €1? On the magazine itself, no. But compared to the same first magazine that they would sell at the normal price, they probably make thousands and thousands of euros more profit — simply because many people, attracted by this first unbeatable price, will buy the first magazine, and a certain number of them, driven by the principle of commitment and coherence that we saw in Influence and Manipulation, will continue to buy the following issues — at full price.

The idea is to understand that it’s OK to lose money by acquiring a customer if it allows you to generate repeat sales that you never would have had — because the customer wouldn’t have come to you if you hadn’t lost money by attracting them.

2 — Offer an ironclad guarantee

When two parties come together — whether real or virtual — to conduct any type of transaction, one party always asks the other (consciously or unconsciously) to assume most, if not all, of the risk.

When you remove the risk from your prospect or customer, you lower the barrier to action, removing the first barrier to purchase. And that’s what you must do. Assume the risk in every transaction. Let your customers know that if they are not satisfied, they will be refunded, the work will be redone at no extra cost, or anything else that demonstrates your passionate and total commitment to their complete satisfaction.

You’re probably already offering some kind of guarantee. But you have to go beyond that. What you need to do is totally and completely guarantee your customers their purchase. What does guarantee mean? It means that you guarantee that the customer will get the result they expect, or they will get their money back. If it’s not practical or possible to guarantee the entire purchase, then guarantee any portion of the purchase that is practical.

Even better than no risk is a better-than-risk guarantee. That is, you offer something to the customer in addition to a full refund of their purchase, as a thank you for spending time testing your product. This can be a bonus that you offer at the time of purchase that the customer can keep even if they ask for a refund. Some people also offer to refund “twice the amount of your purchase”, with success.

You have a lot of flexibility in choosing the time frame in which you offer this guarantee: it can be 30, 60 or 90 days, or even for life. You can also offer a specific form of guarantee based on the product or service you offer. For example, a fitness club might make a written commitment to make you lose 30 pounds and build muscle in 6 months or your money back.

This kind of very specific guarantee works particularly well, and although a small percentage of people ask for their money back — if your product or service is good — this is more than compensated by the increase in sales. Because the main reason people don’t buy is that they don’t want to look foolish in front of other people, and they don’t want to make a mistake. By using risk reversal and guarantees, you get customers to see that they can’t make a mistake. This gives you a powerful new tool — one that gives you a huge sales advantage over your competitors who don’t offer it.

But your guarantee has to be genuine, and you’ll need to back it up 100% and make sure it has no gaps. Specifically, in general a 60 day guarantee is better than a 30 day guarantee of 20 to 100%. It’s up to you to test and see how much you gain. Jay Abraham, author of Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got has seen strong guarantees double or triple sales while increasing refund claims by only 0.5 to 3%.

3 — Offer complementary products

Most businessmen limit the amount of business they do with their customers.

Obviously, they don’t do it consciously. In fact, it is very likely that this is happening in your business right now. Ask yourself this question: Could your customers get more value, benefits, protection or advantages for every purchase they make from you? If the answer to that question is yes, in even a handful of cases, then you owe it to yourself to show your customers how they can get more value from each purchase they make.

When you make a sale, it’s the perfect time to make an additional sale — especially if there are excellent reasons and benefits for the customer to purchase a package or complementary products.

Here are three simple techniques that will help you give your customers more value, often at a discount to them, while bringing more cash into your business:

Add products or services: Offer your customers the opportunity to add products or services that are related to their basic purchase, and that together will increase their satisfaction level.
Add volume or offer durations: Help your customers decide what is the right quantity and quality they need, or how long they want a service to continue automatically. And offer discounts if customers buy in larger quantities or for longer periods of time.Note: When, at the end of the first year of my business, I offered my customers maintenance contracts in addition to simple one-time computer troubleshooting, my business completely exploded. This is what allowed my company to become profitable.
Add combinations: Give your customers the opportunity to buy combinations or packages that will add value to the products or services.

4 — Test, test, test and test

It’s amazing how few companies test their marketing against anything else. They bet their fate on arbitrary, subjective decisions and conjecture. You don’t have the right or the power to choose what the market wants and what the best price, package or approach is. But you do have the duty, the obligation, the opportunity and the power to put every important marketing issue to the vote of your customers and prospects, who vote with their checkbooks, credit cards, orders, contracts, etc.

Testing applies not only to direct outside sales efforts, but to all aspects of marketing.

If you run newspaper or magazine ads, test different approaches, taglines, arguments, packages, prices, bonuses, etc. Test top, bottom, right or left positioning, test different directions given to readers, etc.

The point is, when you test one approach against another, and carefully analyze the results, you’ll be impressed by the fact that one approach always does much better than the others by a large factor. And you’ll also be impressed by how many more sales you make or how much bigger your average sale is, achieved with the same amount of effort.

Test each variable, each thing, like :

Different ways of saying the same thing
One magazine versus another
One mailing list versus another
One radio time slot versus another
One offer versus another
One price versus another
A guarantee against another
A sales presentation versus another
A packaging against another
And so on.

To effectively test two different approaches, you need to be able to get specific results that will allow you to determine which approach brings you more value. For example:

Use a reply coupon, which will be different for each version of your ad.
Ask prospects to specify a service number when they call or write — it doesn’t have to exist.
Ask the prospect to tell you they heard the ad on XYZ radio so they can get their discount or special offer.
Use different phone numbers — each offer is accompanied by a similar but distinct number.
Make different packages and note what bonuses or prizes people are asking for.
Have the prospect ask for a specific person — their name can be fictional.

Don’t be afraid to do small tests: on a fraction of your target, a sample, which will allow you to get successful results for a fraction of the normal cost.

If you don’t test, you are literally throwing money away. It is often impossible to guess in advance what will work best. Here’s an example to convince you:

An insurance company tested these two catchphrases:
1: “Car insurance at lower rates if you’re a safe driver”

2: “How to turn your safe driving into money”.

The first teaser was 1200% better.

1200%. Imagine if that insurance company hadn’t bothered to test and stayed with the second teaser. They would have made 1200% less profit with that ad, yet it would have cost them just as much.

With the Internet, it has never been easier to generate free, automatic tests that effortlessly give you valuable statistics on conversion rates. If you sell anything on the Internet, testing is something you can’t do without.

5 — Offer products from other companies

Over several years the average company will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing, sales efforts and advertising to develop and maintain a loyal customer base. The cost of acquiring a customer or prospect is enormous. Most companies spend their marketing budget to reach 100% of an audience, even though they will only reach a fraction of that audience. What if you could spend all your time and money on people who are already ready to buy, rather than having to find them among thousands of uninterested prospects? What if you could make money from the unconverted prospects you’ve contacted in the past? What if you could do all this with just a little effort?

Well, you can. It turns out that other businesses or professionals have already spent time, money and effort to acquire customers that could be yours just by asking. And it’s not about stealing a company’s customers, no: it’s about gaining access to their new customers with the express permission and benevolent cooperation of the company that acquired those customers.

The process is simple: Company A agrees that Company B can send a sales message to Company A’s customers. Company A may also agree to encourage their customers to purchase a product or service from Company B.

If you are the recipient, you will gain more customers and money immediately, with little effort. If you are the host company, your customers will respect you for recommending quality products that complement the ones you sell. And you’ll get a percentage of the recipient company’s sales — allowing you to effortlessly increase your revenue.

6 — Win back your inactive customers

Almost every business has a factor that almost no one focuses on. That factor is attrition. Attrition is the number of customers who stop doing business with you or your company. They become inactive customers. Most companies don’t have even a small idea of how high their attrition rate is.

To combat this, you must first identify how many of your old customers are no longer active, what percentage of your customers this represents, and who exactly is an inactive customer. If you are losing 20% of your customers per year, you will need to gain 30% of new customers just to get a 10% increase in sales.

Once you have identified this, you need to understand why customers stop doing business with you or your company. Most people stop buying for one of three reasons:

Something completely unrelated to you happened in their life or business that caused them to temporarily stop doing business with you. They intended to come back, but they just never acted to do business with you again.
They had a problem or dissatisfaction with their last purchase that they probably didn’t even tell you about. So they turned their back on your business.
Their situation has changed to the point where they can no longer benefit from your products or services.

7 — Start bartering

Bartering is probably the most fun, challenging, lucrative and rewarding business opportunity available.

Bartering is not about giving your doctor a few chickens for treating you. It’s a form of leverage that can range from the very simple to the very sophisticated, and allows you to get what you want or need without cash. When you trade, you create buying power for yourself almost at will. You can, literally, create your own line of credit of unlimited amount. You can buy goods and services at much higher discounts and on much better terms than you could with cash.

Understand this: no matter what business or profession you are in, you have the ability to generate products or services that cost you less than their market value. For example, a plastic surgeon can sell his face lifts for €4,000, even though it costs him €400 in actual expenses. A sofa manufacturer can sell a sofa for €3,000 when it only cost €500 to produce.

So you can exchange the goods or services you produce for goods or services of the same sales value, even though your real cost is much lower than this value.

Indeed, the most important parameter in bartering is that if the person with whom you are negotiating has no immediate use for what you are offering, don’t let the deal get away and offer him an unlimited time to enjoy your products and services, up to the limit of the negotiated sum, and tell him that he can pass on this credit to anyone he wishes.

8 — Find dream clients

So when Charlie Munger asked Chet Holmes — author of The Ultimate Sales Machine — to take over advertising sales for one of his magazines, the database was 2,200 potential advertisers. Chet Holmes did an analysis of the market and found that 167 of them bought 95% of the ads in the 4 largest circulation magazines in the area. None of these advertisers were in the author’s magazine, and he was number 15 in the market.

By focusing intensely on these 167 dream buyers, Chet Holmes was able to get 30 of them to buy ads in the first year. This alone doubled the magazine’s advertising revenue. Sales were doubled again the next year, keeping those 30 advertisers, and bringing in 30 more. And they doubled again, for the third year in a row, when the rest of the 167 advertisers started buying ads. This remarkable result came from intelligent targeting and then tireless application of the concepts presented in this book, with stubborn discipline and strong determination.

9 — Educate yourself

According to an article in the Havard Business Review, only 10% of the population has what is called the “learning mindset.” These are the people who love to learn and do it all the time.

What if your doctor didn’t have to keep up with medical discoveries and hadn’t read an article on the subject for 20 years? He might prescribe remedies and treatments that are now known to do damage, or use procedures that have been proven not to work. And yet in most companies there is little or no training and there is rarely mandatory training.

Developing a regular and consistent training program will allow you to effectively and consistently do the following

Train new employees who can hit the ground running
Upgrade the knowledge and skills of your existing employees so that everyone works more efficiently, smarter and faster
Enable ongoing professional development so that your team becomes more and more effective
Solve any problems that may arise in your business

If you take the time to sharpen skills and improve knowledge in every possible area, your business will start to run better, smarter and faster — like a perfectly oiled sales machine.

For all training courses you should keep in mind that repetition is the key to success. Indeed it is common after a training to apply some of the things you have learned and to be motivated by all this new knowledge. You apply things and see that they work. Then a week later, little by little, the old bad habits creep back in, and soon there is only a residue of what you learned that you actually apply. The perception of training is usually that it has given you a lot of value, but in fact very little remains after a single training.

So the key to developing your skills and applying more is to be exposed to the same main concepts over and over again, just expressed differently.

Obviously, the same applies to the knowledge we learn from books. (That’s why I’ve tried to share with you the summaries of the drunks I’ve read😉)

10 — The 39.5 rules of successful selling

Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

Establish and maintain a positive attitude.
Believe in yourself.
Define and achieve your goals. Make a plan.
Learn and practice the fundamentals of selling. Never stop learning how to sell.
Understand the customer and meet their needs.
Sell to help.
Build long-term relationships.
Believe in your company and your product.
Be prepared.
Be sincere.
Qualify the buyer. Don’t waste time with someone who can’t decide.
Be on time for appointments.
Look professional.
Build rapport and trust.
Use humor.
Be fully knowledgeable about your product.
Sell the benefits, not the features.
Tell the truth.
If you make a promise, keep it.
Don’t knock the competition.
Use customer testimonials.
Listen for buying signals.
Anticipate objections.
Dig for the real objections.
Break through barriers. It’s not just an answer, it’s an understanding of the situation.
Ask for the sale.
When you ask a closing question, SHUT UP. This is the first rule of selling.
If you don’t make the sale, make a firm appointment to come back.
Persist, persist, persist. It may take up to 5–10 tries on a prospect before you make the sale.
Redefine objections. They are not rejecting you; they are simply rejecting the offer you are making.
Anticipate and be comfortable with the change.
Follow the rules. Salespeople often think that rules are made for others. But breaking rules will just get you fired.
Get ahead with others (colleagues and customers). Selling is never a solitary job. Cooperate with your colleagues and partner with your customers.
Understand that hard work creates opportunity.
Don’t blame others when the fault (or responsibility) is yours.
Use the power of persistence. Can you take no for a challenge rather than a rejection?
Find your formula for success with numbers. Determine how many leads, interviews, proposals, appointments, presentations and follow-ups it takes to make a sale.
Do it with passion.
Be memorable. In a creative, positive and professional way.

39.5: Have fun! This is the most important rule of all.

Finally, if you want to go deeper into these ten points, I invite you to read the books Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got, The Ultimate Sales Machine and The Sales Bible, from which they are taken, and don’t forget SPIN Selling if you’re dealing with live prospects and customers.