Hi everybody, Francis Hooke here from We Grow Businesses. This is our second video in our little series of videos on the fundamentals of business growth. In our last video we introduced this very simple model to break down the challenge of growing a small business into three more manageable chunks. Today, I’ll give an Introduction to Winning More Work.
If we want to grow a business then winning more work is absolutely key to making that happen. Within winning more work, we can break it down into four main sections – the first of which is marketing.
Marketing is all about generating people who are interested in our products or services. The first thing to think about here is which channels we’re using to advertise our products and services. So it could be via the internet, through word of mouth, referrals and all the many other channels that you can use. The trick here is figuring out which ones work for you and spending more time and money on the things that work, and stopping the things that don’t work.
We can also think about advertising complementary products and services. So for example if we’re an accountant we can advertise bookkeeping services because we probably already have a bunch of contacts that could be interested in that area.
Having generated people that are interested in our products and services, the next challenge is then to sell to people. So taking them from being interested to actually paying you some money. We encourage our clients to use CRM systems so they can manage all the people that may be interested, move them through a series of steps, dealing with their concerns, and making sure nobody is slipping through the fingers, and that their following up at the appropriate points in time. In other words, improving the conversion rate.
The next area that we’re interested in is repeat business. Having gone to all the trouble of generating people who are interested in products and services and selling to them, we then want to hang onto them. We love subscription services because it’s a natural way to encourage repeat business to happen. Obviously it’s not possible in every industry or every single product type, but either way we should have a list of contacts that we can follow-up with at various points in the future.
Finally, the last area that we’re interested in is pricing. So this is the price that we advertise the products and services at. If we price too high it’s likely we’ll price ourselves out of the market. But if we go too low we’re not going to make a margin on what we’re doing. So we have to try and get it right. We encourage our clients to do things like competitor research, and pricing testing to make sure they get it right.
If we can optimise all of these variables then we’re off to a great start in terms of growing our businesses. Next time we’ll have a look at delivering more work. I hope this Introduction to Winning More Work was useful. Speak to you again soon.
