There are so many sales growth strategies, it’s easy to become distracted by the latest ideas or tactics that will never work for your particular business.
Just because it’s new or promoted by some guru does not make it a good fit for your time and money.
For rapid sales growth, above all else you need lead flow and that comes from the right lead acquisition strategy.
This Post Has three powerful, hardworking sales growth strategies to drive substantial growth.
They’re part of my rapid growth marketing plan. And every one of my clients is recommended to use at least one of these. Some use all three.
If you’ve read my book, Double Your Business: How To Break Through The Barriers To Higher Growth, Turnover and Profit, you’ll know that the results can be spectacular.
3 Attributes of Powerful Sales Growth Strategies
Whatever marketing you choose to fuel your rapid growth, it must be affordable at your current level of business.
There’s no point spending money that you don’t have on marketing that’s unproven.
At the same time, you’ve got to invest in marketing, learn from your mistakes and refine your approach to build your business.
Secondly, it must be profitable.
Obvious eh? It’s all too easy to throw money into marketing, then discover that the marketing has eaten up all of the profit made in the sales it created.
And finally, it must be scalable so that you can ramp it up to attract hundreds of leads and sales per month.
This article is about rapid sales growth, after all.
It’s easy to generate a handful of leads per month with any old strategy. Only the scalable strategies will produce a fistful of sales every day.
Bring these three together and you’ve got the basis for a remarkable engine for growth.
A single marketing strategy that delivers all three of these criteria will drive remarkable growth all on its own.
Get good volumes of leads from multiple marketing channels and your growth can become explosive.
The other big benefit of multi-channel lead generation is that you’re not relying on a single source of leads.
Below are 3 of the most important channels for your business in 2014 and beyond. First up is the easiest, cheapest and most important to have running in your business.
Marketing Strategy #1 – Email Marketing
The best reason to start email marketing are the stats in the diagram below…
If you rely on generating new leads to your business, rather than nurturing a relationship with those people who’ve already been in touch in some way, you’re losing 67% of your potential sales.
That’s because only 3% of your potential market, in any typical sector, are the ‘red hot leads’ that we all wish we could get more of.
And while roughly 30% will never want to buy from you at all, there’s still the rest to go after – a whopping 67%.
If you want to win their business, though, you’ve got to think about the longer game rather than the easy (but small) game of playing only for red hot leads.
The secret to this is keeping in touch with them for the long-term.
And the easiest and cheapest way to do this is by getting them to hand over their email address in exchange for something that you can give that’s got real value to them.
In B2C where you’re selling to the general public, a voucher can work wonders in exchange for an email address.
In B2B, or for more complex consumer sales, if a voucher is too cheap and cheesy, provide white papers, special reports and other useful information to them.
Whatever you give out, it’s got to have real value to your customer.
Put the sign-up forms in strategic places on your web pages.
Create articles with rich content to demonstrate your knowledge and build credibility.
Then keep in touch with email articles that have lots of rich content and ideas to help them.
While many may never buy, there will be many who just aren’t ready yet.
And building a relationship via email is a great way to keep in front of them.
Because ultimately, 67% of these customers want to buy.
In fact, 7% of them are just waiting to be persuaded to make the decision.
30% are thinking about it and probably just need the right bit of information to be able to come to their decision.
And another 30% think it’s probably not for them, when in fact, if they knew the real benefits, they’d jump at the chance.
Any business that’s not capturing email addresses and then following up via email is missing far more business than they realise.
It’s not unusual to see sales double when a quality email marketing campaign is added to a business that’s never previously used email marketing.
The next strategy surprises a lot of business owners.
They think of social media as timewasting. And of course, if you waste hours every week chit-chatting about nothing, or chasing leads on a one at a time kind of way, it can be useless.
But if you think of social media as an audience for your adverts. Where you can target just the people you want as customers, it gets more interesting…
Marketing Strategy #2 – Facebook Advertising
Facebook has a Pay-Per-Click advertising system that produces great results.
The image below shows a facebook campaign that produced 208 new leads in 24 hours. These came from 1,190 website visitors at a cost of just 27 pence each.
Chicken feed as long as they convert into customers at a reasonable rate.
This campaign produced 208 leads, far more than they normally produce in two months.
One of their old marketing techniques was to advertise in a magazine – but this performed at a completely different level for them. Instead of a handful of leads from a £750 full-page advert in a regional magazine, they got the results you can see above.
In fact, smart business owners understand that the cost per lead is a key marketing metric. For this campaign, you can calculate it very simply as the overall cost divided by the number of leads. In this case it’s £320 divided by 208 leads, a cost per lead of just £1.54 – a real bargain.
Their previous internet marketing efforts were producing leads at a cost of £25 each. This low cost allows them to produce far more advertising for the same cost.
One important thought though – unless your product has some super-USP that appeals to people immediately, then be careful not to make a clumsy sales pitch.
It needs to be an interesting post that gives real value – like this blog post, for example – otherwise you’ll just be seen as ‘spamming’ their Facebook Newsfeed, and that’ll just bring you abusive comments.
Facebook is one of the biggest opportunities for marketers in the past 15 years. With Facebook, you can put your advert in front of exactly the kind of people you want to attract into your business.
You can target people by all kinds of criteria, including location, interests, jobs, relationships, age, sex, membership of groups and all kinds of other criteria too.
And there’s advanced targeting methods that create all kinds of opportunities for you too.
Things like creating an audience of people who are similar to your existing customers, for example.
This means Facebook will show your ads only to those people it thinks have similar profiles to people who already buy from you. Powerful.
Businesses that are dabbling in marketing try to do social marketing for free, or perhaps hire somebody to do ‘social marketing’ with it.
It’s not scalable, it’s rarely effective or profitable, and it takes a huge amount of time.
They are totally missing the point.
Pay a little to advertise on Facebook and you can get phenomenal returns.
Because Facebook is about people, as long as you can identify the right audience, you can market practically anything this way.
I’ve helped clients in all kinds of industry sectors to use Facebook to get results – fashion, hospitality, professional services, consulting, training and more besides.
And talking of massive growth, let’s take a look at the next strategy…
Marketing Strategy #3 – Direct Mail
Armed with a list of names, a strong proposition for your customer and some carefully crafted copy, sales letters like the one below can produce 10% or better conversion rates.
The letter above generated 3 enquiries from an initial batch of just 25 sent.
That’s a 10% success rate.
Industry average for direct mail is just 0.5-1%
But for b2b, done well, results can be far, far higher than this average.
The letter above led to some big contracts for a small engineering firm.
A letter for a firm involved in debt-collection opened doors to major gas, electric and water companies, creating opportunities for multi-million pound contracts.
A single letter promoting a service to lawyers produced a 17% response.
And yet another letter created leads for a specialist recruitment firm that’s grown from zero to £100,000 per month in its first year of trading.
There’s a feeling that the Internet is the only way to go with marketing.
Yet while we are all struggling to keep up with Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter and email, the one thing that we see less and less of is marketing coming through our letterboxes.
There’s a power to putting something physical in the hands of your target customer.
If you can show them you’ve got something of real benefit to them, they’ll be keen to speak with you.
They are likely to call you right back, or take your call when you follow up the letter.
This presents a fantastic opportunity for you if you’re focused on sales growth.
Building a list of quality target customers and sending them direct mail with quality offers produces huge results.
I have clients who have used direct mail to win new customers in sectors as diverse as pharmacy, debt recovery, law, accountancy, property management, recruitment, consulting, and many more industries besides.
Direct mail is not going to die out any time soon – it’s an effective strategy to stand out against an increasingly large crowd online.
If you enjoyed this article and want more essential marketing strategies to grow your business, download my guide to faster growth – 21 Ways To Increase Sales in 30 Days.