In our last Growth Coach business coaching blog, we discussed having the courage to go for growth despite the challenging economy.  While you should conserve cash in your company anyway you possibly can right now, you should not scale back effective and profitable marketing.  As long as your average profit-per-sale is higher than your average cost-per-sale, keep your marketing machine cranked up.  Effective marketing pays for itself! 

Speaking of marketing, there are really only 5 strategies you can use to grow your company: (1) keep the customers you have [PRIORITY #1], (2) gain new customers by generating more leads and closing more deals, (3) increase the average transaction size per customer, a larger unit sale, (4) increase the frequency of purchases, a higher number of sales transactions per year, and (5) say "no" to bad and unprofitable prospects and customers.  As a bonus strategy, and it almost goes without saying, (6) increase the profit margins on all your sales by either raising your prices and/or reducing your associated costs. 

Now let me ask you some simple business coaching questions.  Which of the above 6 growth strategies could your company stand to improve upon right now?  Which are your worst performing areas that need immediate and massive correction?  Which are your best performing growth strategies that you could replicate, multiply and/or leverage even more?  Here is the great news.  You increase your effectiveness in one of these growth areas and you will grow incrementally.  Increase your effectiveness in multiple growth areas and you can grow exponentially -- doubling or even tripling your profits! 

In this Growth Coach business coaching blog we will focus only on the first two growth strategies: customer retention and new customer acquisition.  First, customer retention.  How big and profitable would your company be now if you retained every customer who ever did business with you from day one?  Doesn't that revelation give you incentive to increase your retention rate?  While having 100% customer retention is impossible, it's not impossible to improve your retention rate by 10, 20 or even 30% per year.  Think of the bottom-line results!  Besides, it's easier and less costly to keep the customers you already know and who know you than to attract strangers.  For customer retention strategies, click the following link to read our previously published business coaching blog... http://www.thegrowthcoach.com/Resources/tabid/214/EntryId/62/Plug-Up-Your-Leaky-Bucket.aspx

Now for new customer acquisition.  To gain more customers/clients, you must increase the number and quality of your leads, increase the conversion rate of those leads (close a higher percentage of deals), or do both.  What are your best, proven and most profitable sources of leads?  Your website?  Pay-per-click campaigns?  Advertising off-line?  Advertising on-line?  Customer referrals?  Referrals from advisers?  Direct mail?  Telemarketing?  Trade shows?  E-mail marketing?  Whatever you identify as your best lead sources, keep riding those horses.  Again, as long as your average profit-per-sale is higher than your average cost-per-sale, keep that lead source flowing and producing.  Track and know your marketing numbers (cost per lead, conversion rates, cost per sale, profit per sale, etc.)

To increase your conversion rates, you must improve your value proposition and make offers so compelling that prospects can not say no.  Also, the effectiveness of your sales professionals has a great deal to do with your conversion rate.  Provide business coaching and sales coaching to your sales people to help them grow and develop their level of sales mastery.  In particular, help them improve their closing skills.  One simple way is to capture the best practices of your best-closing salespeople and share them with your entire team. 

Brainstorm with your sales, marketing, customer service, and operations teams on ways to improve customer retention and new customer acquisition.  Ask the question, "how do we better attract, serve, delight and retain our customers?"

We will tackle the other growth strategies in future business coaching blogs.

Daniel M. Murphy
President, Founder & Business Coach
The Growth Coach
Business Coaching Franchise System