How to Increase Your Business in This “Bad” Economy

While the majority are just hoping for survival others still have the courage to ask the question; Can You REALLY Grow Your Business in This Economy?

The answer is YES, slowly maybe, but YES you can grow your business even in this horrible economy!

How?

By focusing all your efforts on the only three ways you can ever grow a business.

Countless people and businesses over complicate marketing with talk of image, brand, feel, style, look, and culture. These are all important, relevant factors — if you are a multinational company — and all are of little importance if you are not! What is most important is the simple fact that there are only three ways to grow your business.

1. Increase the number of customers, clients, members, players, guests. This is where most businesses focus most of their effort, although it is very often the hardest of the 3 ways to increase income. Large expansion in the quantity of customers usually comes from a change in pricing structure or a change in the marketing strategy.

PRICE – Dropping price to increase volume usually increases volume but very often not by the amount needed to increase profits. In fact usually the very opposite happens, profits shrink or disappear entirely!

MARKETING STRATEGY - When we changed one partner’s prime marketing media from print advertising to targeted direct mail, we were able to add over half a million dollars in income year one and over a million the second — with a small decrease in spending! Read a marketing book to learn more strategies and expand your knowledge!

In another case simply tripling a partner’s e-mail database has resulted in 52% increase in play this year!

With a new partner this year we just started an out bound telemarketing effort to re sell x- members that resulted in 56 sales and 60 trial memberships in just six weeks!

2. Increase the common transaction value. How can you get customers to buy more of what you sell each time they call, visit, or click? If ten people stand at the counter to buy a green fee for fifty five dollars, the 80/20 rule says that if all were offered the chance to buy six or seven green fees for, say, the price of five, two people would do it, increasing your transactional value by over 53%!

Uncomplicated, but nearly all customers seldom receive the offer. While the customer is standing right in front of them, golf resorts sell one round instead of five. Carpet cleaning services do not add a stain protections package to the sale. Hotels sell that night’s stay in the summer without trying to sell a return stay in the fall, and so it goes. There’s no cost other than the few moments of time and some basic sales training to make the offer:

“Mr. and Mrs. Jones, have you ever had the pleasure of being up here in Vermont when the leaves are changing color? It is amazing. Our fall packages just came out today but they sell out very fast. Would you like me to reserve yours while you are here today?”

We have increased one partner’s monthly revenue by over $100,000 a month this year by offer two HIGHER priced options! We increased sales for Florida Luxury Golf Homes for another partner by over 25 percent this year!

3. Increase the frequency of repurchase (or the amount of time they stay as a customer). How do you get more of your customers to buy more often to get more residual value out of each one of your clients?

A) Train your current staff how to sell more!

B) Contact the customer more often and in different ways

C) Use residual income models with auto billing

D) Add a loyalty component (not a discount!)

In numerous cases a simple change of marketing strategy, can turn a struggling business into an extremely profitable enterprise, even in this economy!

There are a hundred things you can do in the name of marketing. Focus on exploring these 3, in detail, 1st!