Sales growth is a key indicator of a company’s performance. It can be difficult to understand how various changes to the business – such as staffing – might impact sales, but it’s important to identify which changes will have a positive effect on this aspect. This blog post aims to give you a better understanding of what causes sales growth and how you can optimize your business for success.
- Know Your Numbers. In order to grow your company, you need to know what numbers are coming in, and where they got those numbers from. As an example, let’s say that your sales are $75,000 this month. You don’t know whether this was a surge in demand or one of the slow months. If you dig deeper, you might find out that your customers order more products in December than they do at any other time of year. This is because shoppers have income tied up in savings during the year and want to spend it on Christmas gifts. This gives you an idea of potential sales for next month if you can manage to beat their buying habits. You can now decide how much to invest in customer service, marketing materials and store decoration, as well as how to allocate your staff resources across various channels for maximum impact on sales growth.
- Research Your Market Competitors. Your competitors have more experience than your business in marketplaces, so finding out how they are doing is vital when you’re looking to improve your own sales. You can use this information to compete on price, for example, or you can figure out which products are performing well in the marketplace and try to beat your competitor’s prices on those items. Just remember that having a better product is most important of all if you want to beat the competition, since price alone will not attract new customers.
- Outline Your Shop’s Unique Selling Points. This tip is a little more difficult to put into practice, but it can be hugely beneficial when implemented well. Of course, you have a unique business model in the same way that everyone does, but this tip applies to how you market yourself to customers. If you simply take a look at how your competitors are marketing themselves and try to copy them in all respects, you’ll never be able to stand out from the crowd and attract new customers. Instead of copying what your competitors have going on, consider going in a totally different direction with your marketing. The results will (hopefully) be fantastic.
- Don’t Laugh at the Customers. Your customers have just as much information about you as you have about them, so it makes sense to figure out what they think. If you see that a certain customer has been coming to your store frequently and buying products that aren’t doing well in the marketplace, then it’s worth exploring whether there are other things on your website that the customer might like. This type of analysis can lead to sales growth if you can identify untapped markets where your company is providing unique services or products.
- Look at Your Customer Base. If each customer spends less than $50 with you on average during the quarter, it’s obviously not worth investing in them anymore. It’s much more worthwhile to spend your time and money finding out which customers are spending lots of money on products that you don’t want to be selling. This could mean that you sell clothes geared towards teenagers, but it also could mean that you’re selling food products to elderly people. With so many different ways for abuse, it’s important to keep track of these trends so that you can see what might be working for each customer group. Additionally, if your company is small, it makes sense to only take the time and energy necessary to focus on the customers who are actually worth investing in.
- Talk to Your Customers. Talking to customers can be very rewarding for your business, but it also is important to the health of your business. If customers aren’t talking to you, you might never know they’re having problems with one of your products. Even if these customers aren’t tying up all of their income on your specific product, they may still be spending money on other products in the marketplace that are performing well. Taking a few minutes to talk to a larger group of potential consumers can reveal a whole new world of consumers – and if the products sell well for those people – then it’s likely that they will also buy from you. The best part is that you’re not spending your time and money on these consumers without any guarantee of sales, as you would be if you were advertising to them.
- Invest in Marketing Materials. It’s easy to forget about marketing materials when you’re focusing on actual sales, but those materials are often the first opportunity for your company to make an impression on the consumer. It doesn’t matter what type of business you have – a handmade goods shop or a multinational manufacturing company – if someone walks into one of your stores and sees a piece of marketing material, they will have a positive or negative impression based upon your creativity and insightfulness. If you invest in these marketing materials, they’ll make it easier for you to gain exposure, which is crucial for attracting new customers.
- Least Important Tip of All. If you simply want to take your business into the future, then the least important tip of all is to just start. You can wait until you have money or experience before starting up, but this will limit your growth and enjoyment of your business. By doing it now, you’ll be able to enter the marketplace and learn as you go through your challenges, which will make it easier for you to grow into a successful business.
Sales growth is a vital part of a company’s success. Just as no business can survive without sales, no business can grow without increasing sales which underlines the importance of monitoring business sales and ensuring continuous growth. Fintalent, the hiring and collaboration platform for Tier-1 M&A and Strategy Professionals offers a pool of business professionals including top of the line Sales Strategy Consultants as well as Pricing Experts that will help boost sales for your business.
