If you love your business, it won’t take much effort on your part to find new effective ways to improve your sales. Once your new business is running smoothly the extra benefits can fall right into place by doing creative things like…

1 Sending out Thank You or Customer Appreciation Cards – People like to be appreciated. Sending out an unexpected “thank you for all your business over the years” or “thank you for your business”, or referrals given by customers etc. is good business and can increase your sales. Customers like to be appreciated.

2 Sending Gift Cards to Customers Who Refer You To Others And Get You Business – If you run a service type of business you may have had certain customers refer you to their friends and family. These customers may have gotten you thousands of dollars in work over the years from referring you to others. They may deserve a gift card to a nice restaurant or something. This can only sweeten your business relationships.

When I was in Amway years ago my upline distributor sold $200 worth of gift albums to a real estate agent in one day. The way these gift albums work is simple. Let’s say you send a customer a $50 gift album. The customer can choose from a series of gifts in that album that are all priced the same.

Back then, these albums cost anywhere from $25 to $250 I believe. A very nice, professional and handy way to say “thank you” to our valuable customers for their business or referrals! These gifts (or money) can also be given to other businesses that refer you to new customers as well to increase your sales.

3 Remembering Your Customers’ Birthday – I once read that a person’s birthday is the most important day in their life. Going out of your way to remember a customer’s birthday will definitely touch their heart and make you a friend. Take advantage of this little secret with a personal card or note and make your sales soar. Many businesses use this technique.

4 Adding on Extra Services to Your Existing Service – Do you run a house painting business for example? Have you thought about adding on pressure washing, eaves trough cleaning, driveway sealing, window washing or light carpentry? These add-ons are a great way to increase or improve your sales and you don’t have to worry about advertising as much to keep profits coming in.

5 Offering A Monthly Or Seasonal Continuity Program - Adding on a continuity program can make sales flow on auto-pilot. Just as Netflicks offers movies for a low monthly membership fee, Block Buster has been doing it in their stores for years also. For $24.95 a month you get to watch unlimited movies. This locks in and guarantees your repeat business.

Window washing is a perfect example of a continuity program. Most commercial window washing accounts expect you to come back weekly or monthly. It wouldn’t be hard to get homeowners on a continuous spring and fall window cleaning account. Just about any business can take advantage of a continuity program and watch their sales dramatically improve.

The bottom line to all this is that people will automatically tell others about your great service even more than they already do now if you use creative ways to increase or improve your sales. You can literally have customers eating out of your hand and sending you so much business that you won’t have to advertise for years to come. Add that to all the other creative ways you have to improve your sales and you will be as sound as a pound!

Lee Cusano has owned and operated his own successful painting business since 1991. He has also helped many others to start their own painting business with his "Paint Like a Pro Estimating and Advertising CD-ROM".

Lee also offers a new free report titled "How To Quit Your Day Job This Week and Double or Triple Your Income". To get it go to http://www.Painting-Business.com

Whenever dealing with painting business customers a good thing to remember is to get them to start saying “yes” to you right off the bat. A good way to do this is by asking questions that they can never reply “NO” to. No is a negative word.

For instance, when you were a kid and you wanted to go out and play you were probably very creative at getting your mom or dad to say yes to you.

The art of getting “yes – yes” answers to anything you ask people keeps them open minded during the sales process whereas a “no” answer to any question you ask them may begin to close their mind due to the negativity of the word “no”.

Now I know that when someone calls me to have some painting done that they really want the work done and this yes-no stuff doesn’t really matter all that much. But I still use this technique to make my phone calls and estimates run smoothly. I just want to let you be aware of this handy little trick for your people handling skills.

When someone calls me for a painting estimate I always give him or her a choice of two days and two different times of day for me to come out and do the estimate.

To set up an appointment I always ask them, “Would Monday or Tuesday be better to come over and do the estimate for you?” and “Would mornings be O.K.? Or I can do an afternoon estimate for you.”

Doing this helps to keep your painting business customers open-minded and from saying that awful negative “NO” word. Plus, it:

a.) Eliminates any stress or pressure on your part away from the customer and
b.) It also helps them to make an easy decision (something most people hate to make).

You are basically guiding them through the whole marketing process because they don’t know anything about doing estimates or setting appointments anyway. You are the expert in that department.

Once on the job, they will tell you what they want painted and from there you can give them further choices.

Getting people to always say yes to you is like the story about the army cook that had a surplus of stewed prunes to get rid of. He couldn’t get anyone going through the chow line to take any stewed prunes so he started asking, “Do you want ONE or TWO helpings of stewed prunes? They would answer “just one please”. Case in point, nobody said “no” to him!

Now you don’t have to go around trying to be overly-clever or manipulative. And you don’t have to use this approach all the time. But I do use it for setting up estimates and it always makes everything run smooth and professional.

One more technique I use in my painting business is saying things in what is called the “third person”. Sometimes you may have to convince a customer that you are right about a certain painting application. I will say something like “this is how the old-time Dutch painters told me to do it”. Or “One of the older painters always told me that this is the best way to…”.

Sometimes people won’t believe what you tell them. But if you say that “The Benjamin Moore Company says to…” or “According to the makers of Zinsser Primers…”. This is called saying things in the third person and it works like a charm. How did I learn it? I learned it from the book called “How To Win Friends and Influence People” – an all-time best seller! See, I just did it again.

Lee Cusano has owned and operated his own successful painting business since 1991. He has also helped many others to start their own painting business with his "Paint Like a Pro Estimating and Advertising CD-ROM".

Lee also offers a new free report titled "How To Quit Your Day Job This Week and Double or Triple Your Income". To get it go to http://www.Painting-Business.com