Helping B2B business owners create a profitable online presence revealed something most of them miss when trying to grow their revenue. Discover what it is, and why it’s the foundation to the three keys to growing your business.
Is your business stalled, or stuck in neutral?
There’s a common observation in business that you’re either growing or dying.
Harsh?
Maybe, but mostly true.
Even if you feel like your business is doing great where it is, if it’s not developing new relationships, products or adding to its sales pipeline—it’s probably on the cusp of lean times (or worse).
This is a scary idea to face down if your business isn’t expanding, and it’s been on my mind because several of our clients have been facing this stagnation and hired us to help solve it.
Where Do You Start if Your Business Is In Neutral?
We could get into the weeds on this, but I think Jay Abraham captured it succinctly:
To paraphrase Jay, to grow your business you can do three things:
- Boost the number of customers or clients who buy from you
- Increase the order size or cart value of what they buy
- Increase the frequency that your clients buy from you (or find some other way to increase utility if you don’t have other products or services to sell them)
Working for Ellis Pond, even though we create strategies and build online systems to grow revenue for our clients, what we’re really doing is helping business owners find new opportunities inside and outside the business within the framework Jay describes.
So while our focus is primarily on digital marketing systems, we start by asking business owners I they’ve tapped out their available buyers.
Most Business Owners Haven’t Explored All Buyer Possibilities
This is a broad generalization based on the clients we’ve worked with, but in almost every case it holds true regardless of who I talk to.
For example, many of the people we work sell B2B products and services offline.
I’m sure you can already see that the low hanging fruit that will cause the fastest business growth is by complementing their offline efforts with an online sales presence.
But for these business owners who are in the trenches, it’s less obvious—their sales teams are killing it, and they’re doing fine.
But they could be doing “amazing”–doing fine doesn’t cut it.
Four Rooms of Possibilities
Room 1 – Your current, offline market
To show you what I mean, let’s imagine a building with four big rooms—each holding 100 potential buyers of your product or service.
Room 1 is what you built your business on: a group of other businesses who know you through your networking, sales team, conferences, advertising, and other offline, high-touch efforts.
Your business is doing well, and you’ve captured a high percentage of the people in Room 1 as clients.
But you’ve only scratched the surface.
Room 2 – Your untapped online market
Room 2 has 100 people who are just like the folks in Room 1, but they like to buy online. Maybe they’ve heard of you, maybe they haven’t, but their preference is to do business online.
You don’t have an online presence though, so your market capture of this room is minimal—perhaps zero.
Where’s YOUR Company’s Growth Opportunity?
You could try to capture more market share in Room 1, and you should. But the growth opportunity here is small. The hot buyers in this room are already clients, so it will take a good deal more effort to move the needle in Room 1 in any significant way.
Room 2 is where it’s at.
Think about it…
Because of your work with people in Room 1, you’re already set up for success with material for case studies, fans for testimonials, and a proven product that gets results.
Now you’ve just got to bring all this online:
- Email marketing
- Social media
- Sales funnels
- Contests
- Media buys
- Webinars
- Bootcamps
There’s a ton of ways to bring your message online to the prospects in Room 2—and your growth opportunity is HUGE.
What Happens when Sales to Room 1 and Room 2 Levels Off?
This is where it gets really fun…
See if there’s other ways people in Rooms 3 and 4 can use your products.
Are there uses for your products and services you haven’t even considered? Be creative—this could open up whole new audiences (aka, rooms).
You could also change the offers, use different copywriting angles, and find new and different ways to present what you do.
And when all that’s been done, you can start walking down the other growth techniques: increasing the average size of purchase, and increasing the frequency that people buy from you.
Wrapping Up
I hope this helps spark some ideas for how to look at your business and see new opportunities to grow.
And if you feel like your business is in neutral and you’d like us to see if there’s a way Ellis Pond can help, send me a message at [email protected] and we’ll set up a call.
