Small business success comes down to being able to drive enough sales to sustain consistent growth.
That’s why, it’s not surprising that only half of small businesses survive past the five-year mark, with the other half going under because of various reasons that all point to the same thing:
Not enough new customers.
As any internet business broker will tell you, one of the most important aspects that determines the value of a small business is its ability to increase sales numbers month after month, and that’s because only this type of upward trend can show prospective buyers that the company has enough promise to invest into.
So, in this article, we’ll explore some of the most effective strategies you can employ to grow your sales and ensure that in five years, your business is still standing and going strong.
Ready to get started? Then read on below.
Make Your Sales Cycle Quicker
One of the biggest problems with small business sales is the time it takes to get leads through the sales cycle.
Small businesses usually have less marketing experience and haven’t yet streamlined their processes, which means that there’s a lot of manual work and guesswork involved when trying to convert leads into customers.
Therefore, if you can speed up your sales cycle and get new customers to sign up quicker and more effectively, that can help you spend less time working on current leads and more time pursuing new ones.
But how can you shorten your sales cycle?
Well, there are a few steps you can take to make sure that you not only shorten the time it takes to convert a lead but improve the experience of your prospect in the process.
For one thing, you need to start evaluating and scoring your leads based on the likelihood that they are ready to buy right now.
If you can figure out which leads convert the fastest, you can pursue them more aggressively, while nurturing those that still need time and more information.
You should also map out your entire sales cycle to make sure that each step is a logical progression towards the customer deciding to buy from you.
Another thing you could do is coach your sales reps, helping them understand how to approach different types of leads and how not to waste time with ineffective sales strategies.
Track Your Performance
It’s all but impossible to make steady improvements to your sales processes if you don’t have any idea what’s working and what isn’t.
That’s why it’s essential to implement performance tracking measures so that you can better understand which lead generation and sales efforts are providing the best results, as well as which are the biggest time-wasters and should be phased out.
The good news is that today, there are plenty of analytics and data collection tools that allow you to analyze every part of your funnel and ensure that you are making steady improvements.
If you’re using a database like MongoDB, you can use the MongoDB Tableau integration create visually-appealing reports that you can use for presentations for your team.
Over time, tracking your data can provide you with a significant competitive advantage in your market, as you’ll gain a deeper understanding about who your ideal customers are, what are their buying habits, where they like to hang out, and how to best approach them.
Tracking performance will also allow you to get the most out of every single marketing dollar in your budget, giving you the maximum reach and enabling you to be more aggressive in pursuing leads that are harder to approach.
Increase the Lifetime Value of Your Current Customers
Most companies associate growth with the ever-increasing number of new customers that they can bring in.
But while that is undoubtedly an important aspect, as a small business, you need to make sure that you’re getting the most out of the leads that have already been converted at least once.
Acquiring a new customer is significantly more expensive and more complicated than selling again to an old customer, so by shifting your focus to maximizing the value of your current list of customers, you may find that you can achieve much more sustainable results.
One of the best ways to keep your past customers engaged is to create an email list.
If you can get your customers to subscribe to your newsletter, you could introduce new products, offer them related products that they are likely to be interested in, run special promotions and deals, and educate them about how they can solve various issues that you know they’re facing with the help of your solutions.
With a well-executed email marketing campaign, you can keep selling to your list of customers for years to come, maximizing their lifetime customer value and making sure that you get as big of an ROI from every lead as possible.
An additional benefit of this strategy is the fact that since you’re getting much more value from each converted customer, you can be more aggressive in pursuing new leads and spend more on each acquired lead since you know that you can more than make up the difference on the backend.
Try Out New Marketing Approaches
Many small businesses make the mistake of sticking to just one or two marketing approaches for generating leads.
Part of the reason is the fact that they don’t feel like they have the expertise to try some of the seemingly more complicated and technical approaches, but another is simply because they are afraid of investing a significant amount of money without seeing any tangible results.
However, there’s a limit to how far you can go with using word-of-mouth marketing or hoping to get by with a little bit of search engine optimization.
Today, there are countless ways how you could attract leads online, and if you’re not applying them, it will only be a matter of time until you are pushed out of the market by the competition.
But what types of strategies you could try?
Well, one of the easiest to scale ways to attract new customers is to use paid advertising on social media and Google.
While it can take some time until you start turning a profit, once you do, you can scale up quite quickly and start seeing more sales than with almost any other method out there.
Another strategy that’s been executed by small businesses with great success is influencer marketing.
By reaching out to prominent social media figures in your niche and getting them to promote your products to their followers, you can get an influx of targeted and ready-to-buy leads to your site in a matter of hours.
One thing you must consider when using either paid advertising or influencer marketing is that you must ensure that your site is always up and functioning during your campaigns.
The worst thing that could happen is your site going down when you’re spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a campaign.
Make sure that you have a provider that can ensure stable DNS performance and that your site is up and loading fast no matter the amount of traffic it receives.
In the end, the only limit to the number of strategies you could try out is your creativity and willingness to experiment.
New approaches are being discovered every year, and if you can be the first business to adopt them in your niche, that can provide you with a huge advantage that could even help you carve out a bigger share of the marketplace.
