In this Issue

🐘    4 Ways to Grow
🔊    Volume
⚡️    Velocity
💰    Value
🛍️    Variety

🐘  4 Ways to Grow

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

The same goes for business. You’re not going to drive exponential growth in 90 or 180 days. It’s a process.

Make deliberate decisions. Choose your priorities:

• What does your business need right now?
• What about in twelve, twenty-four, or thirty-six months?
• Where is your business headed and how do you need your brand to perform?

A powerful way to approach your growth strategy is by aligning your business priorities with sales priorities.‍

There are four ways to improve sales performance to grow your business, what I call the 4Vs:

🔊  Volume: Increase customer demand to generate sales ready leads.

⚡️  Velocity: Accelerate your customers’ buying process.

💰  Value: Increase the value of your average size sale.

🛍️  Variety: Increase the lifetime value of your customers.

To grow your business, choose a V: Volume, Velocity, Value, or Variety. Each one can drive revenue growth. But choose one.

It’s very hard, if not impossible, to focus on all 4Vs at once. Each is a big priority and consumes a lot of resources. Prioritize your Vs and work on one at a time.

🔊  Volume

The first way to grow your business is to increase customer demand.

The ultimate measure of a Sticky Brand’s performance is customer inquiries:

• How often does your company receive inquiries for your products and services?
• Is your brand consistently pulling in new customers?

Volume is the amount of demand for your products and services.

The mistake companies make with increasing Volume is they jump to marketing tactics too quickly. They implement advertising and inbound marketing strategies before they’ve validated their sales messaging and value proposition.

You will save your company a lot of time and money with this phrase: If you can’t sell it, don’t market it.

⚡️  Velocity

The second way to grow revenue is to accelerate your sales funnel. Velocity is the speed a customer travels through the buying cycle.

To optimize Velocity, analyze how your customers buy and their “Conversion Points” along the way.

For example:

• How long does it take a customer to move from completing the inquiry form to receiving a product demonstration, and then from demonstration to contract, and contract to delivery?
• What percentage of your customers do not convert at each point?
• Are customers getting stuck or stalled at any key points in the process?

Time and conversion metrics are valuable because they function as an early warning system of problems that might be occurring in the buying process.

Conversion Points help you optimize and improve your sales performance:

• Can you make your messaging clearer?
• Can you improve the buying experience?
• Can you enhance or adjust your products to better serve your clients?
• Can you reduce friction at any of the Conversion Points?

Focusing on improving Velocity helps improve the overall buying experience. By optimizing Velocity you are making it easier for your customers to buy.

💰  Value

One of the biggest yet often overlooked ways to grow revenue is to sell bigger deals. Value is your ability to increase your average size sale.

At Central Smith, we divided customers into four groups:

• Whales: 2 million+ units
• Tuna: 500,000 to 2 million units
• Salmon: 70,000 units or 1 day on the production line
• Goldfish: Less than 70,000 units (or too small to sell)

The sales team struggled with the sizing at first, because many of their prospects were “Goldfish.” These opportunities were too small to serve efficiently and had to be rejected.

The benefit of focusing on Salmons and Tunas, with the occasional Whale, is it dramatically improved sales performance by focusing on bigger deals.

Set criteria for minimum size deals and ideal customers.

🛍️  Variety

A brand isn’t sticky without repeat customers. Winning a customer once is great, but if your customers are not coming back again and again, there is something wrong.

Sticky Brands have substance that delivers clear customer results. Customers come back repeatedly because they appreciate the service, like the products, and are getting the results they want and expect.

So give them more!

Increasing Variety is designed to increase the lifetime value of a customer by providing them more products and services to purchase.

A growth strategy driven on Variety recognizes two things:

1. It’s far easier to grow an existing customer relationship than winning new ones.
2. Existing customers have far more needs than a one time purchase.

Building Variety requires focus and operational excellence. You can quickly get stretched and unfocused by trying to be all things to all people. Rather, it’s a matter of understanding the customer journey and where your company can make a meaningful contribution along the way.

🤔  Thoughts on Today’s Issue?

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