How To Get A 40% Uplift In Turnover

You’ll sometimes hear people saying ‘if only this would happen’ or ‘if only we could get that we’d be made’. Well, I hate to tell you, but in my experience there is no silver bullet for any business. No ‘if only’, and no ‘one answer or action to building a great business’.

It’s about small changes across every area, so let’s look at these and give you a worked example…

First we have the number of Current Clients that are purchasing from you. This is anyone who is within the purchasing cycle of your goods or services, but you also have to think about anyone who has ever bought from you.

If you’ve been going for a while, you’re going to have people’s details somewhere. Do you have a database? If not, perhaps you could look at old invoices to secure this information and you could then transfer it onto a database as that will allow you to get in touch again.

Trust me, this is one area you really don’t want to fall down on, as your financial future depends on having up-to-date details for anyone that you’ve ever come into contact with. And when I say anyone, I mean everyone. So, if they’ve phoned you, browsed your website, walked through your door, asked for information, bought from you online, or ever caught your attention, you need to capture their details.

Bear in mind legal and best practice guidance of course though, and always give people the opportunity to unsubscribe from any communications. And do remember that an average 68% of your clients leave because of perceived indifference in that they simply don’t think you care. So, whatever you do, make sure they feel the love no matter how long it takes them to come back.

New Leads is any potential new business that comes your way via whatever marketing methods you’re focusing on. It could be emails, phone calls, quotes, referrals, or people simply walking through your door. And just going back to the database, do your absolute best to capture these potential customers’ details and put them on to your database.

Converting New Leads is the actual percentage of new clients that you get to hand over money and become one of your lucky new customers.

Average Number of Purchases Each Year is how often your clients return to you.

And the Average Value of Each Purchase is the total value of your sales divided by the total number of your customers, to give you an average spend.

So, looking at these figures what we’re going to do is increase each one by 10%. Not a huge number by any stretch, and using the tactics we have talked about you should be able to do this easily in your business. In fact, when you stop to think, it’s simply small steps like getting your conversion ratio from 25% to 27.5%, so we’re really not asking too much.

                                                      NOW                                                      PHASE 1

Customers                                       25                                                              35

New Leads                                      40                                                               44

Converting Leads                           25%                                                            27.5%

Total Customer Now                      35                                                              47.1

Average Purchases PA                     7.1                                                            7.8

Purchase Average Value               £710                                                           £781

TOTAL SALES                             £176,435                                                     £286,923

As you can see here, the small changes noted in the right hand column – across the whole business – result in an increase of £110,488 or about a 40% uplift in sales! Remember earlier how we were talking about 70% of businesses never make it into that lifestyle business that so many want, it literally is just lots of small tweaks that will get you to where you want to be.

By Alan Adams