Taking Your Business to the Gym: The 4 ways to Grow Your Business

There are only four ways to increase a company's revenues. They are:

1. Acquire another company
   
2. Find new customers to buy from you
   
3. Get existing clients to spend more at each visit
   
4. Get existing customers to visit more frequently and spend money
   

Option 1 is really only relevant in specialised circumstances, and most businesses with not acquire another at all during their lifetime. So businesses should concentrate on the other three. This option anyway is the most risky given that statistics suggest only 33% of acquisitions are successful.

Which of the remaining options you chose depends on who your customers are and what your business sells. For example many businesses offer products or services with a very low percentage of repeat purchases so Option 2 becomes critical to their survival. These kinds of businesses can only support growth by new business development. That is getting more new customers. This is the most difficult to achieve. It is generally accepted that it takes 7 -10 times as much effort to get a new customer to buy from you than to get an existing customer to buy more. Unsurprisingly this type of business is generally much more sales focused and tends to fair less well in recessionary times as conversion rates fall.

Get your customers to purchase more at each visit. This is very common strategy in a B2C environment and works best where the business has a range of products for purchase. Supermarkets are great exponents of this where they offer a discount for multiple purchases. This is very often for the same product but can often be used to cross sell related or complimentary products. These products are carefully analysed to connect products with high margins. If you can't do that; try offering more goods and/or services for the same price rather than giving away a discount. This is a common on big ticket items where for the purchase of a particular product you get another free. This strategy is based on the premise that the perceived value (sales price) of the free item is significantly more than its cost. For example mobile phone accessories which are purchased by the retailer at a very small fraction of their retail sales price.

Option 4 is about getting repeat sales more frequently; this may be achieved by visiting customers more frequently. An example of this is home delivery freezer food company Eismann. In our area they used to visit us every 4 weeks suddenly it was every 3 weeks. We tended to buy a little bit less on each 3 week visit but over the year we spent significantly more. In the UK you'll also have noticed the increased use of time limited discount vouchers by the big supermarkets; these are all designed to increase the frequency of your visit. B2B businesses use CRM data to manage the frequency with which they contact customers or prospects, as well as buying habits. If you haven't got one, even a very simple one, its going to make increasing revenues a lot harder and in these difficult times you need all the help you can get. So spend a little time understanding which of these options are best for your business and start implementing you approach now.

Exigent Consulting specialises in providing Business Turnaround, Sales, Marketing and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help Business Owners improve the profit performance of their business.