The cheap and easy ways to increase profits most businesses overlook
Businesses usually make marketing so much harder than it needs to be.
This is because they focus on the 20% of marketing that is difficult, expensive and unpredictable. And, at the same time, they pay little or no attention to the other 80% - the stuff that's easy and inexpensive.
Let me show you what I mean.
In business, we do certain things to bring in money:
- We go out into the marketplace (literally or figuratively) and tell people about our product/service
- When people enquire, we try to turn those enquiries into sales
- While they're buying, we may offer them a deal on complimentary products or services
- Once we've sold something to someone, we try to maintain a relationship with them where they continue to buy from us again and again
- And, if they're happy, we sometimes receive referrals from them, which means additional customers/enquiries
These are what I call "The 5 Steps of the Sales/Marketing Process"
1. External Lead Generation
2. Converting leads to clients
3. Up-selling
4. Re-selling
5. Referrals
If you improve your effectiveness in any one of those areas, you'll increase your sales.
If you bring in 10% more leads, all things being equal, you should increase your sales 10%. Or, if you have the same number of enquiries but close 10% more of them, that's 10% increase in sales, too.
And so on ...
Now, there's two points I want to make:
(1) When they want to increase sales, the majority of businesses focus on just one of these five areas ... and they usually choose the most difficult, dangerous and expensive area (selling to strangers).
(2) It can take a lot of skill to increase one these steps by 30%. However, if you increase each area by just 5.4% (far easier), you'll achieve the same 30% growth.
(1.054 x 1.054 x 1.054 x 1.054 x 1.054 = 1.30)
And, if you really focus on your marketing hire a pro to do that for you ... hint, hint) and improve each step by 10%, that's a 61% growth in your marketing returns.
To find out how these small increases lead cause your profits to jump, see Small changes = big profits.
Best Wishes
Steve Gibson
Steve Gibson Consulting, Edinburgh 2015 - Privacy Policy