3 Areas Every Business Can Work On For Growth
Pretty much everything I write about in this newsletter comes directly from what I am experiencing in running my own business right now or have run into in helping other people with theirs.
Today’s topic is very much what I’ve been thinking about for this business. It’s not anything splashy or “secret” or something you’ll only learn if you join the diamond-level mastermind. It’s the nuts and bolts of day-to-day business that is super important but easy to overlook in all the normal chaos of day-to-day operations.
The three areas I think every business will benefit from spending just a little more time working on improving are leads, sales, and customer service.
Now you might immediately think “those are all very big areas” and not ones you can just tackle quickly or simply, and I don’t disagree. But here’s what I also think you might agree with: these areas probably don’t get much love or mindshare in your normal business.
Check out what else we’ve been up to!
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Let’s start with leads. The average business I see, outside of the few categories where nearly their entire customer base is driven by ads (ecommerce private label comes to mind) spends hardly anything on this.
The more proactive may do some Google search ads or may spend to sponsor this or that, but as a percentage of revenue, their marketing budget is nearly zero.
If you ask, you’ll hear the almost universal claim that word of mouth is the primary driver of business. Since that seems like something that is working for them, costs nothing, and isn’t clear how to scale, they just leave it alone and take what they get.
The problem comes in two forms. The first is, if this is your only source of new business and it slows down or dries up, you’re screwed. The second problem is, if you want to try and grow, then you have no way to control that besides hope, and hope is a poor strategy.
So, what should you do? I’ve written whole posts about lead generation for small businesses already so I don’t need to rehash that here (and I’m hardly the only one with opinions or tactics for this!).
What I will say is, if you want to grow (and have some control over your growth) then the first thing you need to think about is simply how to get your business in front of more potential customers. If you aren’t thinking about that, and devoting some time to it, and some resources (money, but also time) then it will not happen on its own.
Two More Key Areas of Focus For Business Growth
The second one is sales. No matter what business you are in, you have some form of sales happening. In a restaurant, for example, you want to encourage customers to order your higher margin offerings, order more of them, and then give them reasons to come back more often. That is all the sales effort.
The same goes for any business. The sales effort starts with figuring out how to get more leads to become buyers but also more buyers to buy more and more often. You don’t want to do it in a way that turns people off or feels overly pushy- you want to make it enticing and worthwhile and a no-brainer type of decision. Stack value so it’s easy for them to say yes and say yes more often.
If you aren’t thinking about your offerings, and why people buy, and how to give them more of what they want then you are squandering your opportunity. As hard as you worked to get those leads you want to make the most of them but in a way that delivers real results to the customers.
In my experience, most business owners spend time selling but have never really trained in sales, or studied the process, or even given it much thought. As a result, they get less out of their efforts than they could. This is the second place to spend some time and resources improving your process, tracking results, and continuing to make it better over time.
The third thing is the most ephemeral and hard to define but it is maybe the most important of the three. Essentially, I think of it as trying to reduce the friction of the process of working with your business as much as possible. You want to make it so each step is easy, clear, and exceeds expectations.
The best way to find out what those friction points are is to “secret shop” your own business. Have friends, relatives, or whoever you can get pretend to be a customer of your business and then tell you all the places where things weren’t as easy as they could have been or where it got slow, or frustrating, or unclear. It helps of course if they are as much like your actual customers as possible so they’re really going through the same process.
If you go through it end to end, from initial sign-up to final delivery, I guarantee there are places where you can make the process better. Those changes are what keep people coming back, writing good reviews, telling friends, and increasing the overall value of each customer interaction.
So, then this is what happens. You get more leads. You sell more to the leads you’re getting. Those customers have a better experience and your brand power grows. Then your business grows. And grows and grows.
None of these things is particularly hard or complicated. You just need to decide you want to make changes to improve in each of these areas. As you do you will see immediate benefits, not the least of which is the amount of money you’re making compared to before you made the changes.
It’s what I’m working on here and I can tell you firsthand it does work. You just need to take action to do it!
