Unit of 1 - 4 Ways to Grow Your Business

hlevin09 writes "What does it mean to GROW your business? It means that your business is actively pursuing “more”. It is a business that is more profitable, more efficient, more unique, with more sales, more new customers and more loyal customers. The businesses that thrive today are those that continually grow.

There are many strategies to improve your business, such as cutting costs. However, cutting costs will not grow your business unless you use the money you save to promote your business. While you may control your business better and return greater profits, you won’t grow your business.

The good news is that there are 4 key ways that you can grow your business. They are as follows:

 Win New Customers
 Inspire Customer Loyalty
 Increase Your Average Sale
 Improve Your Business Processes

These 4 fundamental actions will help you have more customers, motivate them to come back to you more often, prompt them to spend more when they do, and improve the processes in your business to ensure that you achieve these goals.

While most businesses focus most of their energy on winning new customers, they are missing huge sales and PROFIT opportunities. When you expand your focus and work on all four way to grow your business, you can experience an exponential increase in sales. In fact, you can increase sales by 33%! (See worksheet for detailed analysis.)

This special report will provide in-depth ideas and activities to help you grow your business in these four key ways.

(For more information about specific ways to apply these techniques to your business, contact Impact Consulting and Accounting.)

Win New Customers
There are hundreds of ways to win new customers. Here are a few proven strategies.

 Target your advertising and marketing. Identify your ideal customer. Then direct your advertising and marketing strategy to reach those potential customers. For example, you could advertise a child care business at a convenience store or at a pediatrician’s office. Which location do you think would provide better results? Aim for the specific people who would be most interested in your products or services.

 Focus on benefits you offer. It is vital that all of your advertising and marketing material focuses on the BENEFITS customers will receive rather than just the features of your products and services. For example, people aren’t just looking for a membership to a gym, they are looking for the healthy body they will get there.

 Educate new customers. To motivate consumers to make a purchase, it is usually important to educate them. For example, the real estate agent, who explains all of the potential mortgage options to the prospective home buyer, is more likely to make the sale than an agent, who simply shows houses.

 Measure results. Ask new customers, “how did you hear about us?” It’s a simple question that can tell you volumes about the success of your advertising.

 Identify your Unique Core Differentiators. These are the things that distinguish you from your competition. Identify them and clearly communicate them.

 Be a problem solver. If a person inquires about something you do, they’re asking for help in solving a problem. If you fail to do everything possible to solve their problem you are doing them a DISSERVICE. Identify their problem. Direct them to the proper solution.

 Create sales forecasts. Mapping out sales forecasts is also crucial to increasing sales. It’s much easier to get to where you’re going—if you know where that is! Sales forecasts help you find that direction and give you a solid path to follow.

 Follow up. Statistics show that 80% of sales are made after the 5th contact.

 Develop phone scripts. Phone scripts and phone performance standards can alleviate anxiety, increase conversations, and increase sales. Poor phone techniques and a lack of team training can cause you to lose many leads.

 Think about other ways to promote your business. There are so many! Send out press releases about your new products or services. Join professional or community organizations. Sponsor a local youth sports team. Encourage word or mouth and referrals. Create reciprocal referral agreements with a non-competitive business with the same type of customer base.

Inspire Customer Loyalty
Motivating your customers to come back to your business more often is vital to the long-term health and profitability of your business. The more frequently your customers purchase from you, the greater your profits.

Studies show that it costs 6 times more to win a new customer than it does to have an existing customer come back and purchase again.

The most important customer list in the world is the one you already have: your customer list! Why? Because loyal customers will not only return to your business, they will become walking advertisements for you. They will refer their friends and family to you. The easiest way to get new customers is through your current customers.

The key here is to inspire loyalty in these valuable consumers. How can you do that? Here are some quick tips to help you get started:

 Ask your customers to come back. Most businesses don’t bother. They fail to recognize the profit potential of repeat business. Once happy with a product or service or a supplier, most customers want to build on that and keep returning to that business. Make it easy for them, ask them to come back.

 Offer exceptionally good service. It is not enough to provide average service. To inspire loyalty, you must go beyond your customer’s expectations. Be exceptional. Offer service that goes beyond the industry average. Make your service better or faster, provide longer warranties or stronger guarantees, give customers some points to differentiate you from your competitors.

 Follow up and ask for feedback. Don’t assume your customers are happy with your products and services. Many customers will not tell you how they really feel. They let their absence speak for them. Call them, follow up, and make sure they are happy with your business. And THANK THEM for their business.

 Gather information about your customers. The more you know about them, the better service you can provide.

 Stay in touch with your customers. Once you have information about your customers, use it to keep in touch with them. Send them a birthday card, send a Holiday card, remind them when their service is next due or notify them when a product is available that may interest them.

 Offer on-going education. Give your customers added support, classes or advice about your products or services. For example, the cooking supply store that offers weekly cooking classes, or the computer software company that offers free phone support. Newsletters are also a great tool for on-going education, especially if they are full of useful, timely information, not just advertisements for your business.

Increase Your Average Sale
Increasing your average sale makes every transaction more profitable. Since the cost of winning a new customer is already covered in the original purchase item, anything more than that is a plus—profit for you.

Once a customer comes to you to make a purchase, it’s important to make the most out of each business transaction. Many businesses let customers, select what they want, without making any suggestions about what might add to the original purchase. This is a mistake.

 Cross-sell. Often the best place to start increasing the average transaction value is to identify ‘cross-selling’ opportunities. These are instances when you sell other products or services, in addition to your customer’s initial inquiry.

Mc Donald’s restaurants perfected this technique with the leading question: “Do you want fries with that?” McDonald’s knows full well the financial value of cross-selling and is not about to take any chances.

 Educate and Make Suggestions. Customers often do not know about other items or services that might add to their original purchase. You need to tell them! After all, customers come to you for help and guidance. Every time you fail to explain all their options, you can be missing opportunities.

 Up-sell. Up-selling is the act of upgrading the customer’s purchase from one price point to another. For example you may have 3 tiers of products or services. You can explain that one level is good, the next level is better and the third level is the best. Statistics show most people will select the item in the middle.

 Bundle products and services. Packaging items or services together adds value to the customer. For example, offer 8 services for the price of 6. This practice makes purchases more attractive to customers and can increase average sales.

 Concentrate on merchandising. Signage, ticketing, presentation, packaging, and store design can all increase your average sale. Grocery stores do this by placing “impulse-buy” items, such as candy and magazines next to the register.

 Make the most of your on-hold message. Your phone’s on-hold message can spark a customer’s interest in more products or services, especially if it is useful and educational. An effective message can turn wasted time into profits.

 Consider raising your prices. To increase your average sale, you must have a full understanding of your margins and what they really mean to your bottom line. Avoiding discounts and price wars is critical to maintaining and increasing your average sale. Oddly enough, sales can sometimes increase with a price increase. Your products or services seem more valuable. This is particularly true if you create sales and marketing tools to educate customers about the value they’ll receive.

Improve Your Business Processes
This is the last, but definitely not least, way to grow your business. This step ties all the other steps together. In order to inspire customer loyalty, win new customers, or increase your average sale, certain processes must exist within your business.

Work ON your business, not IN it. If you, as the business owner or manager, are stuck handling the day-to-day operations of the business, your growth will be slow. Simply, you won’t have time to implement many of the ideas that can improve your business. You have to be able to step outside of the day-to-day activities, look objectively at your business as a whole, and grow your business from there.

Develop functions and systems. Build a business based on functions rather than people. Many businesses are built around specific people rather than the jobs, or functions, those people perform. Changing your business to one that identifies functions first and then slots the right people into those functions will help you grow.

Developing systems and manuals to map out specific tasks is very helpful. Edward W. Demming (redesigner of the Japanese car industry) completed a study showing that only 4% of mistakes in business were due to human error. The other 96% was due to a lack of systems.

Systems clearly spell out how to do every single business task and make it easy to train team members and delegate work, leaving you more time to develop your business.

Establish performance standards. Having ideal standards of performance will make your business run more smoothly. Your employees will know what is expected of them and you will know what to expect from them.

Create a mission statement or business plan. Understanding your real purpose for being in business can help you build better processes and provide clear direction to your team members. Setting goals and completing a ‘Business Plan’ can also ensure that your business develops in every area and that your processes improve.

Measure your current performance. You must have an understanding of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to grow your business.

Train team members. Training is another pivotal area for improving the processes within your business. Regardless of whether it’s customer service, phone answering techniques, or computer skills, training your team members properly is extremely important to the ongoing development of your business.

There are 4 fundamental ways to grow your business. Inspire customer loyalty, win new customers, increase your average sale and improve your processes. When you can achieve these goals your business will grow. It will not only become MORE profitable, it will be MORE enjoyable for you, your team members and your customers.

Sales Increase Worksheet
If you have 1,000 customers and increase that by 10%, you could increase your customer base to 1,100. Next, increase the number of times your customers come back to you by 10% (1 time to 1.1 times). Then, increase your average sale by 10%. Put all of these figures together to see how much you can grow your business. Follow these examples.

Number of customers x Number of dealings x Average $ Sale = Total Sales
1,000 x 1 x $100 = $100,000
Complete your own business figures below:

______ x ______ x $______ = $______
See what happens when just one area—winning new customers — is increased by 10%.

1,100 x 1 x $100 = $110,000
Repeat the exercise for your business:

______ x ______ x $______ = $______
The same happens if you increase customer transactions or transaction values by 10%.

1,000 x 1.1 x $100 = $110,000
Repeat for your business?

______ x ______ x $______ = $______
Or…
1,000 x 1 x $110 = $110,000
Complete the figures below for your business and calculate the results:

______ x ______ x $______ = $______
Now calculate what happens when EACH area is increased by 10% at the same time.

1,100 x 1.1 x $110 = $______ Sales!
Increasing each area at the same time has a multiplier effect of increasing sales by a staggering 33.3%! An additional income of, not $110,000, but $133,100! This is caused by the combination of all 3 areas working together. Try this calculation for your business.

______ x ______ x $______ = $______ Sales!
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