As a business coach, I speak to business owners every week about their businesses and the challenges they face in creating the business that they really want. One of the most frequent challenges that owners bring up is not being able to drive consistent, predictable business growth. Is driving growth a challenge for you too?
When we drill down a little further into why these owners are struggling with growth, what I usually find is that they aren’t covering all of the necessary bases in their marketing and sales.
To help you to determine if you have your bases covered, I want to share a brief checklist with you. Sound good?
If you want to drive consistent sales growth, you need to focus on:
- Generating more leads
- Converting more of your leads into customers
- Keeping the customers you have and keeping them coming back
- Increasing the amount of money that your customers spend with you
That’s it. These are the four bases that you need to cover to grow your business.
What I love about this simple checklist is that it structures your treasure hunt for growth. It shows you the four separate areas to focus on in your business to maximize growth, which makes planning your marketing and sales efforts much more systematic and complete.
Interestingly, what I’ve found is that most business owners only focus on one aspect of driving growth – generating leads. How many of the bases do you focus on in your business? Be honest, we’re all friends here! I rarely find anyone who really focuses on all four bases. That means that there is great upside opportunity for you to create consistently higher growth if you continuously work to improve in each area.
So how can you use this checklist to drive stronger growth?
- Take stock of how you’re doing now.When working with clients, we first look at what results you have achieved in each of the four growth bases. For example, how many leads have you generated this year? What is your conversion rate? How many repeat customers do you have year to year? Do you know these numbers? They’re important numbers to know to gauge how your marketing and sales efforts are doing. You can do some guesstimation, to find these numbers. For example, if you look at the sales you’ve had this year and have a rough estimate of how much an average job is worth, then you can figure out how many customers you have. You can guesstimate your conversion rate by judging how many of the last 10 or 20 leads you’ve gotten that have become customers. Guesstimation’s not perfect, but It’s a start! Ultimately, it’s very important that you know these numbers more precisely, and track them regularly, so you know how you’re doing and what you can improve.
- Set goals for each of the four growth bases. I know we’re already three-quarters of the way through the year, but better late than never! For example, let’s say you had 500 leads in 2013 and want to increase that number by 20%. Your goal for the year will be 600 leads this year (about 8 more each month). If your conversion rate is 40%, a 10% increase will make your goal this year 44%. These goals sound reasonable, don’t they? What will your goals be?
- Take stock of the effectiveness of your current marketing and sales efforts. Look at each of the four growth bases and determine what’s working, what’s not, and what you might need to change.
- Finally, plan the actions that you will need to take to take to improve in each area. What new marketing activities will you need to implement or what existing marketing activities will you need to increase or improve to achieve the new goals that you just set? Now build those activities into your marketing and sales plan. You don’t have a plan? Now would be a good time to build one.
Unfortunately, we don’t have enough space here to discuss how you might improve one or more of the growth bases. If you don’t know what to do to, there are many great articles on marketing and sales in back issues of theAmerican Painting Contractor or check out a good marketing book likeDuct Tape Marketing by John Jantsch or one of the Guerrilla Marketingbooks.
Put your new plan into action now!
Working on improving each of the four bases that we discussed here can make a big difference in your sales growth! Just a 5% improvement in each of the four bases will result in a 13% improvement in your revenue! A 10% improvement will help you grow your business by 26%! That’s definitely worth the time and effort! So get to work!
