Your very best customers make you more profitable. Do what it takes to keep them.

These are your best customers because they like what you sell. They buy from you again and again. And they’re inexpensive to serve. Call them “A” customers. To fatten your bottom line, cater to them.

Unlike bargain shoppers, they’re easy to sell to. Unlike cheapskates, their expectations and desires are already met. And they don’t cost an arm and a leg to satisfy, unlike complainers.

The secret to increasing profits with these people is to identify what they like and give them more of it.

Not far behind are very-good-but-not-quite-perfect customers. Call them “B” customers. They don’t love you as much as “A” customers. They don’t buy as often and are a tad more expensive to market to.

One of the most effective tactics for improving your bottom line is to convert “B” customers to “A” customers. Do this by finding out what they want but aren’t getting. Then give it to them.

To upsell to “B” customers:

1. Provide more profitable products and services at temporarily lower prices as an incentive for “B” customers to discover the benefits that they’ve been missing.

2. Lure them with supplemental or higher-grade products and services when closing a sale. Hamburger joints know this as “Would you like fries with that?”

3. Expose them to products and services that “A” customers love by bundling them with the things the “B” customers already buy. For example, bundled software packages introduce customers to new products at a fraction of stand-alone prices.