As I work with more types of businesses, it becomes more and more obvious to me that the principles for basic business growth don’t really change. The trick is to figure out how to apply them to the particular business you are in.
So, for example, there are only 3 ways to grow your business, right? Essentially, you can increase traffic, increase conversions and work the back end for more profits. But how do you apply that to your business in a real and valuable way?
Well, the easiest thing will be to break down each of those 3 ways and see how you can integrate it. For example, start with #3.
The back end is almost always the easiest and most profitable way to start. What you are looking to do here is to take your customers and get more value from them. This can be done by either increasing the size of each transaction with them or by increasing the number of transactions they each conduct. So for the transaction size, you are looking at maybe offering more variety to your services, or bundling products or services together so you can sell more at one time. For the number of transactions, you might be looking at encouraging the customer to increase their transactions by offering a discount or a membership model where they can prepay or purchase a recurring product or service.
You might be able to add to or increase your product line. For example, if you were a dog grooming service, you could add retail products and grooming supplies so that the clients already walking in your door would have the opportunity to spend more money with you. This will be slightly different for different businesses, but certainly a good place to start is to ask yourself, “What else can I sell people?”, “what can we sell more of?”. If it is not possible for you to increase your offerings or product lines, you might arrange relationships with other vendors and set up a referral program where you can refer your customers to another business and benefit from that.
So that is the first thing you want to do, make more money off of your current customers, the ones that are already coming in and are happy with what you are doing.
See, now we have increased the value of each customer, so we need to look at getting more customers. Does this mean more advertising? No, not yet. Next step is to see how we can convert more inquiries into customers. In a retail situation, you will want to look at ways to increase the number of sales you can make per visitor walking in. This will be more specific to your business or industry if you rely on walk-in traffic, but almost any business can benefit from a couple basic things. A lot of it might come down to follow-up with your prospects. No matter who you are or what you are offering, you are more likely to make a sale if you can build trust with your prospect early on. Is there information, tips, advice you can give them? Are you communicating with your customers regularly? If someone comes in contact with your business, have you got the information required to get ahold of them again? Can you follow up? Or do they just leave, never to return? When they walk out the door, are you done your sales process?
So look around to see how you can increase the closing rate of your business with some simple follow up.
Now, once all that is already in place, then you can advertise and increase the number of people coming in to contact with your business. How to advertise can certainly be a whole course and program on its own, but the point I am trying to make is that it is the last thing you do to grow your business. Not the first. Increase the value of each customer and lead to your business, and then go out and get new ones – at a higher value.
Now your business is growing exponentially from a solid foundation.
