Summary: If you don't think increasing order size and frequency is important, consider the alternative. Small orders and one-time clients can kill a business. You can spend an enormous amount of time tracking down one small order. And if you do a lot of that with a lot of different people, you can be busy, busy, busy, all day long, but not generating the revenue you need to sustain, let alone grow your business.<br> <br> <br> <br> David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, cohost Jay McFarland, and I will be discussing increasing the size and frequency of your client orders. Welcome back, Jay.<br> <br> <br> <br> Jay: Thank you so much. And I have to tell you, I really love this topic. Because I think people get in a rut where they think the only way to increase profit is to add more customers, instead of looking at your current client base and saying, well, how can we expand on what they're doing and using them as a lead source?<br> <br> David: Right. Yeah. And there are lots of different ways that people can engage in this. And the reason that I raised the topic is that Chris Ruvo from ASI recently published an article about a survey they did at the ASI Show in Chicago recently. And they talked about the biggest concerns that promotional product distributors have.<br> <br> And the one that came up as number one in the options that they were given was increasing the size and the frequency of client orders. So I thought, okay, this is a really good topic to discuss. Because it has such a tremendous impact on people's businesses and it's hardly ever considered. Right?<br> <br> A lot of times, as salespeople, we go out there, we get an order and we bring it back and you know, it's just like hunting.<br> <br> You go out. You hunt it down. You kill it. You drag it back. You cook it and eat it. A lot of people take the same sort of approach in sales. And we don't recognize the fact that different clients are going to behave differently. Different orders are going to be different.<br> <br> When we combine small orders and one-time clients, that combination -- small orders, and one-time clients -- can really be a business killer. Because you can spend an enormous amount of time just tracking down that one order.<br> <br> It's a small order and you spend a lot of time on it. And if you do a lot of that with a lot of different people, you can be busy, busy, busy, all day long, but not generating the revenue you need to sustain, let alone grow your business.<br> <br> Jay: Yeah, such a good point. And I think for a lot of companies, their biggest expense is that customer acquisition cost. Right? And if you can lower that or make it so once you've experienced that cost, you don't have to experience it over and over again. Because you're increasing sales with your clients and increasing their orders. That's just a really smart way to go, I think.<br> <br> David: Yeah, exactly. And so when we have clients who are able to spend more, place larger orders and are willing to do so more frequently, then that's a real winning situation.<br> <br> But for people who don't have that, it becomes a real struggle. Because they say, "okay, well I've got all these different customers, and they buy from me once a year and they place small orders. Where do you go with that? And the reality of the situation is that if you don't have clients like that and you want to create a better, more sustainable business, you're going to have to actually go out and hunt them down.<br> <br> As you talked about, it's better when we can do it with our own internal customer base. Unfortunately, that's just not always possible.<br> <br> Jay: Yeah. Not always possible. But I'm sure there are some tricks to the trade. I'm wondering, do you do this by offering or adding different product lines so you can offer something new to these clients? What's the smart way to go about this?
