Brisbane Small Business Coach Talks Business Growth Strategies

When most people think about ‘how to make my business grow’, they think about growing sales (or revenues). Something that is not considered as often is profit growth. As a small business coach operating in Brisbane, I keep my clients focus on profit.

Growth in sales means more work and potentially more staff, bigger premises, etc. Whereas profit growth on the same sales revenue simply means more money in your pocket!

And yes! …you can have profit growth without growth in sales. How? Simply by improving the profit margin of the business and maintaining the original revenue level.

For most small business owners, profit growth is far more important than revenue growth. Not only does profit growth put more money in your pocket now, but it will also help you realise a higher sales price when you decide to sell your business.

Strategies to Grow a Business from James McNamara – small business coach Brisbane

Many business owners ask themselves questions like “how to make my business grow?”

There are so many potential strategies to grow a business. In fact, there’s too many! You can’t possibly do them all. Nor should you as some strategies may not be a good fit for your business.

So what strategies should you use?

The best way to determine the business growth strategies that you will plan and implement into your business is to focus on these specific areas of business growth;

• Increasing sales enquiries (leads)
• Improving sales conversion rate (lead:sale)
• Increasing the average amount that customers spend with you
• Increasing retention and the frequency of repeat business
• Improving profit margin (pricing, operational efficiency, team productivity)

By implementing strategies in these areas of business growth you will end up growing both sales and profits

This means that you will end up with a bigger and more profitable business. A sustainable approach is to plan to take twelve months to make a significant impact on your business growth. Decide on strategies from each of the business growth areas and implement them incrementally throughout the year.

For example, you may start by making adjustments to your lead generation (advertising and promotions) strategies as well as increasing your sales conversions by improving your sales process. Working on these two areas simultaneously will have a positive impact on the number of new customers coming into your business. Don’t try to implement any more business growth strategies until you are satisfied with the gains you have made from changes to these two areas. Once you have bedded down the improvements to lead generation and sales conversion you may move onto, for example, team productivity.

In this way, step-by-step, you can design, implement, refine and perfect business growth strategies in your business. It is important to think in this incremental way, since, as a business owner, you are time-poor. You can only take on a certain number of new initiatives at any one time. After all, you still have all of the day-to-day work of your business to attend to. Taking on a large and time-consuming business turn around project is not sustainable for most people.

Business Strategy to Increase Sales

The specific business strategies that will increase sales are;

• Increasing leads
• Improving sales conversion
• Increasing average customer spend
• Increasing average customer purchase frequency.

Unfortunately, many small business owners just work on strategies to increase leads. The false assumption is that if more enquiries come than the sales and profits will just fall into place. This is not always the case.

One business owner could quadruple the leads, but if their sales conversion and average spend were very low, they would gain little additional sales and profits from the increased leads.

Another business owner could double their conversion rate and increase their average customer spend by thirty per cent. If they did that, then just a fifty per cent increase in leads would compound to make a significant increase in both sales and profits.

How to Make my Business Grow? — Strategy Examples

Here are some useful business growth strategy examples. They have been categories under each of the main focal areas for business growth.

Increasing leads

• Pay per click – Google and/or Facebook
• Personal prospecting
• Telemarketer
• Networking Functions
• Letterbox flyers
• Signage
• Referral
• Strategic Alliance to promote to database

Improving conversion rate

• Improve your own and your teams’ selling skills
• Have a system for following up enquiries and proposals
• Stop quoting! Use benefit-rich proposals instead
• Set a team sales goal
• Understand different personalities and how to influence them
• Set an appointment rather than emailing quotes
• Develop a process for leading sales meetings with prospects

 Increasing average customer spend

• Identify up-selling opportunities and plan out sales script
• Use a checklist with customer
• Develop packages for up-selling
• Music on Hold
• Stop discounting
• Explore the clients’ needs fully in the sales meeting to uncover all sales opportunities.

Increasing customer purchase frequency

• Keep an accurate and up-to-date CRM that includes sales data
• Implement a call/contact cycle with your customers
• Implement a regular newsletter that includes product highlights/specials and case studies
• Mail your existing customers with value-added offers

Increasing profit margin

• A system to ensure that all hours and items are captured and correctly billed
• Negotiate cost reduction with your suppliers
• Have bookkeeper produce Variance Report on monthly P&L
• Set a team goal on overhead reduction
• Reward staff for profit margin increase
• Increase prices by 10%
• Inspect and measure all aspects of your operations to find and eliminate waste and inefficiency
• Charge for couriers & delivery

Conclusion

The number of business growth strategies available is significant. Many good business growth strategies are low cost (or no cost). They are also very low risk. This means that there is very little reason for you not to put a simple business growth plan together and start to implement business growth strategies into your business on a sustainable, incremental basis.

To talk about a business coaching solution for your business contact book a time to chat with Brisbane Business Coach, James McNamara. Use the automated booking system below to secure a spot.

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