ForConstructionPros.com

Barry Himmel

Editor's Note: Rental Product News will be periodically running customer service-related columns by Barry Himmel of Signature Worldwide. This is the first installment.

You have the customer on the phone and they're renting an item or purchasing a part or service from you. That's good, but is it good enough? You recognize as a manager that there might be other rental, sales or service opportunities available with this and every customer. While you are happy to get the rental, you want your inside and outside sales staff to upsell and cross-sell.

Revenue obviously is being left on the table by not taking advantage of these opportunities. What would be the impact on your bottom line if you increased the sale or rental of complementary products by just 10 percent? Try this - take your rental revenues for the month and add 10 percent to that number. We are talking about some big dollars. The power of suggesting and asking for additional sales often goes right to the bottom line, as well as increases customer satisfaction.

Let's look at how to build upselling into the culture and sales strategy of your frontline staff.

Would you like fries with that? This is a pretty famous question that illustrates the fundamentals of upselling. Fast food restaurant employees are trained to ask every customer a basic upselling question - it might be about fries, it might be too add a soft drink or it might be to increase to a larger size. The important component is that it's something. If just 20 percent of customers asked that question agree to the suggestion, the impact on their bottom line would be staggering.