Crack the Secret to Sales Growth
DATELINE: Surfers Paradise, Australia
Next Friday I’m flying Brisbane to Manchester, for another 2 week visit to England. In addition to some client workshops in the North, I’m planning to spend time in around a dozen different counties and council areas.
(Thank you again to all those who helped on my previous visit in May, and those who I will see in the coming weeks.)
I’m in the UK looking to qualify four new clients. Not “three”. Not “five”. And – as this week’s video and article make clear – definitely not “one”!
Never Go Looking for “One More Client”
Why not? Don’t all businesses grow “one client at a time”? If (like a much younger me) you have to ask that question, you may be surprised to learn that they do not.
Growing one client at a time means that every lost client (even if they’re delighted) sets you back. And even if it works perfectly, it’s a recipe for incremental growth at best.
No, the best businesses ask themselves “How do I find my clients 4 at a time?” (And then 10 at a time. And then 50 at a time, and so on.) This is meaningful growth, and more importantly it sets a meaningful challenge to improve your Marketing Strategy and Sales Process.
What would your business be doing if you were chasing new clients four at a time? This weeks article (below) might give you some suggestions.
Thanks Jacob, I’ll read that article and forward this email to my team because you always write with such clarity and wisdom. But why the other side of the world?
Once I return (triumphant?) from my business trip, I will write to you all more fully about the future growth plans for Como Business Coaching, the business I run with my beautiful wife Harmony.
Como’s fundamental WHY is to create “Freedom through Business” – freedom for our family, by helping other businesses owners leverage their business to live their dreams. And as a business, Como provides us with family freedom – which next year will include a lot more global travel than the last four years have afforded us.
Continuing to grow my global client base is a core project in our strategic roadmap, since the timezone spread better supports our adventurous lifestyle. And having lived and worked in the UK for many years, where I am also a citizen, it’s the obvious place to go and make some new friends.
More to follow in a few weeks’ time…
Blackboard Fridays Episode #82 – The Curse of ‘One At A Time’
G’day, Blackboarders! One of the best sales tips I’ve ever received, I’m sharing with you today.
Conventional wisdom tells us that we achieve things incrementally. The joke about how you eat an elephant “one mouthful at a time” is an example of this but it’s most pervasive, and indeed, I call it a curse, when it comes to sales and growing your business.
If I ask how are you going to grow your business or how are you going to increase the number of clients that you service, chances are on reflection you show a bit of humility and say “one at a time”. Putting one foot in front of the other and focusing on where the next client is coming from.
Stop Playing ‘Red Light, Green Light’ with Growth
Like a lot of conventional wisdom I’m here to tell you that this is not how we recommend it. And in fact if we start thinking bigger, we can start applying this not only to clients, but also to recruiting, to building your team and even to things like meetings in your operational schedule.
Clients are something I say you actually need to build four at a time. If you’re looking to just put on clients one at a time, then what happens is one client comes on and one drops off. It’s very difficult to successfully grow a business if you’re putting clients on one at a time and they’re dropping off one at a time.
If I challenged you instead to put on four clients at once, what would you do differently? In terms of marketing, strategic referral channels, your sales process? If you were to start thinking bigger and start going, “well one is not sufficient, I need four at once”, what would you do differently? And why haven’t you been doing that in the past? Why have you been cursed to only try and find one at a time?
Building Momentum
With staff it’s the same. My magic number is two, at least. If you’re growing your business it is much better and much easier, to put on two staff at once than it is to do it one at a time. Now obviously this depends on your capacity plan, your commercial vision, how big you want to get, and how fast you want to get there. But the induction process for two team members is often just the same amount of time and effort as an induction process for one team member.
Why hire a person on Monday and then somebody else in two months when you can put them both on at once? You as the business owner know that setting the challenge of filling two staff members up with work instead of just one is the sort of challenge that you can step up to. In fact, it’ll probably force you to go out there and find those four new clients.
Meetings are the last example I want to talk about because for so many business owners, and for so many businesses, we loathe meetings. Once you’ve implemented the momentum meeting schedule and you’ve got the momentum meeting agenda, which we’re talked about in previous Blackboard Fridays episodes, you’ve got a more efficient meeting structure.
You’ll start to realize that the meeting mindset (your head space for running good meetings) is very different from your head space of working with clients, of managing the team or of thinking strategically about growing the business. It’s much better for you to dedicate a day and fill it with meetings than it is to pepper those meetings throughout your weekly schedule.
Stop bouncing around and going I’ll have a meeting on a Monday and on a Tuesday and on a Wednesday, so that they don’t take up too much of my day, because they will ruin all three of those days.
Linking back to the sales and to putting on new clients, whenever I speak to somebody who’s looking to bring new clients in the business, I tell them, pick one day a week or one day a month (depending on how many clients you need) and fill that one day with sales meetings.
Don’t just have them ad hoc. Even if you’ve got an enormous amount of spare capacity in your business, put those meetings on the one day. Don’t do them one at a time. Do them four at a time. Build that focus and momentum. Because focus and momentum builds your business.
One at a time, whether it’s one new client, one new team member, or just one meeting stops momentum, stutters your business, and makes it harder for you to achieve the growth that you’re looking for.
With Love,
Jacob Aldridge
International Business Advisor
WhatsApp +61 427 151 181
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