How To Increase Sales In Bad Economy

Today we will talk about how to increase sales in bad economy.

First I’m going to cover what to do if you are in a slump or you feel one coming. Next we will talk about how to increase growth in a company. Lastly, I’m going to cover one very important step in growing a company.

What do you do if you are in a slump or you feel one coming?

First of all, shift your focus and change your language. The very first step in changing anything (it doesn’t have to be business or growth or whatever) is changing the way you describe it. As long as you keep talking about, noticing, reporting on, sharing the slump or that feeling that one is coming you are going to constantly be proven right. Until you can change that, you are going to keep it exactly like it is. You are going to keep experiencing that slump or that fear of something bad is about to happen.

First you want to change your language. If you’re running around saying “hey, we are in a slump over here and sales are down and expenses are up….” Stop. I’m not saying not to react to what you need to react to in a logistical kind of manner. If you need to pull money from one account to cover one account, that’s a logistical thing, do it. But emotionally you should not be letting yourself get dragged through the mud with this feeling that things are falling apart or that things are about to fall apart.

Then shift your perspective. Where you spend the majority of your time mentally is what you are co-creating in your reality right now. If you are constantly reporting on and telling others about and noticing all the problems in your business, you’re just going to get more of those. You need to instead look at what is it you actually want and shift your focus. Start to look what are the things I actually want in my life. This is going on right now in the business…Okay, what do we actually want in this business? If I had a magic wand, what would be the perfect solution to finding our dream clients or our dream market or whatever it is. There’s a lot of different business owners that check out this blog and our YouTube channel….so what would that look like? Focus more on what you want than noticing the things that are going wrong in your life currently. Then you have the possibility of turning that around.

It all starts with your language though. You have to stop pounding the desk, you have to stop pounding the drum and saying all the things that you don’t like about your business. Change that language, change your experience.

What are some simple ways of thinking of increasing growth in your company?

Well, most people fully focus only on one aspect of growing a company and that is new customer acquisition and I’m not saying not to bring in new customers. That’s obviously an important one. How do we get new customers? However there’s some other segments that may actually be easier and maybe faster as well and that is how do I get existing customers to buy more stuff? There’s a great book out there by Perry Marshall. Perry Marshall is one of the OG’s, one of the original gangsters of internet marketing and he wrote a book called 80-20 Sales and Marketing. He says 80% of your income will come from 20% of your marketing and 80% of that income will come from 20% of your clients. Hmm, interesting.

I remember when I was coaching my good friend Marie who owns olive oil stores. She was very focused (like so many company owners) on customer acquisition.

She asked, “How do I get new customers?”

I said, “well what if you started offering more exclusive and cool experiences with some of your better clients? Like what if you went to your clients that just buy from you every single month, month in and month out….”

She responds, “Oh, oh yeah. I have clients like that….”

So I said, “Well what if you went to your best clients and said hey we’re going to fly over to Italy and we’re going to have a big experience, you’re actually going to get to smash some olives and create your own olive juice and we’re going to label it with your face on it…what if you start offering things like that?”

All of a sudden if you look at numbers, you might be able to do a hundred thousand dollars and with just a handful of couples going over to Italy with an experience and have it very profitable versus have to really break your neck to bring in that many new customers. In your efforts to grow your company, always understand you probably have fans that love what you do or love your product, love your service and offering them something more exclusive that carries a higher profit margin might really be a good idea. It might be a lot faster and simpler than just thinking about “what are new customer acquisitions?”

Now, another thing is depending on your product, maybe there’s a way for not just to get your customers to buy more but maybe there’s a way to get them to buy more often. Could you create a subscription service, could you create either an educational service where they pay a small amount per month or a large amount. You want to think about not just new customer acquisition but how do I get customers buying more often? How do I get existing customers spending more? Think through three categories and really brainstorm with your team on ways to do that and watch how you come up with some cool ideas.

Let’s hear from you.

Before we get to my last point, I would love to hear from you. What are some ideas that you have to grow a business? Whether you have used them yourself or you have read about them or heard about them on another Blog or YouTube channel. Love to hear your ideas if you have suggestions or if you have questions. I read and respond to every comment on here and I look forward to reading yours.

One important step to growing a company.

Here is one important step in growing your company and that is to grow you. I do not know if you have heard this term, but the bottleneck is always at the top. If you can not envision a larger company, one that is consistently doing better and better, then no matter what your efforts are there is always going to be a bottleneck. There is always going to be something slowing it down. Make sure that you are not just investing in your business (whatever that business is) but make sure you are also investing in yourself. This is not just buying marketing materials, promotional materials, t-shirts and hats and whatever else you may be spending money.

Are you doing the work? Are you working on yourself to get better? Are you working on whether you struggle with…maybe you have a tendency to get really frazzled and agitated? Well maybe you need some meditation. Maybe you need to go to the spa more often. You relaxing your mind, relaxing your body is actually a good thing for idea flow. It’s a good thing for creativity. Maybe it’s you increasing certain skills of yours. Maybe you need to get better at communication or better at storytelling. Maybe you need to get better at raising money…whatever it is that you need help around. Make sure in your efforts to grow your business, you also have efforts in place to grow yourself.

Want help growing your business?

If you would like help in growing a business, you may want to check out our book Time, Money, Freedom. My wife and I wrote it and it is published by Hay House. A best-selling book and the forward is written by my friend Grant Cardone, Mr10x. It is ten simple rules to redefine what’s possible and radically reshape your life. If you are finding yourself in a company and struggling to be passionate about it, struggling to be excited about it, this book may actually help you out. Here is the link Higdongroup.com/time-money-freedom, to make it nice and easy for you. We have it on audible, kindle and we just rolled out the paperback.