To start with, what does 'grow' mean here? If you grow sales, is this the whole answer? Well, if each sale loses you money, then obviously not! So is it growing profits? Well, yes, but you can only go so far with cutting costs, so you need to grow profitable sales.
But will profitable sales grow your business if your customers never get around to paying you? Of course not! Your business will die through lack of cash!
Leaving debt collection aside for another time, let's look at growing sales, bearing in mind we'll need to ensure they are profitable too. There are only three ways to grow sales! Sales growth comes from a combination of:
- More Customers
- Spending More
- More Often
And that's it!
Your strategy for sales growth should consider all three 'mores'; how easy it will be, how much you will need to invest to get the return you seek, how profitable it will be. Your strategy will be unlikely to focus on just one of these mechanisms either. Almost certainly it will be a balance of all three, probably with one playing a larger part than the others.
Attracting new customers who've never bought from you before will involve promoting your name and your marketing messages, and is unlikely to produce instant results. Your 'new customer' strategy will need to take your messages to where your ideal customers will see them. You can't rely on strangers coming to find you where you are.
These strangers will probably need to receive your messages several times before they start absorbing much more than your name, however compelling your messages may be, so this needs to form part of your 'new customer' strategy too.
Persuading customers, be they first timers or repeat buyers, to spend more relies on having 'more' for them to buy! Not exactly earth shattering, but nevertheless often ignored!
It may be that you can persuade them to 'upsize', or you could 'upsell' by convincing them to add extra products or services to their purchase.
Whatever you do, you need to have the 'more' available for them to buy.
When it comes to the upsize, you will almost certainly be able to do this yourself by adding extra value to your basic offering, checking of course that these extras are actually seen as being of genuine value by your ideal customers.
Providing products and services to be 'upsold' does not however have to rest entirely with you. This is an area where Strategic Alliance Partnerships can be very important. If your partner's products complement yours, it is reasonably likely that your products complement theirs, so you can help each other.
Lastly, there is the question of how to persuade customers to come back for more, and get them to do so more frequently.
As existing customers, they are already know you and presumably remain happy to have bought from you in the past. Your task is to ensure that the next time they want what you supply, they will come back to you, isn't it?
Well, yes, of course, but it goes beyond that simple picture. They may only be aware of the narrow range that they actually bought from you previously, and not your entire 'repertoire'. And this repertoire may have changed since they last purchased from you any way.
You also need to be in the front of their minds at the time they decide to take action to satisfy their new want. In this regard 'a miss is as good as a mile' in terms of the timing of your messages, and there's the clue. You have to be in the front of their mind shortly before they make their decision. As you have no idea when this may be, you have to regularly remind them of your existence and capabilities. In short you need an effective 'keep in touch' system.
As a parting thought, what if you consider yours to be a one-hit business? As my friend the Undertaker reminds me, he doesn't sell to the deceased! He sells to their family. And guess what? They're all going to die one day too! So maybe yours isn't a one-hit business after all!
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