What Are The Buying Triggers of Your Customers?

Do you know your customers ‘buying triggers’?

A buying trigger is a naturally occurring event (often out of your control) that increases your customer’s motivation to buy at a particular time of year.

These buying triggers vary depending on what you sell and how your customers buy.

Christmas is a perfect example of a ‘buying trigger’ for most retail businesses. In the lead up to Christmas, buying something from a retail outlet changes from a ‘want’ to a ‘need. Your customers ‘need’ to buy presents for the family, food for Christmas lunch and lights for the front yard.

If you were selling office supplies to small businesses however, you might see a spike in sales in the last two weeks of the financial year, as business owners try to get tax benefits from spending their budgets now rather than waiting until the new financial year.

The triggers might change, but there importance to you doesn’t.

How to you make the most of these ‘buying triggers’?

By having a plan. And to do that you need to step back and say to yourself, ‘my customers are looking to buy, how do I make sure that they spend their money with me’?

Well, to increase the amount of money they spend with you, you need two things – a plan to ‘up-sell’, and a plan to ‘cross-sell’.

Let’s look at an example:

Say I own a shop that sells Christmas Trees, and I want to increase my revenue.

First, I need an ‘upsell’ plan – how do I make sure that my customers are buying my most profitable trees (get them to buy the larger size, the ones with gold plating etc), and not the cheap ones in the back that have a small profit margin.

Second, I need a ‘cross-sell’ plan – how do I get them to spend more of their Christmas dollars with me rather than someone else? If they buy a tree, they are also going to need tree decorations, tree lights, and a box to pack it away in come January. I know my customers are going to be buying these things somewhere, I need to make sure it’s from me.

By understanding the buying triggers of your customers, and looking at the big picture, its not hard to see how a few changes to your sales strategy can have a big impact on your bottom line.