Consider Downselling to Commercial Accounts

Professional sports teams are retailers. They have been hit by the Great Recession, and one of the ways they're responding—called downselling—could be a valuable tool for other retailers.
     With sports teams, downselling means things like offering commercial accounts half-season tickets at half the price of a full season ticket. The objective is to maintain the purchasing relationship with the accounts so that when economic fears finally subside, those accounts will still be customers.
     According to an Associated Press feature published last week, the need for downselling is now being seen by teams across the board. Baseball attendance last season decreased by almost seven percent from the year before. During fourteen weeks of the National Football League season, twenty games were blacked out of TV coverage because the games failed to sell out. That was true for only nine games in the prior season.
     Downselling fits best as a tactic for commercial accounts—the business firms, government agencies, and nonprofits to whom you grant special terms because of the volume of their purchases, the length of their relationships with you, or particular advantages your business derives from claiming them as customers. For you, downselling could mean lowering threshold quantities necessary to receive purchase discounts and/or extended payment terms.
     Use downselling intelligently and not out of desperation. Offer the special terms to commercial accounts that are active advocates for your business. Advocates recommend you to others and counter unjustified complaints about your business. Advocates clearly want you to succeed. This is more than being a loyal customer. Abundant amounts of research have shown that what we think of as customer loyalty is quite fragile. If you downsell to accounts that are less than advocates, you risk lowering the long-term value of your standard terms in the minds of the customers.