Imagine your business is like a bucket.
Imagine water is the money pouring in from potential customers.
In this analogy, consider marketing as spraying a garden hose towards the bucket… A lot of this water doesn’t even land in the bucket!
This is a very common, but very expensive way to try to get water in your bucket.
When you can focus your marketing efforts to a specific and desirable customer segment and they see the value; it is more like pouring a hose directly into your bucket – this is good. It’s effective and efficient.
But, there are likely holes in your bucket!
The first thing you need to determine is where are the holes and how big are they?
The gauge for this is called your conversion ratio. It’s the percentage of actual sales you get (water that stays in the bucket) out of the total water poured into the bucket (the total number of leads and opportunities for sales).
There is an important point here:
Having an actual gauge to measure the water flowing out of the holes will give you a way to measure if a patch job works.
If you want to increase profits in your business (keep more water in the bucket) the common method is to crank up the advertising spending (spray more water towards the bucket), but this is most often done without any gauge to measure the results. This is expensive and ineffective as all you’re really doing is spending money to spray water in every direction with the hope that some might land in the bucket!
Why not patch the holes in the bucket first?
There are two simple patches:
- Answer all the sales phone calls – I had a client with one phone line who didn’t want to pay for the second line. What if a new customer called while they were on the phone?
- Follow up with all leads – I know we get busy, but these potential customers called you first. Why not follow up with them and get them what they need?
At a deeper level there is a lot more to be done:
- Sales training – My most successful clients continually invest in training their salespeople.
- Product knowledge training – Wouldn’t it be great if everyone who talked to customers knew how and why every one of your products and services differentiates itself from the competitor?
- Consistent systems – “Do you want fries with that” is a dated but great example of a systematized upsell program that literally kept millions more in the McDonald’s bucket.
- Set up the gauges to measure the leaks – Just by starting to measure where the leaks are will help improve conversions. The best gauges report the good and bad days in real time… and in time to figure out how to patch the holes!
We think there is so much opportunity for profit improvement in this area; we are creating a complete “patch the holes in the bucket” program for independent business owners.
If you want to take some of that advertising money spent spraying water towards your bucket and patch a few holes bucket instead, just let us know. (By the way, we have a money-back guarantee.)
Drop us a line: paul@thebusinesstherapist.com
