As an entrepreneur, what should you review every year or every three years to make sure your business is running smoothly? The first way to unpack this loaded question is to ask yourself about your primary goal as an entrepreneur. Your primary goal — regardless of your products, services, or business model – should be to spend more time selling.
While you may have to wear many hats as an entrepreneur, you will be leading the field if you can spend three-quarters of your time selling.
At first blush, this may seem like an impossible goal. However, the closer you can reach that ideal, the more your business will prosper.
Once your business prospers, you’ll be able to hire the people and buy the automation you need to put most of your business on autopilot.
On increasing sales as an entrepreneur
Here is how you can increase the quality and quantity of your sales:
1. Review past performance
By conducting a win loss analysis, you can quickly gather a lot of information on the progress of your business. This analysis will show you how to win more often and in a bigger way by reviewing past sales deals.
You’ll develop an X-ray vision about:
- · Recurring problems.
- · Changes in market conditions.
- · The competition.
- · Your buyers’ needs.
By analyzing your selling experience in relation to buyer’s responses to your offer, you’ll gather critical data. As a result of this information, you’ll be able to adjust your business processes and tweak the quality of your products or services. When you figure out how to improve your performance, you’ll increase your revenue.
2. Review your lead generation methods
Undoubtedly, you will have tried many lead generation methods. Now, during your review time, see what worked and what didn’t. Then go one step further and try to discern why some things worked while other things fell apart.
This knowledge will make it easier for you to scale up the things that did work since you now know why they worked.
This knowledge will also make it possible to adjust the methods that didn’t work – sometimes a tweak can turn things around to create huge results. In addition, you can also jettison those things that sounded good in theory but did not survive the crucible of experience.
3. Review your sales process
Look over your sales process, breaking it down into distinct steps.
Are there any unnecessary steps that merely confuse buyers and slow down the sales process?
Are there some overlooked steps that could produce better results?
In other words, are there steps in your sales process that you should stop doing and other steps in your sales process that you should start doing?
With the wisdom of hindsight, you’ll be able to identify pitches that worked and those that fell flat.
Ask yourself the following questions:
1. Do I have a desirable product or service that meets the buyer’s needs, wants, or desires?
2. Is my offer compelling enough to make people want to give me money in exchange for the chance to get their hands on my products or use my services?
3. Do I present the offer in a way that clearly demonstrates that I am assuming all the risk?
4. Do I need to use different bonuses or more bonuses to sweeten the deal, giving buyers the impression that they are receiving more value than the money they are shelling out?
5. Do I introduce a sense of urgency into the offer through some form of scarcity to prevent buyers from procrastinating because they need to take immediate action to get the offer?
6. Are customers fully aware of what the product or service can do for them?
7. Can I offer significant proof that I can fulfill the promise of benefits made in my offer?
4. Review your sales channels
While your sale channel may be working well also think about ways to both enhance your existing channels and add new ones.
Here are some ideas:
- · Enhance or create online sales pages.
- · Find other mediums to advertise.
- · Schedule webinars or add more webinars.
- · Create content or increase the quality and quantity of your content.
- · Write an autoresponder sequence or improve your existing autoresponder sequence.
- · Use offline methods more if you are primarily selling online.
- · Use online methods more if you are currently using conventional sales methods like making calls and visiting prospects.
5. Review how well you’re tracking your business
The best way to identify how well you’re doing is to have metrics to measure your results. While you probably have a few metrics in place already to measure your performance, consider the possibility of adding a few more to increase the accuracy of your information gathering.
Here are some things you should be measuring:
1.How much you spend on advertising and what type of response you’re getting.
2. The number of leads you are getting and the cost per lead.
3. The rate at which you are contacting new prospects.
4. Your conversion rates—the rate at which you convert prospects into customers.
5. Your cost per customer acquisition
Small changes add up
The best way to radically improve your business is to improve your sales. In your revised marketing plan, find more ways to delegate the operational aspects of your business so you can spend more time to focus on selling.