Growing your business successfully hinges on many factors and two of the major ingredients are numbers and communication.
The communication side is about how you lead, train and motivate your employees as well as using marketing to communicate your company’s value and uniqueness to generate sales.
The numbers side is just as important as the communication side, because to grow your business certain called ‘growth KPIs’ numbers need to change.
There’s a step by step formula any company owner can follow to grow the business faster, and here’s the 4-step process which will be discussed in detail…
- Measure all aspects of the business
- Understand the profit opportunities numbers reveal
- Apply specific, well chosen strategies to the figures
- Review results – modify the strategy if needed and measure again
Where the growth of your company needs to begin is with measuring, because measuring obtains FACTS about results to base decisions on.
The more you understand measuring, the more you can find hidden “profit opportunities” to apply strategies to, for rapid business growth.
Measuring is easy to begin by tracking leads and sales.
You can start with tracking all leads or phone calls, however it actually starts prior to that, with your website performance.
The Two Sources of Lead Generation
The type sources or types of lead generation are…
1. Passive
2. Proactive
Passive lead generation is where prospects go looking to buy from your industry in a search engine (e.g. on Google, on Facebook, on LinkedIn etc.)
Proactive lead generation is where you take your business to prospects to ‘interrupt’ their life with advertising for your business.
Proactive strategies include…
- Facebook PPC ads
- Radio ads
- TV ads
- Billboards/road/vehicle signage
- Letterbox flyers
These types of strategies can generate leads directly, where they see your business phone number and call, or indirectly where people go to your website, find out more and then phone your company.
Tracking the stats of activity with your website is super important. You want to know how people find your business and your website stats available through Google can reveal a lot about that.
The two platforms to use for seeing your website stats are…
Google Analytics
Google Search Console
Both are free to use and generate stats about sources of traffic to your website and even phone call volumes to your business.
Analytics reveals traffic from platforms such as social media that bring people to your website. It reveals the number of people (visitors) and how long they stay on your website. You can also set up Goals to see how many use contact forms to opt in or click on the phone number from your site too (for mobiles use only, which can be setup in Event Tracking).
Search Console reveals other very interesting facts such as which phrases people use to find your website and where you rank for each phrase in Google search results. Plus, you can see what page related phrases your site ranks in Google search results too.
The stats from both tools can reveal hidden improvement “opportunities” for website traffic and leads to take advantage of for free.
Simple changes to your web page TITLES and Descriptions can make quite surprising improvements to the rank in Google search results, and with that the number of website visitors and phone calls to your company.
Are all your page TITLES carefully chosen to be visitor and Google “friendly”? If not, you could be missing out on up to 50% more leads and phone calls to your company!
Learn more about passive and proactive marketing strategies.
With lead sources being tracked, then its time to move into leads to sales conversion rates.
How to Convert More Leads into Sales
You’d be shocked at how easy it is to convert loads more leads or quotes into sales.
But first you need to know how many you are converting now.
What’s your conversion rate from Leads to Sales – for the previous month?
If you’re not measuring it to see the actual figure every month, you’re missing out on easy sales. That’s because when you measure and see the real figure you wonder about some quotes you gave that didn’t turn into sales. You then start to pay more attention to the figure, put a little more effort in and then starts to improve.
There are a couple of dozen, super effective strategies that significantly improve conversion rates.
Each improvement is a corresponding improvement in your monthly and yearly revenue.
What a lot of business owners don’t understand is that increasing conversion rates from 50% to 60% is not a 10% increase in sales and annual revenue, its actually a 20% increase because the increase is a multiplication calculation, not an addition.
If your conversion rate is 30% then increasing it to 36% is also a 20% increase.
What that means is that the lower your conversion rate is, the greater the potential increase available.
Years ago a blind manufacturer was failing in her business. It turned out her conversion rate was just 5%. Six months later it was 72%, with 3 price rises having been introduced during the time. She went from stress and struggle to super profitable, by focusing on conversion rates.
A building company that carried out room extensions on homes, had a conversion rate of 12% with a $2,000,000 revenue. In just 4 months time, after applying a few strategies, it was 18% and saw monthly sales increase to $270,000 to be on track for a revenue of $2,980,000 – without any more money being spent on advertising.
Increasing conversion rates is possibly the least thought about way to increase business income there is.
Have you ever applied a conversion rate strategy, to try to increase your figure?
If not, there’s a LOT of opportunity to increase it. Perhaps by 20% to 50% or even 100% – to increase your annual revenue.
The strategies for increasing conversion rates are actually communication ones. It’s what you say to people and how you say it and what you put in writing with a quote that will increase the figure.
Example Conversion Rate Strategies
Some of the many examples of easy and fast to apply strategies are…
- Offer some kind of guarantee in writing with your quote or prices, or on your website Services page. Guarantees reduce the perceived risk of buying.
- Change your incoming phone call greeting – don’t say the word “speaking” – its been seen to hurt conversion rates significantly.
- Change what you say first after the phone greeting. Don’t answer people’s questions, ask questions. Be the leader – people want help, not to have all their questions answered. When you go to a doctor, who asks the questions, you or the doctor?
- Learn all about identifying people’s DISC Profile. Each person has a strong preference for how they want to be communicated to. DISC is a powerful tool to help with that. It’s been proven to increase sales and income by 367% in one month.
- Learn about body language – to understand when you are and aren’t in rapport. Rapport is the key to converting more leads into sales.
- Study rapport-building using words, voice and body language skills
- Change quotes into proposals.
- Get professional training on how to sell using rapport building, DISC Profile identification. Professional training will completely eliminate all awkwardness, tension and friction in selling situations so people like you, relate to you, buy from your company and then pay on time. ‘Old school’ training used to teach people to be aggressive and pushy.
These strategies have seen remarkable increases in conversion rates for 27 years in hundreds of businesses.
Are you missing out on easy increases in your sales due to a leaky conversion rate process?
Growth Opportunities in Leads and Sales
Increasing conversion rates is just one of many opportunities you can benefit from, using strategies like those above.
Seeing which types of service you provide has the highest conversion rate is very interesting too.
If you have a high (above 60%) conversion rate on new leads for one type of service, it usually means you’re smashing competitors and that’s a profit opportunity, to increase prices on that service.
The greatest benefit of tracking conversion rates, especially on each type of service your company provides, is to see what happens when you raise your prices.
If conversion rates don’t decrease after a 5% to 10% price rise, you can introduce another price rise!
You’d be amazed at how often conversion rates and sales do NOT decrease after a price rise. And if they don’t decrease, you can introduce another price rise, with very limited risk.
Your business always makes higher profits and profit margins from a price rise – and that’s a Primary Aim in business isn’t it?
Growing Your Company with Service Work Opportunities
These days most companies have some kind of job management software, especially as they reach and go beyond $700,000 in revenue. That’s because you definitely need it and benefit from being able to access data from clients, jobs and your own company when out of the office, on site etc.
The more popular job management systems are SimPro, AroFlo and WorkFlowMax and soon to be taking a slice of the action is BBM. This system was built by management and trade industry experts with decades of experience for savvy business owners who want higher profit margins, more than just job management and far more confidence with all their company decisions.
The challenges seen, by training hundreds of business owners for two decades, is that company owners aren’t trained on management and measuring.
They simply don’t know what figures are relevant to their company from a management point of view, to increase profits and margins by taking action or implementing strategies from what the figures reveal.
Relevant figures to your business are essential for you to know. Some of these figures are shown with the common job management software platforms, but it’s up to you to know exactly what reports are important to you, which ones you need to take action from, and the reports that are essential to look at weekly and monthly.
Unfortunately the software providers are not management experts, so you are left to try to figure out what reports are most relevant, how to configure them in the software, if that’s even possible, and then try to understand what the figures in the reports mean to you.
Management training, or a smarter management software, not just job management software is needed, so you are optimising the profit and growth potential of your business.
Some of the reports you need to be looking at weekly for the service side of your business are…
- Gross profit on every job
- Gross margin on every job
- Gross margins on all jobs of the same type
- Work produced in the week as a dollar figure – relative to wages paid for the week
- Comparison of quoted gross margins and actual gross margins on each job
- Comparisons of all jobs for quoted and actual gross margins
That’s a good list to start with but by no means is it all the reports you need.
When it comes to growing your business there is a balance you’re always trying to maintain, between new work or sales coming in and work you’ve ‘produced’.
If you sell more than you can produce and continue to do so week after week, you’re under-staffed and will need to hire someone.
This is why its super critical to be measuring what dollar figure in sales you’ve received as new work/sales each and every week. Then you need to compare that with ‘work produced’ each week to see if you are under-staffed or over-staffed every week and then see the trend of that for multiple weeks in a row.
If you aren’t tracking your new sales to work produced balance – measured in dollar figures each week, you’re going to feel stress.
Nearly all of the stress comes from not knowing your figures.
For example, if you didn’t know your number of leads and quotes had dropped by 20% every week, when would you find out?
In a few weeks, when you start to stress about not having enough work for employees?
When company owners don’t track their number of leads and sales and dollar figure of sales, there’s usually a whole lot of unnecessary stress being felt.
When you know your figures, you can take action when you need to by implementing a strategy.
If the number of leads are down, you can ALWAYS do something about it. The problem is, the solution can often take weeks, if you’ve only just implemented a new strategy.
What’s smart is to have already have a proven lead generation strategy ready before you need it so you are ready to use it when leads are low.
Also strategies and systems to solve cash-flow levels, profit margin levels, and even staff issues are beneficial to have too.
Having a ready to use system to use to hire great attitude employees is very beneficial system.
Management often isn’t a topic business owners focus on learning proactively. Its time consuming enough just trying to keep a business running so its not something you can drop everything else to learn.
The good news is, you can get the management learning taken care of in 6 to 12 months by learning it while implementing strategies and ready-to-use systems.
That’s not a lot of time considering how many more years or decades you will own your business.
The best thing about learning management is the benefit of a higher Net Profit Margin.
The smarter you are with management related knowledge and skills, the higher you can take your company’s Net Profit Margin.
What figure should you aim for with your company (once its over $700,000 revenue) is a common question asked by clients.
From experience, 15% is the minimum – even though “benchmark figures” may show an industry average of 5% or 8%.
Why 15%?
Because it’s actually very achievable and at that figure you start to have surplus cash, so you can save cash and build cash reserves.
Then your business becomes Bullet Proof and can ride out any storm, or radical external influence that can and often does destroy industries, such as a GFC.
If you like that idea consider the Business Freedom Mentoring Program that gives you and assists you with all the strategies, management reports, tools and systems to achieve true business freedom – where your business operates without your time or energy.
That’s where there’s no more stress due to cash flow, employees or external influences and your life and work are both very enjoyable!
Start the journey to find out what business freedom is and how you can achieve it with a no obligation 45 minute consultation. You’ve got nothing to lose and much to gain.