In business you are either growing or dying. There is no staying still.
So assuming you want to grow, I’m going to broadly outline some of the critical steps you need to undertake.
In my observations based on over 30 years’ experience coaching businesses in over 25 different industries, most businesses wanting to grow focus on the wrong activities.
They think the path to growth is to focus on marketing – to get more leads. Which is actually the last thing you should do.
I’ll get to why in a minute.
Every business lives and dies on their cash flow. No cash and you can’t market yourself. No cash and you can’t pay your suppliers. No cash and you can’t pay yourself or your employees. No cash and you quickly go out of business.
So your most important task is to handle your cash – in and out.
How? By liberating the money tied up in your business. Debtors!
Depending on your industry you might give your clients 30, 60, 90 and even 120 days to pay. Money that you’ve earned, but have no access to.
So your first job is to move the money from their bank account to yours.
I’m not going into every way we coach clients to do so – suffice to say we have over 21 strategies to do so. And frankly, having the money means you trade for another day, have the money and can focus your energy on productive growth activities which require it.
Once you have your debtors handled, look at your sales process.
Every organisation, no matter how long they’ve been in business can increase their sale amount at the point of purchase – putting more profit on their bottom line.
McDonald’s famous “Would you like fries with that”, is an obvious example. I have no idea how much their revenue increased over the last 30 years with that simple approach.
And if you’ve ever bought a new car and walked out with a host of “optional extras” like metallic paint, spoilers, mag wheels etc., you substantially added to the dealer’s bottom line profit.
A final example is the “extended warranties” often sold when you buy electronic or household items.
And yes, we have over 77 different strategies which will help you upsell.
So make sure you figure out what else you can sell once the customer has said yes. Psychologically, upselling right there and then is far easier than trying to get the customer to come back for more later.
Now look at your actual sales conversion rate. i.e. How many prospects do you need to see to make a sale?
The average figure is around 30% or less. I know of some businesses where the conversion rate is around 4% or less. While I don’t know the numbers for your business, calculate for yourself what increasing your conversion rate by only 5% would make to your bottom line.
The good news is we’ve trained and coached hundreds of sales people in how to increase their conversion rate which means for every hour invested in speaking with a prospect, they make significantly more money.
And you guessed it. We have 116 different strategies for helping you do just that.
Only now that you’ve got your debtors handled, increased the average sale value and improved your conversion rate, should you look at how to generate more leads.
Why? Because marketing costs money. Either real hard currency and/or time.
So there’s very little point in spending more money generating new leads until you improve your conversion rate and get more out of the leads you have.
Anything else is like filling a leaky bucket full of water. The more you put in the more you waste through the holes. Waste of time and effort and in the case of your business, money.
One last word…
We’re offering a series of complimentary Business Health Checks valued at over $2,000. We’ll sit down for about 90 minutes and look for leaks in your business. Areas where you are either spending too much for the result you’re getting, or leaks in your business.
At the end of the process you’ll receive a comprehensive report with prioritised recommendations on how to fix any issues we uncover.
Interested? We’re offering these to a select few businesses each month. To qualify you must already be doing well and want to do better. If you’re starting from scratch with no business experience this is not for you.
Give me a call on (02) 9499-7958 for a confidential discussion and we’ll decide if it’s appropriate to move forward.
Rashid.
