January has been a busy month of sales seminars, sales training and motivational speeches so I hadn't had any time to think what I was going to write about this week until about half an hour ago...

I was sat at my PC in my home office, tidying up some emails when one of my good friends called. It's been a while since I have spoken to him so I was delighted to hear from him. It was great to catch up and find out everything that my friend had been up to! He said that he has something he thought I would be interested in hearing...

This story starts with my friend's 18 year old son who is currently enjoying a gap year, getting his head down and working. He has a job in major UK supermarket and he is really enjoying it.

Based in South West London the store he is working in is busy, affluent and diverse. It's not huge but it's a decent size. They have around about 150 staff and shifts would mean that at any one time there might be 40 or more people working in the store.

Like most retailers the store chain in question are keen on their customers owning and using store cards. This creates loyalty, allows the store to compile details on personal shopping habits and group trends and, perhaps most importantly, allows them to extend credit to their customers.

And as any business who has cards like these knows, customers on credit are worth far more than those paying cash!

So back to our little store...

Like most stores they have targets and goals and their most recent "push" is on encouraging customers to sign up for more store cards. Each member of staff, whether individually or as a group, is trained to "upsell" these cards and are then let loose on the customers. Not particularly ambitious, their target number of take ups is 4 cards per week... for the whole store.

So for the next week our young hero, despite not being on the till much of the time, asked every customer he could if they would sign up. Despite his lack of experience or formal sales training and techniques our hero signed up... 18, in one week. Now I have to admit that I have no idea how this rates or how many you or I would have signed up but it is obviously well over the target of 4 that was set for the whole store.

At the end of the week our young salesperson goes on his holidays, returning two weeks later to find out that in his absence the whole store, 150 people remember, have upsold exactly ... zero.

Zero in 2 weeks. So what do we learn from this?

1. Upselling and cross-selling to existing clients is critical if you want to sell more and make more money.

Clients who have already bought off you, who are in a buying mood and who believe in and see value in what you do are great prospects for upselling and cross-selling. There is every possibility that they will buy something else if you make it known to them.

I remember as a young salesman one of my best clients buying something off someone else. I spoke to my client some time later and he apologised to me saying that he did not know that I could supply him with what he wanted! Ouch! I never made that mistake again!

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