Growing business to most people will mean keeps the business running with reasonable income to pay expenses and extra to ensure business expansion to others it simply means increasing revenue.
Most business owners spend more time on their staff, business strategy or to complicate their product(S) but are these essential to growing your business?
It is good and important to care about these things but they are not the essential to growing a successful business. Others spend time on their plan, trying to revise it, looking at loops or points to focus on, yes it is good to do all these things but to grow a business, and you need more than just your plan, staff, product and strategy.
Here is the secret, SALES. Your main objective to starting a business in the first place was to make sales. Therefore, you should put much of your time on sales. No matter how good your product or services are, if you don’t make reasonable sales, you will go bankrupt in less than no time. If you are a young business, think of putting 85% or more of your time on sales. If you are an already established business, try putting in at least 40% of your time on sales.
Look at successful businesses out there; look at what they do to get the products to the consumer. You will be astonished. They are successful not because of the quality of their product (you known many better companies with better quality products that have gone bankrupt or struggling to survive), but their commitment to selling, getting the products to their consumers is better than their competitors.
This may sound awful, because we have been use to excuses (being too busy, have other stuffs to do) if you can drop these excuses, bring yourself down and try this technique, you will be surprise at how quickly your business will improve and the effect it will bring to your business in the long run.
Sales should therefore be the main center of focus of what your company does every single day. As the founder of IBM, Thomas Watson once remarked, “Nothing happens until somebody sells something”
Your marketing team therefore is the pride of your company there any resistance from your marketing staff about being pushed and held accountable should not be tolerated. Sales staff should be closely monitored and any who is not happy to have their performance closely monitored should be fired.
One other secret to be successful is to stick to one product, over time this pay off. It is often nowadays to see entrepreneurs going into divert products. This most of the times lead to one product drawing revenue from the other and at the end, they can’t trace their success or failure (Although desperate times calls for desperate measures).
Today, many companies uses divers means to sale their products like e-commerce, door to door sales.
Most businesses that when bankrupted did so at the early stages. This point to one thing, most people or consumers did not get to have a hold of your product, they did not know of your existence before it was no longer in the market. Little or nothing was done on advertising which plays a vital rule on sales. Therefore while planning your business; enough resources should be allocated to advertising. People need to know about your product, they need to see it, touch it and have a taste of it. If consumers must consume it, they need to know about it, its composition, what they stand to benefit from consuming it, why they should consume your product and not that of your compatriots.
One strategy that often pays off is given out your products out for free. The bible says “give and it shall be given to you”. Giving out something of great value away for absolutely nothing is huge and pays off in today’s market. This way, you create a friendly atmosphere around your products, attracting people to consume your product. This method is very successful to selling your products, creating trigger that encourages people to share something with others and people will normally comeback to your doorstep.
Creating something of massively high value, something that you would SELL, to make money, and then simply give it away, baby!!!
Another strategy to getting your business going and conquering territories is getting something unique. People like to try something new, people are always anxious to get a new product on their menu. At times it may not be a new product in particular but a better way of packaging. I’m going to deal more on this, packaging.
Like the saying goes “love at first sight is very strong” people are attracted, draw to and motivated by what they see. I have seen people paying extra price for the same good just because the package was review and done in a better way even though they were aware the product quality and quantity has not been altered. The more attractive you package is, the more people will be draw to your product and therefore the better your sales. People often pay or buy a product because the packaging is better and presentable. Note that your main goal is to make sales; therefore you have to focus on what can sale your product.
If you take a good example this will be the automobile industry. Each year, they companies try to come out with new designs. This keeps them in business as people will always love a new design compare to an old one. Not because they have added anything new to the car but just because they change the look, maybe just the tyres and consumers are running to pay extra for it.