6 Ways To Attack The Market To Win Sales, Profit & Cash Flow

INTRODUCTION:

Businesses that want to grow and increase profit and cash flow will generally have to find a way to increase sales at the same time. To grow sales, the first thoughts will be to (usually erroneously) drop price, spend more on advertising and put more salespeople on.

Before you do this, here are 6 areas that should be checked off before you end up wasting your time and money.

 Figure 1: A scatter gun approach to increasing sales by spending monies aimlessly through expensive advertising is not recommended. "Uno" what happens when you do this? A mess with somebody else to pick up the pieces!  Photo courtesy Balmain Baz and Lara Scolari Gallery

1: Understand Your Existing Customers

To increase sales, before you rush off to find new customers, do you really know your existing ones? Why do they buy from you instead of your competition? If you are not sure, survey them. If you understand why they buy from you, chances are others would too, you just haven't figured a way to find them and let them know.

2: Upsell

Your customers know and trust you so have you kept in touch with them or are you and your sales team reactive instead of proactive? It's much easier to sell to an existing customer but you have to pick up the phone and ring them!

3: Get A Database

Once you know what your ideal purchaser looks like, get a database and put these targets in it. Having a real list of who you would like to get as a customer is much more effective than just marketing to the general public anonymously.

Figure 2: Coming up with ways to increase sales are often the simplest.

4: Increase Outbound and Inbound Activity

Get active and do not wait for the phone to ring! The more activity the sales team does the greater the conversion to actual sales. Have you measured how many calls you have to make to get a lead and then a conversion to a sale? Once you know this work backwards from the sales you need to make and then make sure you are doing the minimum activity to make it all happen.

What inbound marketing are you doing through blogs and other call to action plans?

5: review Your Sales PLan

Do you have a sales plan and if so, how is it performing? If you've looked at the first 4 points of this blog you may need to alter it accordingly.

6: Test & Measure

After putting the above in place make sure you test and measure the results. Book meetings with your small business accountants and business advisors to discuss what has worked and what hasn't.

Review profits and cash flow and see how they can be improved further with the planned increased level of sales. Amend your three way budgets as part of your planning.

CONCLUSION:

To grow a business then generally you need to grow your sales. Look at some of the above basics and watch your results improve dramatically!