We all want growth in our businesses. But why is it so hard to do, and then why don’t we keep growing all the time?
I’ve seen it many times in my businesses and I’m sure you have too. You put a new system in place or bring on a new product or service and business explodes. Then the following year, it’s back to more of the same. You get to a certain sales level and then you’re stuck there.
Why is that?
Well, I’ve discovered over my time that in business that there are three assets all businesses need to have in place to achieve steady predictable growth. Without these, it’s a matter of trial and error and you may not even know what works or not.
You’re relying on luck – which isn’t necessarily the best business practice or strategy.
The three assets are:
- A Documented Journey
- Actionable Metrics
- Tools & Tactics
Let’s go into each of these and why they’re important.
A Documented Journey
This is an actual plan that shows step by step how someone who has never heard of you finds out about you and then becomes a lead, then a customer, and finally an advocate and promoter of your business.
If you don’t have this documented, you’re going to have a hard time moving people from one stage to another in their process of becoming your customer.
You’ll find that you’re working hard trying to find new customers and when you talk to people they either buy or they don’t right away. If they don’t choose to buy you lose them and have to find more people.
This is a long hard grind to building a business.
Actionable Metrics
If you don’t have a way to track where you are on your path to growth you’re not going to know if you’re getting anywhere.
Sure, the end goal is a sale (and then repeat sales and referrals) but how does someone go from a stranger to this level?
There must be steps along the way.
Once you identify the most important steps in your customer journey then the next step is measuring them.
How many people have done the actions you want?
Where are they getting stuck?
Once you know these pieces of information you can start to see how your efforts are going.
How many people will become customers this week, next week, and the week after? When you know these numbers and how many people are at each stage you can start knowing what your sales are going to be.
The key is the numbers you’re measuring have to be actionable and they have to affect the results you want to get. If you can’t affect the number or the result you need to find another number.
When we’ve put this in place for clients, there have been amazing results.
Tools & Tactics
This is the fun stuff and everyone wants to start here.
They want the latest marketing tool that’s going to explode their business.
The problem is if you don’t know where you want people to go and what you want them to do you can’t get a predictable result.
Sure, you can try different tools and tactics and every once in awhile you’re going to get one to work.
But then it stops working and you don’t know why or what happened.
Without a plan in place and a way to measure where you’re at all you’re doing is throwing stuff against a wall and hoping it will stick.
There is a better way.
You develop your plan and your metrics first and then you chose the tools that will make the most difference and get started.
If you’d like to learn more and you have an existing business, then let’s talk! You can schedule a Complementary Double Your Sales Workshop for you and your team. We’ll look at your business and get started on creating your system. You can schedule at www.gosocialexperts.com/dys. This is a 90-minute workshop that will start the process of creating a plan for you that will put you on the path of doubling your sales.
At the end of the workshop, if it makes sense, we can talk about what it looks like if you want my help to fully implement this system.
Brian Hahn
P.S. Schedule your Double Your Sales Workshop at www.gosocialexperts.com/dys