Note: this is the last post in the series on how to increase sales.

3 Steps to Increase Sales Now- Average Sale per Customer

In the last couple of posts, we discussed how you can increase sales by examining your data using a dashboard or analytical tool, to become familiar with two key measures:

1. The number of customers you have (current, new, lost), and
2. The frequency with which they purchase.

The third measure, increasing sales per customer, is probably one of the biggest opportunities you have to increase sales.

However, few companies recognize this and focus on it.

But you should focus on it.  The cost of sale is much higher when acquiring new customers, as much as 10 times more, than it is to sell more to your current customers.

The average sale per customer is calculated by dividing net sales by number of customers. A very simple calculation.

Focus on your Market Basket

To increase sales to current customers, you’ve got to focus on your industry market  basket. This refers to the particular items you sell, and all the related items needed to make that item function properly or more effectively.

For example the painting industry market basket consists of:

• Brushes
• Rollers
• Sand blasters
• Paint scrapers
• Steel wool
• Putty knife
• etc.

One of our retail customers noticed, by analyzing data from their analyticall dashboard, that average sales per customer were not where they’d like it to be.

However, they were able to increase sales by up to 15% by focusing on increasing the average sale per customer, or increasing the size of the customers’ market baskets for various categories.

They recognized that marketing would get their customers through the shop door, but once inside they had to implement different strategies to increase the average sale per customer.

Some of these tactics included placing products in more highly trafficked areas of the store, training sales associates to offer complete solutions instead of isolated product purchases, and offering commissions to department heads for increasing sales of non-key items or complimentary products.

What do your Numbers Tell You?

I’ve just scratched the surface here regarding how you can measure and analyze sales data using a Business Intelligence tool. But the main thing I wanted to communicate to you is:

Before deciding to implement the latest sales techniques or a new commission program, look at your data first.

You’ve got a ton of it (excuse me, gigabytes or even terabytes of it) in your accounting, ERP, CRM, POS or other systems. You’ve just got to get it out of there and into an easy-to-use analytical tool,

Once you are able to see your sales data visually, and analyze your sales by number of customers, frequency of purchase, and average sale per customer (different ways of slicing and dicing data is known as viewing different dimensions of your data), your eyes will be opened to the opportunities.

As one of our customers recently said: “There are tremendous opportunities in your organization,” if you can analyze your data using a Business Intelligence Tool.

Next Steps

If you’d like to learn more about how KPI Online can help you analyze your data, attend one of our weekly webinars. by CLICKING HERE.

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