The secrets of growing your business in good times or bad is to focus your efforts on three simple strategies:
- Find more prospects
- Convert more prospects to customers
- Increase the value of each customer
- Increase the average sale
- Increase the number of sales to each client
Pretty simple, right?
Simple concepts and tough, exciting, achievable challenges for any entrepreneur.
In this blog, I’m going to share the best ideas, techniques, and tactics for achieving these strategies.
Before we launch into this too far, let me mention referrals.
It is true that referrals are the easiest prospects to convert. They usually show up gift wrapped and ready to go. Some established businesses do quite well on referrals alone. However, planning to grow your business with referrals and ignoring other methods of finding prospects is a sure way to failure. After all, you have to find some clients or customers somewhere before they can give you referrals, don’t you?
Find More Prospects
Your plan needs specific activities you plan to do to find more prospects.
You could make a list of everyone you know and set up a schedule of badgering them. That’s the basic MLM model that will guarantee to cut back your busy social calendar.
You could grab the phone book and start “dialing for dollars” (cold calling)… if you’re a masochist.
Or you can advertise. More about that later.
Convert More Prospects into Customers
Your plan needs to include how you are going to convert more prospects to customers.
Do you have a Unique Selling Proposition? (That’s a fancy way of asking “Why should anyone do business with you?”) It is a key component of your sales system and needs to be a factor in all your marketing plans.
How good are your sales skills? Don’t laugh. If you don’t like to sell, you definitely need a good sales team – even if it is only one person. After all, the whole point of being in business is to sell stuff. But you already know that.
Increase the Value of Each Customer
Now we’re getting into the nitty-gritty. What are you going to do get your clients or customers to buy more of your products or services AND come back for more?
A little attention in this area will yield greater results than almost anything else you can do. Sadly, far too many small businesses focus so intently on referrals and finding new customers that they completely ignore the gold mine in their customer database.
Stay tuned and we’ll be going into more detail on all of these.
