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Going through the work of identifying your target audience, really getting to know them and developing products to meet their needs can be very rewarding. If you want it to be financially rewarding, you’ll also need to learn the art of making repeat sales. Repeat sales generate eighty percent of the profits for a successful business. When you’re ready to move beyond the one-time transaction, here are some ideas for mining the gold of repeat business.

Breaking the “Find New Customers” Cycle
It’s difficult to watch someone work very hard to build a business, only to leave the additional income from repeat business on the table. That’s what happens when you’re constantly chasing new customers and making one-time sales to them, rather than offering new products and services to existing clients.

If you think about it, it’s actually easier to sell a product to a satisfied client, isn’t it? So it doesn’t make sense to get caught in the cycle of “go out and find more clients and sell them the same old product.” In order to boost your income considerably, you must, instead, begin creating new products that meet the needs of your existing clients.

Once you make up your mind to pursue additional business with existing clients, you can step off the never-ending cycle of chasing new clients and watch your income move up at the same time.

Learning What Your Clients Need
You may be asking yourself, “But how do I know what my existing clients need?” You can actually use the same process that you used to create your original products. Here are some helpful steps:

• Look at your client base as a target market.
• What questions are those existing clients asking?
• What additional needs continue to be unmet after they buy your product?
• What add-on products complement your original offerings?
• How could your product line be expanded naturally to meet more needs?

Here’s an example that illustrates how a one-product company can create add-on sales to its existing customers. A hypnotherapist specializes in smoking cessation hypnosis. She has lots of clients who come to her for that service, but once they stop smoking, she doesn’t ever see them again. She’s spending a lot of time and money in marketing to attract new clients.

Because her existing clients know her smoking cessation sessions work, they’re the perfect prospects for additional services. By listening to her current clients’ concerns, she learns many of them are ready to take on new challenges in life, now that they’ve quit smoking. She offers to help with visualization sessions so they can focus on their new goals.

By expanding how she sees her existing client base, and focuses on their needs, she has opened the door to a whole new level of income. You can do the same thing. If necessary, take some time off from marketing to new target audiences and turn your complete focus on your existing customer base.

Develop the habit of listening to your clients’ questions and determining what needs still exist. Turn those needs into products that fill them. Not only will your clients be grateful, you’ll also see your income multiply substantially.

You will always have to do some marketing to bring in new clients, but there’s far less pressure when you’re making repeat sales of new products to existing clients. Once you stop chasing new clients and focus on building more products to help your customer base, your whole business will turn around. Learn how to mine the gold of repeat sales to build a strong, sustainable business and a solid base of satisfied customers.

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

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