7 Ways to Increase Your Business for Less Than $50

By James Chevrette

Business has been soft this summer for some shops and good for others.  For those experiencing challenging sales, there may be a tendency to give in and say there’s not much to be done. But here we give you seven ways to get more business by spending $50 or less and a small amount of your time:

1. Clean your store! Move the demo boards, dust the counters, wash the installation bay floor etc. Give everything a good clean with cleaners not just water. Now is the time to do it.  When a customer comes into your store, make sure your store smells fresh and looks clean. If you were going to buy a pair of sunglasses off a display rack, and they were covered in dust or had fingerprints on them, would you buy them?
2. Make sure the demo boards are tidy, no holes or missing parts (trim bezels etc.). If you do not have product for a head unit or speaker hole, make plastic panels or use old grills to cover the holes and place “coming soon” or “new models arriving shortly” signs.
3. Call your customers from the past year and have a customer appreciation BBQ. Costco hot dogs and buns are cheap; inviting customers to the store for an afternoon is priceless. If you get five customers from each month of the previous year, that’s 60 people in your store for under $50. You can even ask a supplier to sponsor the BBQ.
4. Call customers from the past year and check in. “Hello Mr. Customer, it’s John from ABC Audio. Just seeing how the new speakers have been working out in your 2008 Audi.”  If the response is negative you have a chance to fix the issue. If the customer is happy, ask for a 5-star review.  Even if the response is negative, you have a chance at a 5-star review for fixing it. As in example #3, 60+ 5-stars review would be great advertising for free.
5. Ask a supplier to do a demo of products in your store or offer the “X Factory Rep” to meet your customers or tune their cars. We in the industry think this might be trivial, but a customer that bought an amplifier or a pair of good separates would love to have an “expert” listen to their car. Create external excitement for your customers.
6. Offer an annual worst car stereo competition. Every Friday post pictures on your Facebook page of the worst customer-submitted installations etc.   After 90 days, hold the finals in your parking lot. Use local personalities to judge and have “junkyard style” trophies. Just build your own trophies from old speakers/radios or whatever. This idea gives you 12 days of content for your social media and at least three videos from the finals PLUS a picture of the winner with the “junkyard trophy.” This is a no cost social media campaign with fun content!
7. Pick up the phone. People are tribal by nature. We all want to be around others with the same interests etc. Subaru people, Jeep people, Knuckle Dragging Bass Heads they all have one thing in common. Talk to people, interact with people. For those of you who know the Grant Cardone of “10X your business fame,”  he says if you plan one phone call every 15-minutes you reach 32 people a day, for 5 days = 160 customer opportunities you have from your existing customer base.  Think you can close 10% or 16 people with zero cost?

As you have seen by these examples, they tie together.  Clean the store, talk to customers, run social media campaigns. All these examples can be done for almost no cost, just time. You are at the store anyway, why not commit to a 30-day challenge?  For 30 days, plan your day, set a goal to talk to X amount of customers. We have only so many days of summer left, let’s create some business and have fun doing it!

James Chevrette

James Chevrette has been a territory manager for over 8 years with Trends Electronics, a Canadian electronics distributor, but he never forgets his roots.  He has worked in an installation bay, in R&D in manufacturing, and personally trained thousands of people across Canada. Through his dealing with national accounts, regional chain stores, and relationships with brick and mortar independent retailers, he offers a unique perspective about business growth opportunities. He started a non-profit blog in 2015 to educate people within and outside his industry. It has since reached across North America and into Europe with over a million posts read.

Photo: James Chevrette

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