4 Ways to Grow Your Business

Are you a business owner? Do you know that there are just four ways to grow or expand sales in your business?

Get more customers: in current or new markets

Get customers to stay longer: customer retention

Yes, there are hundreds of tactics or methods you can use to grow sales – but there are just four basic strategies:

Get More Customers. This is the most obvious and common approach when it comes to growing sales. There are two dimensions to “get more customers". The first is to get more prospects and the second is to improve your conversion rate. Only when you have optimized your Conversion Rate should you consider increasing the number of Prospects into your business – indeed it may be that you never need to do any new marketing at all if you can do a better job of converting your current prospects into customers.

Lead generation is expensive, both in terms of time and money. So before you consider how to get more customers thru lead generation, you would be wise to maximize the other 3 strategies first.

Get Customers to Spend More. Often overlooked, this is one of the easiest ways to grow revenue. Do you know how McDonald's grew their profits by $35 million?  I bet you do! It is a six-word script. Would you like fries with that? It is a very simple tactic, but not easy. It is not easy to ask that question extraordinarily well billions of times! If you could increase every transaction by just 5%, what would that mean to your business? Want some more ideas? Raising prices is certainly one option. You can also promote premium products, upsell or cross-sell complimentary products or services or expand payment options or plans.

Get Customers to Buy More Often. It’s not enough for customers to buy, you want them to buy again and again. You need to stay connected and give them a reason to do so. Maintain a customer database and use it to promote customer only offers via mail, email or text. Start a monthly continuity program or newsletter. Use a reminder system. Develop a fan base on Facebook or Twitter and promote special offers for followers. Educate customers on the full range of products (don’t assume they know).

Get Customers to Stay Longer. If your new business simply replaces lost customers, you gain nothing. Keep the customers you have. It costs 6 – 7 times more to get new ones. Plus existing customers tend to be more loyal and less price sensitive. If you could keep every customer for an additional month or year, how much revenue would that represent to your business? The key to retention is simple – deliver what you promise and then some! Here’s a few techniques to consider: thank you or bonus gift with new or first purchase, send birthday and holiday cards, follow-up call after purchase or job completion, ask for testimonials, recognize customers in newsletters, blogs or social media, and give ‘free’ information or advice.

The first step in using this process to build your business is to measure the results you are currently achieving – not just a guess, but measuring what is actually being achieved. You may be surprised at the results – sometimes just the action of measuring an activity will improve it. In fact, many of my clients get a 10% increase in business just from learning how to measure their results. While measuring results is simple, it is not easy.  And that is why becoming good at measuring your results can be such a competitive advantage for your business