Hi

There are only two ways to grow your business: get more customers or have existing customers buy more (or more often). It's that simple.

So it would be reasonable to assume that most business owners have a strategic plan to accomplish both of these. In my experience, however, this is rarely the case. If such a plan exists it is to scatter marketing content across various pillars in the hope of generating interest.

But there is a better way. Take getting more customers for instance.

Customers don't just magically appear they come from generating a lead which you convert into a prospect, engage with on a discovery call and then convert to a customer.

To sign one new customer therefore requires knowing your conversion rates from lead to prospect to discovery call, and discovery call to customer sign-up. However, it is rare to find a business owner who knows their conversion rates.

It isn't quite this simple of course, because not all the leads that enter your sales funnel will be your ideal client. I'll take as a given that you know the characteristics of your ideal client, and so what you need to generate are qualified leads: that is those who display these characteristics.

Next, of course, you need to be able to answer the question “How many new customers do you want each month?” And in case you’re wondering the answer isn’t “As many as I can get.” Growth should be planned based on factors such as capacity, onboarding time, your fixed costs and the business owner's requirements in terms of remuneration.

I use a spreadsheet we call the Profit Planner™ to calculate the number of leads a business needs to generate the number of new customers it wants each month. 

Knowing this number, and the amount you can afford to spend to generate each lead, you can devise a targeted marketing campaign focusing on your primary lead sources and avoiding wasted expenditure. If you’d like to find out more about Profit Planner™ drop me a line.

Next week I’ll look at strategies to get your existing – and new – customers to buy more frequently from you.

Until then…to your success.

Noel Guilford