Part 1.
This is the first part of a series of blogs with short bite size pieces of business advice, which if implemented could make a real difference to your business sales and profits.
I have realised, from more than 30 years of starting and running businesses, it is very often the small and simple things that can make the biggest difference to the growth of a business.
Also from coaching many businesses over the past 15 years, I have learned that many small businesses owners use the excuse of ‘not having time’ to NOT implement new ideas.
But when shown how to make small changes that take little time to plan and implement, they realise that they do have time, after all, and it is very possible to introduce new ideas that can make a big difference.
Here I Suggest 5 Business Growth Hack Ideas To Boost Your Business
Here I suggest FIVE ways to make changes to your business – one for every day of a 5 day working week.
Start with number 1 on Monday and work through to number 5 on Friday.
Each should only take one hour of your time, each day and, in some cases, a lot less time.
1. Monday - Collect Customer Reviews
2. Tuesday - Place Your Customer Reviews On Your Social Media and Your Website
3. Wednesday - Make Continual Progress In Your Business
4. Thursday - Ask Your Employees To Suggest Three Ways To Save Money In Your Business
5. Friday - Divide Your Customers Into Customer Groups
Monday
1. Collect Customer Reviews
87% of people will go online and check your customer reviews before they purchase from you.
But if you have no customer reviews or you only have a few or what you have are out of date, your potential customer will not be impressed and you could lose them.
But it is very simple to get a review from a customer who has made a purchase - simply ask them.
In my experience, most people are happy to provide you with a review, but many business owners are too frightened to ask for fear of what they will hear.
But good or bad, you need to know.
If the review is good, you will know that what you are doing is satisfying your customer and if the review is bad or poor, this is valuable information for you to improve things.
So, you must do it today.
Contact your most recent customers and ask them for a review - 'phone or email them now!
Tuesday
2. Place Your Customer Reviews On Your Social Media & Your Website
New potential customers will buy when they have trust in your business and your products.
One way to create trust is from good reviews from existing customers – so it makes sense to place them where your target customers will be looking and where they will see them.
That means your social media and your website.
See How This Can Be Done
Recently, I did this for one of my clients.
His name is Chris Fleet, a top accredited UK hypnotherapist, helping people with anxiety and depression to improve their lives. He also trains new hypnotherapists at his Devon School Of Hypnotherapy to Diploma Level.
Recently I placed this review from a successful hypnotherapy student, who graduated from his school, onto his Facebook and LinkedIn pages.
It was only part of the review, as the student Jo Webber provided a lengthy review - but it was enough to create much awareness.
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Here is another student review from another one of Chris Fleet's successful students, Ali De Matos - I placed this onto the home page of his website, along with a picture of Chris and Ali De Matos, proudly showing off her Diploma In Hypnotherapy.
Crucially, the review and picture were placed near the top of the webpage, so that more visitors would see it.
Again this technique has worked well and has helped to sell his Hypnotherapy Course places.
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You can see more by visiting https://www.chrisfleethypnotherapytraining.co.uk
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This technique of placing customer reviews onto social media and onto website pages can be very powerful and is something you should do, too.
Wednesday
3. Make Continual Progress In Your Business
It is wise to have a good Business Plan for your business to set your strategy, but too often, small businesses create a Business Plan, then either forget about it or ignore it.
Often there is a good reason for this - the business strategy that they have set themselves or that someone else has set for them is too ambitious and they are overwhelmed by it.
In business, you need to continually move forward, but a slow steady pace is far better than trying to grow your business at a gallop – growing a business is a marathon NOT a sprint.
The best strategy that I advise for my clients is simply to just beat the previous month’s sales total. If you do this most of the time, you are ultimately moving your business forward and in the right direction.
This Is Very Simple To Do
This is simple to do – just record and total your business sales for each month and try to beat the previous month’s total.
For most businesses, you can either keep a cumulative sales total as the month progresses or set aside an hour or so at the end of each month, to total your sales.
If you don’t beat the previous month, then sit down and see how you can improve things for the coming month.
By adopting this strategy, it can remove a lot of unnecessary stress and can stop you becoming overwhelmed by the enormity of the task of achieving a large growth.
If your monthly turnover is £10,000.00, say, and you beat each month by 1% for ten months of the year, your annual sales will grow by approximately 10% - provided, of course, the other two months don't see a big drop in your sales!
Thursday
4. Ask Your Employees To Suggest Three Ways To Save Money
Employees love to feel that they are more than just ‘workers’ in a business.
I know from experience that many like to feel more involved in the business than just working in it and one of the best ways to achieve this is by sometimes involving them in the decision making.
I know many employees have some good ideas about how a business should be run but, too often, they feel their views are not welcome or are not needed.
They then keep these ideas to themselves.
For my businesses, some of my best business idea have come from employee suggestions and these ideas have proved to be very successful when implemented.
As a business owner, you cannot have all the answers on how your business should be run best and you should really welcome ideas from the people who are often the closest to the working clogs of your business - namely, your employees.
Ask Them To Suggest Three Ways
Today ask your employees to suggest THREE WAYS to save money and to reduce costs in your business - maybe, even offer a prize for the best suggestion.
I think you could be surprised by what is suggested.
Friday
5. Divide Your Customers Into Customer Groups
Then, finally for Friday, a good suggestion to grow your sales by understanding your customers better.
You customers will only buy from you if they feel your products really help them and if your products provide the right benefits. If they think your products are not right, they will not buy and you could lose potential sales.
One good way to optimise your sales is to ensure your products are exactly what your customers want but there is a good chance not all of your products will appeal to every customer.
If, for instance, you run a café and you have a nice selection of meals, it is very easy to think that everyone will have the same dietary tastes.
But, in reality, this is not the case.
For instance, older people may like to eat different meals to younger people, meat eaters will want different choices to vegetarians and vegans and some people may like a large meal while others will like a light meal.
This is just a general description of how tastes could vary.
Customers Can Be Divided Into Groups
A good way to approach this is to think that customers can be divided into distinct customer groups, where each group could contain customers of a similar disposition with similar tastes, such as:
· Older people
· Younger people
· Meat eaters
· Vegetarians
· Vegans
. Children
In order to optimise your café sales, you would be well advised to offer different meals for the different individual customer groups.
For other businesses, you might have other customer groups based on:
· Gender
· Earning ability
· Marital status
· Retired
· Homeowners
· Students
This list is not exhaustive but should give you an idea of how to potentially divide your customers into groups.
Simple Exercise To Evaluate Your Customer Groups
It is a very simple exercise to take an A4 piece of paper and to list the likely customer groups that your products appeal to, and then to list which of your products will appeal to each group.
You should then assess each customer group, separately, and see whether the needs and wants of the customers in each group are fully catered for by your products.
When they are not, maybe create new products or improve existing products.
Maybe ask yourself these questions:
1. Do I have a good choice of product(s) for each of my customer groups?
2. Are my products right for each customer group?
3. Do my products bring the right benefits to each of my customer groups?
4. Does each of my customer groups get a good customer experience from my products?
From this very simple exercise, you could be surprised to discover that you are losing potential sales simply because you are neglecting one or more customer groups.
To help you with the process, you could even ask your customers what their views are – as suggested in 1) above here in this article.
The more you know and understand about the needs and wants of your customers, the greater the number of customers, you will attract and the more of your products, they will buy.
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All 5 Growth Hacks Are Very Easy To Implement
The basis to the success of my business coaching is to make business owners think differently about their businesses.
Very often owners are too close to their businesses and their thinking becomes very narrow and very restrictive.
But when shown ‘how to think’ and ‘what to think’ differently, I have seen many business owners experience ‘lightbulb moments’ where they suddenly see things differently within their businesses.
The results can be staggering - creating big positive changes to their businesses through small actions that have taken ONLY the minimum amount of time and effort to implement.
YOU CAN DO THE SAME!
I Want To Challenge You To Use These Ideas
Starting next MONDAY, please implement each one of these ideas on the days indicated and see if you can use these ideas to grow your business.
If you are already using some or all of these ideas, then well done.
Let Me Know How You Get On
I would love to know how you get on - so please contact me below.
Best Of Luck!
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Please look out for Part 2, too, in the coming weeks, with more easy-to-implement ideas to grow your business.
