On average, companies are only using between 10-40% of all methods, a small slice of what is available to grow their sales revenue faster and higher.
Are you one of them?
In this episode, I introduce you to ten ways to grow your sales revenue. I cover everything from communication, increasing your value, and more ways you might not have thought of for your company’s maximum sales growth
SALES REVENUE GROWTH EXPERT, BUSINESS CONSULTANT, COACH, AND ADVISOR TO ENTREPRENEURS.
CEO of Business Success Factors and creator of Sales Revenue Growth University, where he teaches the best sales revenue growth strategies for companies who are serious about their sales growth. These are the same strategies and methodologies that he used to increase a company’s close rate by 862% and their revenue growth by 116% – all within four months.
Do you want to increase your sales revenue but don’t know how?
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I’m here to talk to you about, how do you grow your sales revenue and how do you do it efficiently? There are ten different ways that I’ve practiced, discovered, and teach my clients how to do this. I’d like to give you all ten on this show, and then in subsequent or future show, I will go into detail on more of the particulars on how to do it. Growing your sales is extremely important because let’s face it, with the situation in the economy and the situation across the globe, a lot of people are like, “I’ve got to pull back.” No, you want to grow but most people don’t know how to grow.
Let me give you the ten ways of doing this and then we’ll expand upon them in the future. Number one, increase the number of new clients. I know that seems obvious, but a lot of people do not have a great focus on increasing the number of new clients. How can you do that? You can start different avenues or venues within your business. Maybe you can go after super large accounts, for example. These complex sales that you thought, “Maybe they are a little bit out of reach,” but you can go after them. You could start a new area within the business to go out and get new clients. One of the ways of supporting that is you want to have different ways of going after getting new clients. We could talk in length and we will about marketing plans, marketing calendars, and prospecting ways to do this.
I would challenge you. How many of you could get one new way every other month to go after new clients? You put it down on a calendar and you walk it forward. Could you go back to other segments? Could you go after things of different avenues where you haven’t been? Maybe you do speaking, webinars, boot camps, whatever it might be. Maybe you’re going after what Chet Holmes used to call the Dream 100, which is a segment of 100 dream type of clients in a certain segment. There are different ways of doing this, but you want to bring in new clients. You could offer new incentives for new clients as well. You can bring new clients in through a new incentive. You’re giving it a new-customers only. You see that happen from time to time, but it does bring in new clients. The more new clients you get, the more you can work with those clients over a long period of time if you do this right.
Referrals are another way of getting new clients. Most companies are not that good at it. They don’t have an active program that’s more of a passive. They go, “Whenever someone asked me or I remember to ask whatever, we’ll go for referrals.” It’s not the way to do it. Bring in a new friend. There’s a campaign for you. If you are a restaurant, for example, bring someone in. You might have to discount at that point just to drop it down but look at your margins. What could you discount down that is not a high drop that you could offer a discount? Maybe the first person in pays full, and the second person in pays 50%. If you can break-even or better on the acquisition of a new client, and you have the opportunity like in a restaurant to bring them back again and again, it’s worth it. Think about how you bring a friend in any company. Manufacturers can do this, anybody can do this. The first way is increasing the number of new clients.
The second way is increasing your transactional value per client. What does that mean? That means you’re going to get more money from them in the form of sales. You can do this in the form of upselling, which is selling them something of like but more money. Cross-selling, you could sell them something complementary to what you’ve already done. Auto dealerships do this all the time. They will sell different things, add-ons if you will, heated seats and all kinds of things. You can do that from your company too. Even if you’re a small business or you’re a super large business, it doesn’t matter.
Down selling, what does that mean? If they’re not going to buy anything, but you could sell them something to get them started, i.e. increasing a new client. You made an offer on a higher thing but they’re not interested in it, but you can make a good profit by selling something lower, then do it. You want the client to keep bonding with you. Adding extended warranties, a lot of companies do this. They have paid warranties. If you go to Staples or you go to any Best Buy or whatever, they are constantly offering you, “You want to extend your warranty for 1 to 3 years with this?” Why did they do that? Because it’s super high profit and it keeps you engaged in their company, which we’re going to talk about.
Grow Sales Revenue: The higher people trust you, the higher they like you, the faster they’re going to buy from you.
Bundling product is another way of increasing transactional value. You see a lot of companies doing this. The world-famous one that started this was McDonald’s. They put up the Happy Meal, the burger, the fries, and the Coca-Cola. There’s a huge profit in Coca-Cola when you’re bringing it from the tap like that. It’s pennies costs to deliver that, but the perceived value is very high. They’re able to make their money in the bundling, so can you, if you think about how to bundle products.
The third one, increasing the frequency of purchase or the buying frequency. What does that mean? You got a client. You get to sell them more, but now you want to sell them more frequently. How do you do that? You could do that through membership programs. You could do that through maintenance programs. There are a lot of different ways of increasing the buying frequency. The question I would have to use is, how do you think you could do that in your company? Get them to buy again and again. You see this all the time on wines. The wine of the month club or something like that. Maybe you can put something like that into your business.
The next one is increasing their speed to purchase. What does that mean? You’ve got to speed up the purchase. You’re going to give them urgency reasons to buy. How do you do that? You do it in your company positioning. How do you position? Do you position as an expert? Do you position as a commodity? The more you position as an expert, the quicker people are going to want to buy from you. How can you do that? Use public relations or you’re out there in the social media community. Whatever it is for your business that you’re going to create more of a bonding and speed to urgency to purchase your programs. Aligning with your clients is another way of doing that. Working on the steps to your sale to look and say, “How can we increase the speed to purchase throughout the whole conversion process?” Building rapport is a huge one. The higher they trust you, the higher they like you, the higher that they view you as an expert, like, trust and respect you, they’re going to buy faster. It’s that simple.
Let’s move on to the fifth one, increasing the overall client retention. What does that mean? It’s one thing to get a client. It’s another thing to have them buying from you more frequently. It’s another thing to increasing the transactional value over a longer period of time. Instead of two years of purchase, maybe get twenty. What does that do? Your cost of acquisition usually has already done in the client. Everything they buy has a higher profit margin, which we’ll talk about. How do you do that? You can go back after and try to reactivate past and dormant clients. Past clients that you’ve done business with that are just sitting there. They’re in your database and you’re like, “We’ll go back and get them.” How will that increase the overall retention? It brings them back in. If they’ve been there two years, now they might stay there for 5, 6, 7 years, even 20 years.
You can also say, “That’s also increasing the buying frequency,” and I would agree with you. Going after loss clients, those clients that are just completely gone, they haven’t been doing business with them at all. They hardly probably even remember you, but they will remember you. Go back and try to re-engage them. Loyalty programs are used in all kinds of capacities, but they’re designed to keep people in the system. I bought a new vehicle and they offered a three-year loyalty program. Why are they doing that? They’re hoping to sell me a new car. They’re hoping to keep me into that dealership, into that brand. It makes a lot of sense.
Let’s talk about the next one, increasing the number of sellers. What does that mean? You get more feet on the street, more voices on the phone, or more outreach going on. How do you do that? You can do it through affiliates. You can do it through joint ventures with complementary businesses. You can do that by partnering up with other people, other companies. You can do this by increasing the number of high-quality salespeople that you bring into your company. A lot of companies don’t have a good process for doing this. That can be taught. It’s easy enough to teach that process and to implement that process. Imagine if you doubled the sales of your sales team, what would it do for you? Could you do it on commission only? That would even be better. Building out an agency, that is a way of doing it on commission only. That is getting a bunch of independent representatives representing your brand and your company. They’re going out and getting the business for you.
Grow Sales Revenue: You can elevate your prices when your brand is higher.
Partners with competitors. There are partnerships that you could bring up. You might say, “Competitors? Why would I do business with competitors?” Competitors don’t always offer everything that you want to offer. I’ll give you an example. When I was in the telecommunications business, we would partner up with other companies that sell similar in services, but they are sold in different regions or different areas. There were certain areas we could not sell in, but they could. There were also areas that we could sell in that they couldn’t. We would pass business back and forth. It’s a great way. If you can get a competitor and you get a very solid arrangement and agreement with them. Ambassador programs, that’s like a glorified referral program if you will. Ambassador programs are cool because they create customer loyalty and the customers wanting to push out and get their folks, and then being the ambassador and bringing the new clients to your business, or bringing the existing clients by getting them to buy more in the buying frequency, and the transactional value, etc.
The next one, increasing the margins and prices in your company. What does that mean? Let’s start this way, eliminate or at least minimize to a high degree discounting. Why? Because when you discount a product or service, it takes you X amount of products or services of new sales to make up for the loss in the margin on that discount. Salespeople in your company limit their ability to discount. They put their compensation plan accordingly so they’re not discounting. You could create loyalty programs. Loyalty programs will increase your margins. If you’re extending the retention of the client and you’re getting them to buy more frequently, or buying at higher processes, programs, and prices, then what will end up happening is your cost of acquisition drops so your margin increases.
Next one, elevating your brand. You want to elevate your brand because that increases your margins because it increases your perceived value. You can elevate your prices when your brand is higher. Think about going to a five-star resort or a five-star hotel versus going to a two-star. You will pay more for that because the perception is there’s more value there for you. One thing about raising prices that you’ve got to be very careful about if you’re going to just look at raising prices, there is a market tolerance for a specified period of time. Be careful on how you raise your prices. If you raise them too high too quickly, then what ends up happening is you end up hurting your sales versus growing your sales.
Let’s go to the next one, increasing the meaningful communication externally. It’s always great to increase the internal communication. We’ll talk about that, but externally. How do you do that? Through following up, through your messaging. The more you can increase your message communication, meaningful communication, then what will happen is you’re going to increase the ability to increase your value, which will also allow you to increase your margins and get new clients. Follow up is a key one. We’ll go into that in a future show. I’m going to go into each one of these a lot deeper. The bottom line is work on your messaging and your ideal persona. Work on your positioning within that. You’ve got to have a follow-up process in place because that follow-up is a common courtesy. A lot of sales get lost due to lack of follow up. I was on a call and somebody said, “I lost a $35,000 sale because I didn’t follow up with somebody.” Worse yet, it’s a $35,000 recurring sale that this person made 50% commission on every single year. If that person stayed for ten years, $17,500 a year in commission is lost over ten years. Never mind what it costs the company.
Next one, after you went to increase the meaningful communication, you’ve got to increase the skillset and potential of the people and the process on and around sales. You work on things like, how do we put out a value-based proposal? How do you do value-based selling? How do you do conversational selling? How do you do expert presenting? Most people are not that good as a presenter. Do you have a defined sales book or a sales playbook that everybody can be on the same page? Do you have a sales cadence that’s consistent, then everybody follows it on the same process? You can measure these types of things and you can improve upon the skillsets and potential. You want to do a team analysis or a company analysis if you haven’t done that. Coaching is another great way of increasing skillsets. A lot of times, management within companies are not really coaching. They meet once a week. They meet once a month. They’re not helping the people to expand and grow. You constantly got to have training going on consistent every single week in your company. The other one is increasing the skillset and potential around accountability. How are you holding people accountable to the processes and the things that are a must in your company?
Let’s move along to the tenth way, increasing the effectiveness and efficiency. Of the other nine things that we just talked about, you will constantly want to say, “How do I make this more effective? How do I make this more efficient?” One of the ways of doing this is measuring by your numbers. You want to get clear on your business direction. Have everybody clear on your business direction. Everybody needs to know what the customer journey is. They need to be able to recite it back to the ownership. Everybody should know how an order flows through the company. Everyone should know what is going on with other departments. You wanted to find your constraining factors or those factors that, “We can’t get here based on this.” That’s why you do a company assessment of the process. You do it on established goals that everybody knows about. I think it’s Sun Tzu, “Everybody moves in the spirit of the same rank.” It’s so important in a company, but that increases the effectiveness in the efficiency of the mission which is the selling client. Getting clear on your strategic objectives. What do we want strategically, not just acting tactically? Managing time within the company, that’s an oxymoron because you really can’t manage time but you can allocate time the right way, and proving your internal processes all the way through the process.
Let me recap the ten. Number one, increasing the number of new clients. Number two, increasing your transactional value. Number three, increasing your buying frequency. Number four, increasing the speed to purchase. Number five, increasing the overall retention of your clients. Number six, increasing the number of sellers. Number seven, improving those margins or increasing the margins and prices. Eight, increasing the meaningful communication externally. Nine, increasing the skillset and potential of your people. Number ten but not least, increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of your overall process on the nine, then plus the internal things that need to happen in your company.
Until our next show. I have some great guests coming up so please tune in. If you like this show, please go up and give it a rating. Hopefully, it’s a five-star rating and spread the word, spread the love. If this can help somebody else, I would appreciate you putting that out there and increasing the number of people who can learn from it. What number was that? That’s increasing the number of sellers, if you really look at it. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you for reading. It’s a pleasure and I’ll see you soon.
