Make More Sales With Your Billing Process
June 17, 2009
Every small business needs to make sales. You want a steady flow of customers to keep that cash coming in and your business afloat.
What you might not realize is putting in place a good billing approach can not only help make sure you get paid, it can actually help you make more sales.
Yes, by billing people you can actually get new and repeat orders.
How?
You might have started thinking of the answer already.
What happens when you invoice a customer? You send them communication. And do they read it? You bet they do, if they are an honest and organized business anyway. So you are sending communication that is almost guaranteed to get read by the people most likely to be good customers! It automatically filters out dead beats, because if they do not read invoices then you do not really want them as customers 
Of course when dealing with some companies you will have to deal with a different department for billing than your main customer. In those cases you need to modify your approach somewhat, maybe with courtesy copies to your main client contact (which I do anyway).
Now we have established your invoices are valuable real estate, what can we do with that information?
Well obviously we do not want to get in the way of getting bills paid, and we certainly do not want to annoy our happy customers.
Keeping it subtle, you could do a couple of things.
- To get repeat custom from the same customer, make an offer. If you post invoices manually, add to your covering letter or drop on a post-it note saying “as a valued customer we would like to offer you …”. If you send electronic invoices then you can add something in the curtesy email or right into the invoice template.
- Get referrals by first just asking for them (”If you know anyone else who could benefit from …”), or if you want to increase your chances consider some kind of incentive, such as a bonus. If you offer a discount on future purchases for referrals, it could kill two birds with one stone, a referral AND a repeat purchase.
You might not want to follow this idea exactly, but do think about how your correspondance can do dual duty. It could be your next sale opportunity is sitting right under your customers nose!