SPECIAL GUEST BLOG By Sean Donnelly, Financial Management Mentor, Mentors.ie

Without adequate sales you have no business. Some ways to increase sales:

1) Ensure all your staff know & practice the ‘Ten Commandments of Good Business’¹. Clients/customers are mentioned in each commandment; in fact they are at the start of every commandment because clients/customers come first. Shoppers decide in the first eight seconds when visiting a retail store whether they are comfortable and therefore likely to buy². Sixty eight per cent of customers who leave do so because of indifferent staff who just don’t care².

2) Ensure your unique selling proposition (USP) is crystal clear and is distinct from competitors. What benefit will buyers get from your product/service as distinct from competing products? What is unique about your product/service? What specific customer need are you satisfying?

3) Sales result from marketing. Have you done a value-analysis on your marketing spending to ensure you are spending money on media bringing in enquiries/orders? Have you analysed which marketing/advertising media are producing the best results in terms of sales enquiries/leads? Are your marketing messages consistent with your USP?

4) Direct advertising vs. Indirect advertising: How much can you avail of free publicity such as customer recommendations/testimonials and word of mouth from satisfied customers? In many instances these are worth far more than normal advertisements. Social media – Are you using these for advertising, PR, promotions and free publicity?

5) Market share – Have you some measurement of the market and your share of it? How do you know where to improve if you don’t know how you’re performing?

6) What is your lead conversion ratio or your quotes accepted ratio? Declining or improving?

7) If sales have declined, why? Is it because of change of taste/fashion, customer slowdown in non-essential spending, price resistance or what? Have your competitor’s sales suffered a similar drop? Unless you can answer these questions you cannot determine the most appropriate solution.

8 ) Promotions – Have you considered price discounts, bulk purchase discounts, vouchers, competitions, financing arrangements for high value purchases etc?

9) Repeat customers – What percentage of your sales derive from orders from existing customers vs. new customers? Would your business expect customers to come back again rather than go to a competitor? Have you surveyed some existing repeat customers and also some customers who have gone to a competitor? It is vital to find out what existing customers value most about your products/services and to learn from previous customers where competitor’s offers are proving more attractive than yours. Loyal customers are made not born. Marketing activities attract customers but customer care keeps them.

10) New customers – What are you offering these to try out your product/service? What does it take to get ‘satisfied’ customers to try out your product/service? What offer is most enticing & appropriate? Can you afford some innovative trial offer?

11) Lifetime customers – How many years/months would a typical customer stay with you after their first purchase? If the nature of the business is strongly customer loyal (most personal service businesses) the value of lifetime customers should be calculated and this should be used in strategies to retain customers for the maximum period and also in attracting new customers who will bring in revenue over a long period.

12) New markets, alternative uses for products, selling different products to existing customers etc all need to be explored.

¹ From David Reznick, founder of Reznick Group, one of America’s largest accounting firms. ² Chris Daffy, Once a Customer, Always a Customer.