05/09/2019
1. ‘The 4 Business Multipliers’ (4 Ways To Grow Your Business):
Other than buying other businesses, there are just 4 ways to grow your own business…
• Referral: We all know that generating enquiries by referral is THE single best way to get customers. However, virtually every business has what we call a ‘reactive referral process’ in place. This ISN’T a system. This ‘ad hoc’ approach will only get you so far, but when you want to achieve growth targets, you cannot hope to grow your business on this basis. The key word in all of this (which you’ll hear a lot from us) is SYSTEM. Systemising your referrals from customers and other third-party referral sources is key to your success.
• General Marketing: Rigorous testing has provided us with a number of proven marketing approaches which enable businesses to generate many enquiries at will. The reason why most businesses believe that general marketing is often ineffective is explained in (2) below.
However, a critical piece of the success jigsaw is to use a number of marketing approaches, not just one or two (another key reason why most businesses don’t grow at the rate they should).
We have a saying: “Other than zero, the worst number in business is ‘1’; 1 key customer, 1 key supplier, 1 key employee and 1 marketing approach.” You are seriously harming your business if you only use one or two marketing approaches (another big cause of growth slowing).
• Sales Conversion: When your referral and general marketing systems are operating effectively, they will generate a healthy supply of enquiries every month. As soon as an enquiry is generated, your ‘sales conversion system’ should kick in.
In other words, you should have a system in place that helps the prospective customer through your sales process, ensuring they become a customer.
You need to build in a number of stages, whereby each one moves the prospective customer closer to the sale. Once again this is a BIG weakness we see in most businesses – there isn’t usually any kind of sales conversion system in place.
We have come across businesses that were only converting 1 in 10 enquiries (from general marketing enquiries) prior to implementing a sales conversion system. Take note that we are talking about true conversion rates here. Many businesses kid themselves that their conversion rates are higher than they actually are because they only count the ‘easy’ pickings from warm referrals and ignore all the failed general marketing efforts. Once the system was in place, they improved their conversion to between 7 and 9 out of 10.
This makes a huge difference to your new customer acquisitions – and is achieved with absolutely ZERO extra cost.
• Maximising Customer Value: Much has been written and spoken about selling more products or services to existing customers. In reality, many businesses find this one of their most challenging tasks. But it needn’t (and definitely shouldn’t) be so. The reality is that most businesses just miss so many golden opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell their products or services, again because no formal system is in place for actually doing it.
You know as well as we do that little thought is ever given to putting in place a solid system that identifies the opportunities for selling more products or services to customers, and what exactly has to be done when these opportunities arise.
