How to grow small business to big business.

You have a lot of ways to build momentum in your business.  Momentum is how to grow small business to big business.

Chances are, if all you did was invest just one hour to adding momentum to your business each week…

You could DOUBLE or TRIPLE your profits within a year.

There are only 3 ways to grow a business:

1. Get More Customers
2. Increase the Frequency with Which They Do Business With you
3. Increase the Average Purchase Price Per Transaction

That’s it.

Sounds pretty simple, yes?

It’s broken down into 3 steps.

Step 1: Take “Momentum” Inventory

Take inventory of all the ways you’re currently:

1. Generating Traffic
2. Capturing Leads
3. Making Sales

Each one of these areas is a source of momentum in your business or how to grow small business to big business.

Step 2: Get Scientific

We’ll use our CRM, Google Analytics, and any other such tracking software to track each effort.

Like a scientist who painstakingly takes notes to know what ingredients in his formula produces positive (or negative) results… I challenge you to become “scientific” in your analysis of what’s working (and what’s not).

Why is this important?

So you can do more of what IS working… And less of what ISN’T working…

The problem is, just as the cover of Adweek Magazine (Oct 16) said:

“I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half.” – John Wannamaker

Figuring this stuff out (which isn’t hard) makes a huge impact.

Step 3: Incremental Improvement

Finally, ask yourself:

“What can I do, right now, to make an incremental improvement in each one of those areas?”

Initially, we’re not setting out to double your profits overnight. We’re just looking for small, incremental momentum builders that are practically effortless to execute – yet frequently yield a big result.

For example, you could:

1. Add a phone number to the top of your website (KissMetrics found this to increase signups by 17.2%)
2. Increase the number of follow-up attempts your salespeople make (The National Sales Executive Association shows 80% of all sales happen between the 5th-12th follow up)
3. Use retargeting (98% of your website visitors leave without converting – retargeting brings them back)
4. Reduce attrition with better customer support (89% of customers stopped doing business after experiencing poor customer service – turn this around with better customer support)
5. Offer strong back-end sales (up to 65% of your customers will buy more if given the opportunity – all you have to do is make them a compelling offer to get even better results related to their original purchase)
6. Take your clients from online to offline (direct mail outperforms all digital channels COMBINED by nearly 600% – get even better results by focusing in on only those customers who have invested at least $1.00 with you)
7. Increase your prices (we helped our clients raise profits by 25% without losing a single customer by simply increasing prices and justifying it with a stronger guarantee)
8. Optimize your website lead capture (moving the opt-in form to the left increased our signups by 200%!)
9. Get more of your emails opened (80-92% of every email you send is not being opened – improve your email deliverability and instantly see a boost in results)
10. Get better click-through rates (we saw a 33% greater click-through rate by simply adding an image to our emails)
11. Re-engage your inactive clients with an irresistible offer (reach out to people who haven’t purchased from you in a while with a foolproof offer and follow up at least 3 times – this is how we increased month-to-month sales for one client by over 100%).
12. Create a winning referral program (this increased DropBox signups by 60% and helped PayPal achieve 7-10% daily growth!)
13. Establish joint venture relationships (your JVs only get paid on the sales they directly make promoting your products to their list – it helped one of my clients make over $2.5 million in extra cash within 6 months)
14. Create a Unique Advantage Point making the unique advantages of doing business with you (over your competitors) crystal clear
15. Establish a loyalty program (research indicates as much as 70% of profit comes from loyal customers – create an incentive to keep your most loyal customers coming back)
16. Create a better customer experience (for every $1.00 spent on developing customer experience, organizations are seeing $3.00 in return)
17. Offer a point-of-sale promotion (Hudson News had their cashiers simply ask “Do you want a bottled water?” with every purchase, resulting in customers spending more money)
18. Offer autoship/auto-renew contracts (give your customers a discount to autoship and increase the number of times your customers do business with you – similarly, if you’re B2B, make it easy for your contracts to automatically renew)
19. Upsell for greater convenience, luxury, performance, speed, etc. (JetBlue offered a couple inches of more legroom and added hundreds of millions in extra profits.)
20. Add a cart abandonment sequence (email or call someone, if they added something to your cart but didn’t check out, to remind them of the benefits of doing business with you – an easy way to bring people back many “lost” buyers)
21. Collect customer feedback (if someone expressed an interest but didn’t buy, ask why – this helped SuperOffice increase sales by $60k this year)

Of course, the reality is that there are hundreds of ways to boost sales…

We’re just getting started.

If you haven’t done so yet, talk to a business growth strategist at Midnight Oil  and discover more ways to increase your bottom-line profits.