The worth of a customer is determined by how often you continue to sell them. You might have figured the number of times a customer will be prompted to repurchase, but you also need to consider how much value that customer will have or how much the value will increase if you keep soliciting them again and again.

You want to upsell or re-sell those customers immediately after the initial sale, hopefully at the time of purchase. You may be doing that now.

If you can get them to order another item that goes along with what they’ve already purchased, you will dramatically improve your profits. You want to experiment with add-on products and services.

You can offer a package of related items for a discount so you don’t have to worry about advertising costs.

You can contact your customers right after the initial sale to see how they like the purchase and offer them a deal on something else. Maybe one out of three will take you up on it.

You can upgrade their sale. If they’re buying a basic service, you can offer them a deluxe service but at a $100 discount.

Upselling is just one of the many different techniques that you can use.

You can secure the rights to high profit or repeat-type products that make sense to your customers and keep visiting them or calling them or sending them salesletters.

Also, for example, if you are a heating and air conditioning contractor, you might go in and service the equipment.

You could set up a relationship with a home remodeler or a carpet cleaner and refer business to them with 10% or 20% of the profits going to you. You can set up a deal with a carpenter or a gardener. There are many possibilities.

If you sell something else to half of your customers, you could add $1,000s and $1,000s of profit to every sale.

Once you know how much extra income you can earn on the back-end, you can dramatically expand for the increased amount of money you spend to get those customers since they’re not just worth X amount of dollars to you, they’re worth $ale #2 + $ale #3 + $ale #4, etc. You have to figure out the average customer’s over time which we’ll cover in another article.

If you don’t want to push other people’s services, you could also sell your leads or prospects to other companies. Certainly your database of heating and air customers or your plumber database or your carpet cleaner’s database isn’t that valuable to a non-competing service company. The local carpet cleaner doesn’t care about the local plumber going in and getting his business. You could sell your database to the plumber because those people have had other people come in and work at their house. This automatically increases the net worth of that customer because their name is worth a certain amount.