A reason why your profits are stagnant

When you sit down in a dentist’s chair for your annual or bi-annual teeth cleaning, the hygienist might do something crafty…

They’ll call the dentist in for a ‘checkup’, to see how your dental health is. The end result of this checkup is to find either problems to handle (cavities), or things to improve from ‘mediocre to great’ (teeth-whitening).

You can very easily come in expecting to pay $100 for a teeth cleaning and then leave with a bill for $2000, from additional services for things you now feel you need.

This didn’t happen by accident. It’s called an upsell.

And you can do it too!

Contractors are in an excellent position to offer upsells to customers. Whether you’re a plumber, roofer, electrician, landscaper, general contractor, there are opportunities for you to offer to serve your customer at higher and higher levels, taking care of all their needs.

This is very important for your business’s health.

If a dental office only ever promoted their teeth cleaning services, they’d go broke, and go out of business. If it costs $200 in advertising/promotion to acquire one customer, and they only do a teeth cleaning once a year, for $100, the business is not sustainable. Therefore to profit and keep the business alive and secure, the upsells are essential! The teeth cleaning gets the customer in the door, with a low cost service, which recoups the cost of the advertising, and the teeth straightening/whitening is where the business profits.

The same goes for contractors.

The best way for a contractor to leverage this is by offering free inspections, or low-cost, low bar of entry services, and once your technician does the job, they then find high-end services to upsell. For instance, an electrician who comes out to replace a circuit breaker box, and then upsells a solar array. Or a landscaper who comes out to do a lawn, and then up sells a custom paving stone driveway. And don’t get me wrong, not ALL will take the upsell, and that’s ok, you don’t need ALL of them to buy the upsell, you only need a few.

If your profits are low and you just don’t know what to do, this may be one of the causes.

Get aggressive about it, and get your sales & technical teams never failing to promote an upsell.