Looking to grow your business? We can help you with 7 ways to grow your business, the first 5 grow your sales, the last 2 reduce costs. Which of the 7 ways will you focus on first? Talk to us.

There are just seven ways to grow your business. The first five grow your sales and the last two reduce your costs. The seven ways are:

1. Increase customer retention.
Stop your customers defecting to the competition by keeping them happy. It’s easier to retain existing clients than attract new ones.

2. Increase leads generated.
Gain more enquiries from people who are not yet customers with improved marketing strategies.

3. Increase your sales conversion rate.
Get more of your prospects to buy from you by following up effectively and building rapport.

4. Increase transaction frequency.
Engage your customers to buy from you more often.

5. Increase transaction value.
Help your customers buy additional products or services or bigger volumes.

6. Reduce cost of sales.
Increase your margin by improving efficiency to reduce the costs that go into your product.

7. Reduce overheads.
Eliminate or better manage your fixed business costs.

Which of these should you focus on as a business owner? There are improvements to be made in each area, however, it’s most effective to focus on one or two at a time.

For example, a manufacturer will likely want to focus on reducing variable costs first. It might become apparent that wastage of raw materials or inefficient use of time is impacting the profit margin of each sale.

Or, maybe a retailer would focus on encouraging existing customers to come in more often and spend more time training the sales team to cross sell and upsell.

Which of the above ways is the easiest and cheapest to implement?

Increasing customer retention. That’s why its top of the list. Simply looking after your customers better is a fast track to growth.

“Good service leads to multiple sales. If you take good care of your customers, they will open doors you could never open by yourself.” – Jim Rohn

We don’t want to steal the holiday joy just yet, but here’s a friendly reminder that the following tax payments are due on the 15th Jan 2023:

• GST for period ended 30 November 2022
• 2nd Instalment of Provisional (Income) Tax

If you have any questions or concerns, our team is always here to help. The rest of the important tax dates for the financial year are available on the IRD’s tax calendar on their website.

Your existing customers can offer untapped potential. Are you nurturing yours and building stronger relationships or chasing new leads? Discover the impact realising this untapped potential could have on your business with our Value Gap Calculator.

When focusing on sales growth, your existing customers are your greatest asset.

Many businesses focus on enticing new customers instead of encouraging their existing customers (who already know, trust and like them) to spend more, more often.

The probability of selling to existing customers is 60-70%, whereas the likelihood of selling to a new customer is only 5-20%. The opportunity with your existing customers is huge, so why not focus some more attention here instead of prioritising chasing new leads?

By building rapport and forging deeper relationships with your customers, you’ll also get clearer on what they really want and how you can give it to them.

Tapping into added value

There are hundreds of ways to build stronger customer relationships to increase your retention rate and average transaction value. Focusing on your existing customers provides the highest return on your investment – it’s cheaper to target them and has a higher likelihood of success.

Here’s an example of how several strategies can make a real impact.

Let’s say your sales currently sit at $1,250,000, and your current retention rate is 70%. You review your customer relationship management (CRM) system and set-up a customer loyalty programme. You send an email to announce the programme and offer a small discount code for using within the next 7 days. You keep tabs on what your customers are buying and send targeted emails at appropriate times. By the end of the year, your customer retention rate has increased to 80%, giving you almost $40,000 more cash in the bank and $55,000 more profit.

In addition, you up-sell and cross-sell complementary products and services to increase the average number of times your customers buy from you from 2.5 to 2.6 and the average transaction value by 5% to $686. These key things alone result in an increase in cash of $76,317 and a profit of $105,995.

We can run your numbers through our Value Gap Calculator.

Would you like to see the impact of making some small improvements on your profit and cash? Making small changes to retain and delight your existing customers can result in a much higher return on investment than spending on attracting and converting new customers.

Good old-fashioned customer service is as important today as ever.

Providing a great customer experience and managing customer expectations by under-promising and over-delivering is essential to delighting your customers.

Get in touch to find out what returns you could achieve by increasing your customer retention rate, number of purchases, and transaction value. We’ll help you identify the strategies you can implement to better serve, delight, and retain your existing customers and positively impact your bottom line.

Contact us to unlock your business’s untapped potential and set goals for the coming year.

As of February 1st 2023, Sidekick Cloud (which is helmed by Josh Wilson) will depart the Sidekick Group and become The Software Coach.

We’ll still continue working with Josh and his new company to help our clients improve the way they utilise technology in their business. Josh will continue helping with the more in-depth software implementation jobs, and we’ll continue using and building on the skills Josh has left us to help our clients make the most of the tech stack in their business. 

We want to thank Josh for all his contribution in helping us develop our tech stack and skills during his time with the group. We wish him all the best with his new venture and we’re excited to continue working with him as we both help small businesses be more successful!