Here's a good advice for any business. If you want to sell lots of products and services and expand your business with loads of eager new customers. Sell wide, sell deep.

Let's look at this timeless rule of good marketing. It's full of ideas and inspiration that can flatten your pocketbook rather quickly. The best ideas are ones that help you work smarter and effective, not harder and ineffective. Here's how "sell wide, sell deep" works.

To sell wide means offering lots of products or services that follow a basic theme (for example: all things offered by a printer). "Sell deep" means finding lots of good variations on a successful product. Let's say you have one product or service that customer after customer is ready to plunk down money to buy. You start thinking "If I had ten products just like that one I'd get rich. "If you've got a successful blue shirt that everybody wants, why not expand on the idea? Offer a yellow one. Then offer a red one. Then maybe even trousers! Before you know it, you could be the manager of a store located in the most exclusive district. That's selling "deep." Now offer different kinds of clothes and related items like accessories. Give your customers choices of old-fashioned styles, modern styles, trendy styles and so on. That's selling "wide."

Many businesses find a big increase in revenue when they introduce customers to a low-priced product, then step them up to increasingly more involved and expensive products or services. Customers are ready to spend more for more advanced services as they come to trust and rely on you. If you aren't able to provide extra products or services yourself, contract with others to provide them for you. Many web site owners swear by their "back page" items. You can easily offer your customers lots of products and services supplied by others at very little cost to your own company.

Start out with a winner product

All businesses start out with some idea of what they want to sell. In the beginning you develop a few promising products and services and put them out there to gage the public's interest. Some products work, others don't, and sometimes you get a request out of left field that turns into your most important profit source. The way to think is to have one successful product that finances the loss of a couple of other products which may have a future, or not. Try to develop and market these products by using the income from your winner product. If you’re lucky, one of the products will be successful, and then you can finance a couple of other products. Often the products that you don’t really believe in, is that special product that might go big. Before you know it, you’re able to buy your first Ferrari.

Listen closely to what your customers and prospects are saying. When they talk about a problem they have, think of it has a hint for another product or service you can offer to solve that problem. Those unexpected suggestions are your most important opportunities. You don't have to wait for customers and prospects to suggest new products and services. Ask them in clever ways that get them thinking for you. "How did that work for you? Was it as effective as it could have been? What problems are you having that we might be able to solve for you?" Customers can often see things that people inside the business don't realize.

You've seen people conducting surveys in the mall. That kind of research isn't very good from a statistical standpoint. You can't get reliable numbers and percentages from it. However, you can use simple research to get ideas for new products and services. Just like some restaurant chains, give customers a short questionnaire to fill out. Have them leave their comments for improvements or new services. Reward them if you can with a discount or free offer. Home-grown research, from entry forms on your counter to spending time on the phone with a prospect, can show you new ways to expand your successful products and services. Sell wide, sell deep to make more money.