You are surrounded by simple, obvious solutions that can dramatically increase your income, power, influence, and success. The problem is, you just don’t see them.

I have good news—there are only three ways to increase your business:

1. ‍Increase the number of clients.
2. Increase the average size of the sale per client.
3. Increase the number of times clients return and buy again.

A mere 10 percent increase across the board expands your income by 33.1 percent. A 25 percent increase in these categories nearly doubles your income

I smiled pleasantly and went on to explain that as long as their salespeople maintain sales from existing clients at past levels or above, give them 100 percent of the profit on the first sale for every new client they bring in. They’ll be ten times more motivated to sell new clients.

General Motors, Honda, Ford, etc., will sell you a new car for $24,995. Have you ever paid just the advertised price? Or do you buy a few extra items, like a radio, air-conditioning, security system, sunroof, warranty package, or financing?

Combining several, if not all, of these strategies will produce even greater results. The whole will be greater than the sum of the parts.

whenever two parties come together to transact business of any kind, one side is always asking the other (consciously or otherwise) to assume more or all of the risk. If you ask someone to take on all the risk, their first inclination is not to buy.

Your goal is to eliminate as much, if not all, of the risk in the transaction for your client. When you take away the risk, you lower the barrier to action and eliminate the primary obstacle to buying.

Aggressively let your clients know that if they are dissatisfied, you will give them their money back, redo the job at no charge, or whatever else it takes to demonstrate your total, passionate commitment to their satisfaction.

Go to your supervisor and offer to work in the higher position for sixty to ninety days at your current salary. You can guarantee either that the company will be completely satisfied or guarantee a specific level of performance or result. At the end of the trial period, they can make the promotion and raise official or you’ll return to your previous position.

Salting the food before tasting it indicated the person would implement a plan before testing it—ergo, no job.

Determine who in your marketing area is already selling to the clients you want to be reaching, and who has their trust, respect, and goodwill. They would be selling something that either goes before, goes along with, or follows the product or service that you sell to people. Your product or service does not compete with their product or service, but it complements it.

Stretch yourself and start examining subjects, industries, and markets you’ve never been interested in before. Why? Because you’ll get fresh new perspectives, ideas, and insights into segments of the buying market you’ve never thought about before. And you’ll start seeing the connection. Ask yourself powerful questions about how other people use things, do things, sell things, deliver things, service things, make things, compete, and prosper.

Think: highest and best use of your time, money, and effort. Highest and best. Always highest and best!

Always discover what the hidden opportunity is in every situation.

Try to uncover at least one cash windfall for your business or employer every three months.

Build a business breakthrough foundation based upon multiple streams of idea generation instead of a single idea source.

Breakthroughs increase in direct proportion to the amount of networking, brainstorming, and masterminding you do with like-minded, success-driven people outside your industry.

Employ as many success practices of others outside your field or industry by adopting or adapting their philosophies and methods to your business situation.

1. Try to come up with thirty breakthrough ideas in thirty minutes for thirty different areas of your business or career.
2. Next, try to identify twenty overlooked opportunities that your business or job is sitting on.
3. Come up with ten possibilities you could test that, if successful, would result in a major breakthrough.
4. Make a list (and keep adding to it) of as many breakthroughs as you can identify that other industries have produced.
5. Finally, start applying the mind-set you’re now developing to the subject matter of each chapter you are about to read.

Think about the different people you deal with, sell your products or services to, buy from, and work with. Think about them one at a time. Then focus on what that person’s real need in dealing with you is. What results are they truly after?

Acquiring clients at a breakeven or a slight loss and making substantial profits on back-end repurchasing is one of the most overlooked and underutilized methods of client growth and generation available to you.

If you lower or totally eliminate the hurdle in starting a relationship, far more people will begin one with you.

Remember, the goal isn’t just to cut the price of the first purchase. The goal is to make that first purchase so much more appealing that people find it harder to say no than yes . . . please!

Make a list of every product or service you or your company sells. Then figure out how you can lower the resistance barrier to a prospective client, employer, or prospect by lowering the entrance fee you ask.

One of the biggest “competitive-edge” advantages you’ll ever gain is to always make it easier for the client to say yes than it is for them to say no.

When you take away the risk to your prospect or client, you lower the barrier to action, thus eliminating the primary obstacle to buying. And that’s what you must do. Assume the risk in every transaction you have with your clients. Let them know that, if they are ever dissatisfied, you will give them their money back, redo the job at no charge, or whatever else it takes to demonstrate your total, passionate commitment to their satisfaction.

When you tell me that if I am dissatisfied for any reason whatsoever, you will not only give me full and immediate return of my purchase price, but you promise me an additional reward on top—a compensation incentive for having taken the time, effort, and faith to purchase in the first place—I’m impressed.

If you sell products or services, consider offering the client something else in addition (a bonus) when they agree to purchase. Offer them an exceptional money-back guarantee, but allow the client to keep the bonus if he or she asks for a refund.

They’ve had three people in the last five years ask for a refund—which is the negative side. But they’ve had a 300 percent increase in business—which is the positive side. And every piece of equipment that was returned was sold almost instantaneously to somebody else, again on a no-questions-asked, five-day, money-back basis.

Make a complete list of every obstacle to your clients or employers that might prevent them from purchasing, dealing with, or choosing you over your competition. Break them into the following categories:

• Financial reasons: the initial cost or expense of choosing you. And the potential financial loss if the transaction doesn’t work out.
• Emotional reasons: how bad the client or employer would look or feel if his purchase or commitment to you fails to perform.
• Measurability reasons: Can it be measured and evaluated to show the tangible impact you or your offering could or should have on the client’s life, business, or career?

Look at your product, service, or personal performance history to see how many people have been dissatisfied, asked for a refund, cancelled, or complained. If the number is low or nonexistent, that means a high risk reversal would do wonders for you.

Tell me honestly—could your clients be getting more value, benefit, protection, or advantage out of each purchase they make with you? If the answer to that question is yes in even a handful of cases, then you owe it to your clients to show them how to derive a greater benefit each time they buy.

I’m going to show you three simple techniques that will help you deliver greater benefits to your current clients, often at a discount for them, and at the same time put more immediate cash into your business:

• Adding products and services: Offer your clients the opportunity to add related items to their basic purchases from you—items that when combined together will increase the level of satisfaction or significance of the ultimate result more completely, conveniently, and efficiently.
• Adding volume or time options: Help your clients decide the best quantity and quality grades in which they want to purchase your goods or services.
• Adding combinations: Give your clients the opportunity to purchase combinations or packages of goods and services that help them better achieve the satisfying end result they want. With one convenient purchase decision.

Instead of simply selling cars, most dealers offer their clients the opportunity to add on a stereo system, convenient financing, security devices, a sunroof, car phones, an extended warranty, and all kinds of other options to the basic purchase. As you know, they typically make such offers immediately after the client has decided to buy a car, truck, or van.

Write the names of your three best-selling products or services. Now add the end result that clients desire when they buy these items. Then, alongside the names of those items, list some of the ways in which you might increase the value and benefit of those goods and services to your clients by adding a product or service to a typical sale.

Observe what your clients do before they buy your goods or services. Can you provide that to them, too (as part of the transaction) for a fee? For example, if you are selling instructions of some kind, be sure to sell the equipment necessary to perform the task you are teaching

Watch what people themselves do with your service or product after they buy it, and offer to do it for them for a fee. This isn’t just delivery, assembly, installation, shipping, or training as in some of our previous examples. This principle leads caterers to printing and sending out invitations.

See what people buy to go with your product or service in the pursuit of their end result. Make it available to them through you. A fishing-equipment provider will most certainly sell fishing licenses, rent boats at a nearby lake, and provide guide services, since that’s all included in a pleasant day of fishing.

Ask yourself how you would make a client’s end result even more complete. A flu shot that protects future good health very conveniently and economically. Keepsake pictures of a ski trip or anniversary dinner.

Just giving people a structured offer with volume choices nearly always boosts the business you’ll do with a client on the initial transaction and over time. Photographers offer at least three basic purchase options. Only about twenty percent of their clients choose the basic offer.

Consider offering three times the average volume being purchased now for two and a half times the price.

Package your product or service for a period of time. Try a year’s worth first. Any service can be turned into a yearly contract, from HVAC maintenance to initial legal consultations.

Up-sells are different grades, different fabrics, different colors, different styles of blinds or curtains. Cross-sells are other decorations that go along with them;

I strongly urge you to look at your business or practice and ask yourself—could I take any or all of the products or services I sell and reposition them to be more upmarket?

In the majority of the cases when you raise your market positioning and become more upscale, your existing clients look at you with more respect. Thus, they have more loyalty and that turns into more referrals. Suddenly large segments of the marketplace who never noticed you before start noticing you and buying from you.

You can’t get the best results until you comprehensively evaluate all the different approaches you have available in all your business activities.

“Who already has a strong relation-ship with people to whom I might be able to sell a noncompetitive but related product or service?”

A psychiatrist I’ve advised made his business boom by following just one piece of advice: He told the people who referred patients to him (the bulk of his business) to tell anyone they referred that they wouldn’t have to pay for the first session. The psychiatrist ate that cost himself, but more than made it up in new business because so many patients urged friends and family to try him out.

Over one-half of the client attrition I see is the result of loyal, satisfied clients who only intended to temporarily stop doing business but never quite got around to starting back up again.

The moment you recognize that 80 percent of all lost clients didn’t leave for an irreparable reason, you can almost instantly take action and get many—even most—of those clients back. And when they do come back, the good news is that they tend to become your best, most frequent, and most loyal clients.

If you can cut your attrition rate in half, it’s just like adding that number of new clients to your business or your practice. So if you’ve been losing 20 percent of your clients every year and you start with a client base of one thousand clients, you’ve been losing two hundred clients a year. And if you cut your attrition rate in half, that’s like adding one hundred new clients every year.

A retail store I consult sends a $20 no-strings-attached voucher to any client who does not purchase something from them within a nine-month period. Few people can turn down a $20 buying opportunity for free, and fewer only spend $20.

An attorney I advise wrote to all of his inactive clients and offered a free two-and-one-half-hour consultation, just to make sure they weren’t overlooking some necessary legal steps or exposing themselves to a legal hazard. More than half of his old clients took him up on the offer, and about half of that number later became paying clients again.

If the client definitely won’t come back to you, do you just drop the client and the effort cold? My response is to thank him or her for helping me identify weaknesses in my product or service that I can fix or eliminate. And in doing so massively increase my future success or income.

Start a policy of communicating regularly and intimately with as many active clients as possible (if not all of them). This will help avoid the misunderstandings, unintentional interruptions in business, and lack of attention that open the door to competition.

I want you to commit to collecting, acquiring, and keeping every client and prospect on a mailing list, and working that list properly. Keep segmented lists of clients by their purchasing habits. Remember, you make the rules. If you see a client-list technique that works for another industry, try it.

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