Key #1: Test, discover, and optimize your proven systems for exploding sales!
What is your top producer of new leads?
What are your bottom 50% of lead generation activities?
Do you even track your numbers accurately enough to know the answer?
One of the first places we look to help our online Business Coaching clients explode their sales is to find out how to scale the lead generation and lead conversion winners they already have but just haven’t tapped into.
And where do we help them find the time, energy, and money to scale these proven winners? By starving their bottom performers.
Sounds obvious we know, but in our experience coaching over 1,000 online business owners, it is something that fewer than 5% of have systematically and strategically done prior to working with us.
And when you find your winners, then you have to systematize them so that you apply and use them across your company, not just in a random, haphazard way. Not only will this help you rapidly grow your sales, but it will protect your business by capturing the know-how in systems that your business owns!
Key #2: Streamline operations so you free up the cash flow to reinvest in grow.
There is something in finance called your “Sustainable Growth Rate”, which as applied to your online business says that your cash flow (not just your “income” or “profit”), is the biggest restrictor of growth for your business. (This is simplified we know, but after 20 years of building and scaling over $1 billion of online businesses we think we’ve earned the right to simplify when it brings the essence of a critical concept to the forefront.)
What this means is that you don’t just have to think about “sales” but you really need to think about “cash flow”. Specifically, how do you increase your cash flow and speed up the pace at which you convert sales into cash (i.e. collections) and reduce the operational costs you have.
When we do this with our Business Coaching clients they are often able to double or triple their Sustainable Growth Rate which means they no longer have to settle for less growth than they are capable of simply because they don’t have the cash on hand to seize those opportunities.
Key #3: If you don’t innovate you will get marginalized.
Whether this innovation is:
- New products that you source (ideally proprietary products), or
- New ways to reduce inefficiencies, or
- New ways of connecting with your customers and marketplace, or
- New ways of adding value to your clients lives.
If you don’t innovate in your online business you will eventually be marginalized by your competitors. Whether your competitors are the Amazon.com’s of the world or the other independent sites out there who are constantly on the look out for innovations they can model and implement in their own businesses, you’ve got to find ways to innovate to stay ahead.
Priceline.com founding team member Jeff Hoffman with Maui CEO David Finkel after a joint interview at a television station.
Take the example of Jeff Hoffman, co-founder of Priceline.com. Jeff is also the co-author with Maui CEO David Finkel of the bestseller, SCALE: 7 Proven Principles to Grow Your Business and Get Your Life Back.
When Jeff first started sharing his insights with the Maui community as a Maui Advisor and Maui Coach, one of the things he shared is how he regularly sits down to “read the world” (his term) and do “blue sky thinking”.
He asks the question, “What can I do today that I couldn’t do yesterday?” And from these free flowing ideas he grabs onto kernels of breakthrough ideas that come from looking at the world different than everyone else.
Does it work? Well it helped him grow priceline.com from zero to $1 billion in sales in less than 48 months!
Key #4: Apply the best of time-tested direct marketing strategies to your online business to massively explode your growth!