As business owners, our natural tendency is to want to offer our customers choices. It seems logical – the larger the selection, the more choices our prospects have, the more they’ll buy, right? Wrong!

It may seem counter-intuitive, but the fewer choices you give someone, the more likely they are to buy. Choices actually create confusion, overwhelm, and paralysis. And this rule applies to every stage of the sales process, including emails, marketing materials, and even your web pages.

For example, an email that has multiple calls to action or multiple links will get fewer total click-thrus than an email with just one link. A web page with one call to action will get a higher conversion rate than one that has multiple options. This is why “squeeze pages” – a landing page with no navigation bar, with a sole purpose to convince the visitor to sign up for your email list – are so effective.

If you have a retail business, you might be very tempted to carry a large variety of inventory in order to please all possible tastes, give the customer more options, and incresase your sales. But if you look at what is and isn’t selling, you will probably notice that you have a lot of “dead wood.” A good portion of your inventory is just sitting there, week in and week out. Figure out which items are most popular, and get rid of all the rest. Your sales of the most popular items will go up, and your inventory carrying costs will go down.

The same is true if you provide a service. Give your customers up to three basic options or packages for optimal sales conversion. Just like the retail business that has best selling items and clunkers, if you analyze your service offerings, you will find some that are more popular than others. Focus on offering only the two or three services that your best clients want, and not only will you increase your conversion rate, but you will get better and better at delivering those services, and you will do it more efficiently. Your sales AND your profit margins will increase.