3 Ways to Build Your Business

Only Three Ways to Grow Your Business

No matter how you look at it, there are only three ways to make your slice of that pie as big as possible. This may be bad news, but the silver lining is that awareness of this concept will help you quickly focus your efforts. What are these three ways?

The first way is to find more customers. This is the strategy employed by most business people – but is it really the best way? For some businesses, it may be the only way, but for most of us there are two more effective ways.

The second strategy is to get existing customers to buy from us more frequently. If we can figure out a way to bring our buyers back to us on a more regular basis, we’re also increasing our total revenue, and this is our goal.

The third way is by creating a reason for our customers to buy more from us each time they come to us. If we can up the ante of our clients each time they are feeling good about us, this will also have the same result of increasing revenue.

So when do we apply each of the three strategies above? When we’re just starting out, you will need to spend time building a client base – so the first strategy can’t be avoided. You’ll find, if you haven’t already, that this is perhaps one of the most time consuming ways of increasing revenue. So make a game of it; turn it into a contest amongst your sales staff, or between you and the world at large and you’ll do okay. See if you can increase the number of new clients you find every week. Once you can claim a few victories, you’ll find yourself even more motivated to move forward. Each time you get a new piece of business, don’t sit back and relax. Capitalize on this new high and go find your next client. Your enthusiasm from the last client will spillover to your next client will buy that much quicker.

It happens at different points for all businesses, but after you have a fairly strong client base, you then can implement the second and third strategies. Why would you want to avoid the first strategy, getting more customers? This strategy shouldn’t be avoided, but it should be lower in priority than increasing the frequency of purchases as well as increasing the size of each purchase. The reason is simple: finding new customers is the most expensive strategy when building revenue. Convincing existing clients to buy more, or more frequently is far more efficient.

Show Customers You Have Credibility - When you have narrowed potential clients down to the shortlist of those who have the need, and the funds to buy from you, you then need to figure out a way to provide some sort of assurance to them. You need to demonstrate that your product or service is high quality and that you have integrity in dealing with them. But at this early stage it will be difficult to make them believe you. Find a way to get referrals from others.

Our business is training, and in order to create credibility in the market we ask our clients for reference letters. It’s never easy getting clients to write reference letters, but it’s important when we’re on a sales call to be able to flash these to potential clients making sure they see the logos of the companies who’ve written them. We didn’t need to go this far, but you may want to provide some clients with pro-bono service in exchange for a reference letter.

Once your customers have done some business with you, you can then begin to think about how to increase order size and purchase frequency.

Offer Reduced Rate Packages – If your product price is 100, and the average marketing cost for each sale is 40, then you make 60 on each product. (not including direct costs) If you can get your customer to buy 2 products, your marketing costs are probably similar to what they were when they bought just one. You should be happy to give some of that savings back to the customer. In the end you’ll have a happier client and your revenue will also be higher.

Consider offering freebies when clients buy more. Some industries are much easier to do this in than others, but figuring out a way to increase the total value to the client will go a long way in building a relationship. Giving out promotional items like pens or mouse-pads does not count!

Keep Clients Coming Back – Clients often will tell you what they want from a vendor – but you first have to ask them. If you can provide more of what they need, you’ll find your clients coming back for more, more frequently.

We asked our clients what they needed and found to our surprise that they wanted some very basic training for fresh graduates right out of university. We assumed that fresh grads were full of knowledge and wouldn’t need any kind of training at all. When we asked, our clients told us that these people didn’t have even the most rudimentary of personal self management skills. Several of our clients asked us to come back earlier than we expected when they learned we offered a program for new office staff.

One of our clients is a PR agency, and when they found out that we had written a book on networking skills, they asked us immediately to provide this course to their staff. But it didn’t end there; they also asked us to offer it on a quarterly basis to their clients as a way of helping them to build their own practice!

Referrals Have Double the Benefit – When you ask you clients to refer business to you, you have to be extremely humble. If you have been having an ongoing sales dialogue with someone who not only spends money, but also has responsibility for saving it, you’ve hit a gold mine. When you successfully convince someone to refer business to you, you are creating a very positive motivator in his or her mind. When clients pass your name on to others, they listen to and hear themselves endorsing your product. At the same time they’re passing information on to others, they’re reinforcing their own positive feelings about you. They’ll more than likely be returning to buy from you again!

If you don’t think that this will be successful, try adding some incentive for the referrer. Figure out a way to pass value back to your helper in some way. You could give him some free product, but better yet would be to give him a discount the next time he purchased from you – don’t forget that your target is to increase your revenue.

The Gift of Gab – Talk to your clients! We all can talk to our best friends, our families and our colleagues because we know where our commonalities are. Not everyone is easy to talk to though. Make a practice of forcing yourself to ask clients how you could make your product or service better or cheaper, or otherwise more what they want or need.

You can compete in only three areas: price, quality and service. Most companies compete on one, some compete on two, but if you try to compete on all three, you’ll fail miserably. Your credibility will quickly go out the window, and you’ll have a hard time regaining it again. Decide which one or two aspects you compete on. Figure out how you will respond to questions concerning the third issue – undoubtedly someone will ask you. And then find out how your clients feel you perform in these areas. You may not like what you hear, but you definitely need to hear it!

Take pains to develop those social skills you need to start and facilitate a conversation with your client.

The best way to increase your revenue is by getting clients to buy more each time they buy. Increasing the frequency of their purchases is also very useful. Don’t forget that adding new clients to your customer list is the most time and resource consuming of all.