Spring Clean Your Way to Success

grow your business, business growth, grow sales, make money save time, maximise potential, Tania Allen

“If you do what you’ve always done. You will get what you’ve always gotten” We’ve heard Tony Robbins say it, and many others before him including Mark Twain, Henry Ford and Albert Einstein.  In fact if you were at one of my events earlier this year you would have heard me saying it to a full house of business owners. Saying the words and even hearing or reading the words are one thing, but what do they actually mean and how can you change things up a bit if you’re not happy with your current results or you would like to shake things up,  drive your business forward and get the results you deserve.

As human beings, we are creatures of habit and unless we make a continual conscious decision to do things differently and make a commitment to taking consistent actions towards what it is we want, it’s no wonder many business owners become stuck, are working harder than ever before and are frustrated with slow or no real progress.

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Get More Customers, Make More Money and Get More Out of Business by Attracting, Selling & Wowing Customers

Chances are you’re a business owner who wants to grow, create leverage or simply make more money and have more time to do the things you love. We get it. Most small businesses are struggling because they don’t have enough customers, they don’t have enough sales or they simply don’t have enough money.

Tania Allen | Get More Customers, Make More Money and Get More Out of Business by Attracting, Selling & Wowing Customers

Let’s make it clear up front, not every small business is struggling. Some are thriving and want to build a better business, whilst others are literally surviving. We can therefore say small businesses fall into two categories. They either:

  • Need new life & are ready to get back on track and go from surviving to thriving or
  • They are thriving and are now ready to go to the next level

Regardless of whether you’re currently thriving and doing well or wanting to thrive, it’s important to look closely at the common problems that can arise in any business at any time and at any stage of growth. Generally speaking you do not have a solid system in place to help you thrive and continue to thrive most small businesses will always at some stage be challenged with:

  • Not attracting enough leads or prospects into your business
  • Not converting those leads into customers and
  • Not getting customers to spend more and more often.

It has been long known that in order to grow any business you either need to get more customers, get them to spend more with you and get them coming back more frequently.

This can be broken down even further by saying in order to grow any business; a business must focus consistently on:

  1. Increasing leads – attract the attention of potential buyers.
  2. Increasing conversions in other words turn those prospects into paying customers
  3. Increasing the average transaction – getting them to spend more with companion selling or upselling
  4. Increasing the frequency of purchase – encouraging them to buy again
  5. Increasing lifetime value – keeping a customer for longer
  6. Increasing profit margins and;
  7. Increasing the number of referrals from friends, family, colleagues and clients

So what does that look like for you and your business, so that you can easily and effortlessly create systems that will help accelerate your business growth? To fully create leverage, it’s important to understand the big picture view of your business.

A good place to start is to strategise your company’s Lifecycle Marketing strategies & tactics.

So what is Lifecycle Marketing?

The Lifecycle Marketing Model provides a simple framework you can use to design a marketing plan that will help you attract customers, grow sales and deliver an experience that wows your customers. When put into action, Ideal Customer Lifecycle Marketing will help you get more customers, grow revenues or put simply, make more money and ultimately it will help you create more time to focus on getting more out of business in general.

To grow any business it’s vitally important you know and understand and put systems in place to support the business in ATTRACTING more highly targeted leads who are eager to learn more about your solutions, SELL MORE and position your product or service as the obvious choice when customers are ready to buy and WOW Your Customers so they stay engaged come back for more and refer their friends.

Regardless of whether you are operating a service based or retail business it’s important to know your starting point. We like to start with identifying your ideal client.

Know Your Target – Who is Your Ideal Customer

Attempting to reach everybody with your product or service is not only inefficient; it’s also very expensive. That’s why it’s important to narrowly define your target customer, and focus your marketing dollars on the market that is more likely to buy from you than other markets. It’s also important to understand that it’s not about you or your product it’s about matching a solution to your prospects specific challenges, concerns, frustrations, desires and wants. You can clearly define your target market by taking a look at your current customer base, evaluating why they buy the product or service you sell, and more specifically why they choose to buy from you. It’s also a good idea to grouping them based on similar interests. Don’t be afraid to get specific!

Attract Traffic and Interest

It’s important to generate awareness of your company and your product or service before you can start capturing interested leads. The “traffic” may come to you through website visitors, phone calls, in-person visits, and more. Your methods of advertising and attracting interest will determine the quantity of leads, the quality of prospects, and the way they reach you. You may attract traffic with Pay-Per-Click ads on Google or Facebook, social media activity, partner referrals, print ads, networking, live events, or any number of other methods. Once you get the word out about your company and gain people’s attention, you can begin to capture their contact information and follow up.

Capture Leads & Nurture them by Educating and Adding Value if they Don’t Convert.

The most successful marketers understand that a customer once is almost always a customer again and strive to connect and build relationships with potential buyers. This comes from collecting the phone number, email or any other contact point for the customer so that you can offer free value, help solve problems and potentially sell more services to them in the future.

If your prospects don’t convert straight it’s important to develop and implement a lead nurturing program into your business. This ensures you have an opportunity to build a relationship with your prospects over time and allows you to educate them about what it is you sell and the benefits that will solve their challenges, concerns, needs and wants.

Offer & Close

I come across this time and time again. You’ve got to ask for the sale if you want the sale. You’ve got to offer the cake with the coffee if you want to increase your average transaction value and you’ve got to back yourself enough that you know and trust your product and service is solving the need and or want of your marketplace. Make the offer, ask for the sale and you will grow your business easily and effortlessly. Oh and one last tip on closing sales.   Success is in the follow through. If you are in a service based business follow up and follow up some more. This process can be a combination of automated follow ups and personal follow ups but no matter up the more you follow up the more you will increase your conversion rates.

Deliver, Satisfy & WOW, Get Repeat Business, Referrals & More

After the sale, it’s time to deliver the your products and or services and create happy customers or as we have heard before raving fans. Have a look at how you deliver your products and services. Are you wowing your customers? Are you delivering an experience they will never forget and will want to come back for more or refer their family and friends to. Don’t take your customers for granted, as the moment you do they might just go next door to a competitor. Deliver WOW and satisfy and not only will you get more repeat business, have more people referred to you, you will also watch your profits soar.

 

Serving is the New Selling

Serving is the New Selling

We all love to eat and drink and if you’re like me you may also love to observe certain trends in the marketplace I have noticed an increasing number of people who dine out and grab takeaway. Gone are the days where takeaway was for the Friday night people are eating out or doing the grab and go every minute of every single day.

So looking from a fly on the walls perspective, it would be common for one to make an assumption that the food and beverage is booming and is likely to be on the incline rather than the decline.  Is this an accurate reflection for this coming year? Some say yes and others say no. In fact, I was reading in a recent article where it was predicted that … there will be a slowdown of growth in the overall food and beverage market in this current year and therefore some challenges for the franchising sector will also be experienced.

Now I’m going to make a bold statement here, if we all built out businesses on predictions and the forecasts, the economy would be built on fear and most business owners would be closing the doors before they gave themselves a chance to shine.

So how do you shine? How do you maximize your potential?  How do you take control and steer your ship to where you want it to go regardless of the economy and regardless of all other outside influences?

Here’s some proven ways that will help you maximize your potential in your business providing of course, you do the right things, in the right order and, at the right time on a consistent basis.

Business gurus both present and past say there are many ways to grow a business and some ways are more complicated than others. Often times because of the conflicting messages out there it’s easy for any business owner to lose sight of what’s really going to help us produce short term results and long term benefit and gain.

Let’s explore the top 3 that will help you build momentum faster.

As obvious as they sound, I invite you to take some time to consider the below and see what changes you can make and what actions you can take as early as tomorrow to build a more solid foundation for increased profits and set your business on a more predictable path.

 Increase the number of customers.

Now this one sounds a little obvious and it’s what most business owners want more of every single day. What I would ask you to do however, is to consider what this really means.…

To increase the number of customers, you firstly need to increase the number of prospects coming into your business. We all know not everyone who walks into your business will buy, so your #1 aim is to ensure your business is welcoming and invites more people in and aims to provide a solution to your customers challenges, frustrations, concerns, wants or needs.

With the understanding that not all prospects will turn into a paying customer, it’s important to ensure you have a strategy and a process in place to ensure that the majority of prospects are converted into customers and the rest are nurtured so they eventually buy or perhaps recommend you to others.

There’s your business tip #1. Increase the number of customers in your business, and in order to do that you firstly have to increase the number of prospects interested in doing business with you, and then you must do whatever it takes to show value and benefit to that prospect so they naturally want to buy what it is you offer and sell and this is what we refer to as increasing your conversions.

There are other ways you can increase the number of customers and that’s through customer retention. Your aim in business should be to increase the number of customers coming through your doors every single day. It is however very expensive to build a business based on a new customer strategy only, so take some time to consider how you would go about retaining your current customers, in other words coming back to you over and over and also how you could reactivate past customers who haven’t purchased from you for a while.

 Increase the transaction value

McDonalds have been famous for this. Using the traditional “would you like fries with that” approach to getting your customers to buy more.  Many a business owner believes they must increase market share and set out to achieve what is often times a deflating activity. What if I told you that you can influence the success in your business faster just by focusing on increasing wallet share and not just market share.

So what is market share and how do we increase it? Imagine a woman has $20 in her wallet to spend on food and beverage items for the day. She may walk into her local café and purchase a takeaway coffee for $4.20. Its lunch time and she’s undecided as to what she would like, so chooses to take the coffee for now. Meanwhile she’s walked out of your business and past another. By the time she decides what she wants for lunch, she’s well and truly gone. Will she turn back?  Highly unlikely. She is more than likely going to walk into another store and buy what she feels like at the time. This is a very simple example of losing wallet share.   She had $20 to spend, $4.20 was spent in your shop and possibly another $10 was spent in another store.

The key point for you to consider is, how do you get the customer to spend more in your business without feeling like you are following a script and doing the “would you like fries with that strategy” or worse still feeling like you’re squeezing the last dollar out of someone’s pocket just to fill yours with classic upsell and cross sell strategies.

Here’s a simple solution that will make everyone happy…..

SERVE DON’T SELL.  If you change your mindset and how you look at “upsells” and “cross sells” and increasing the transaction value, how you can “serve” your customer more then increasing the average transaction will become top of mind and will allow your business and service to flow. In fact I believe you are doing your customers a dis-service by not offering another item with their original purchase. The worst case scenario is your customer will say no. It’s that simple.

 Increase the frequency of repurchase.

An effortless way of increasing sales in your business is increasing the frequency of re-purchase. The key is to be mindful of how you invite your customers back more often. If you’re a retail store think about some ways how you would get your customers to come in more often. Perhaps it’s getting them on a morning coffee run pick up, offer an SMS ordering system, or perhaps you could send an SMS blast out to your customer base offering lunch time specials or afternoon delights.

As a service based business look at how you can package up your offers and get your clients coming back for more and of course more often. Regular automated touch points via email and SMS and phone provides a way for a well-balanced customer nurturing strategy.

Increasing this area alone by 10% can impact revenues significantly. Imagine what you could do if you increased this by more than that?

 Time to Take Action….

Knowledge is all but useless unless it’s applied so it’s time to get moving and implement some of these tips into your business to ensure you build momentum faster.

Take some time to consider how you will

  • Increase the number prospects into your business. Some ideas could include increase referrals, carry out consistent marketing, social media, running special events, special offers, promotions etc
  • Increase the average transaction value. Consider companion selling, what else will complement the original purchase. Is there an upgrade to what you are selling?
  • Increase the frequency of purchase. Take some time to think of ways you can invite your customers back sooner. Think about your offers and ongoing promotions.

Some say achieving business success is easy. I have to agree. The key to achieving momentum and maximising your potential is doing the right things in the right order and at the right time and more importantly on a consistent basis.

If you would like to learn more about how you can maximise your potential in business. Tania Allen is offering all readers of Business Franchise a Complimentary Road Map Strategy Session.

The Cost of Success – How to Balance Your Focus

It’s not that often as business owners we talk openly about the cost of success. For most of us we keep our game face on and rarely expose the  other side. Regardless of whether you’ve been in business for a short time or  as long as me or perhaps even longer, you will have some idea that there can be a huge cost to success and it can creep up from nowhere if you don’t take deliberate action to ensure you keep your focus balanced between business and life.

If you’re unfamiliar with my story let me give you a quick snapshot. I started in business at the age of 20 with my husband Simon. He was an electrician and like any young couple we had a dream to create success early on in life. We set out on our adventure of building an Electrical Contracting business. Running a business with many staff doesn’t come without a lot of hard work and long hours. We always had a belief that success would come as a result
of our hard work and commitment to best practice. All we had to do was bring the customer in, provide an exceptional service and then keep them coming back for more. Repeat and referral business came effortlessly as we built a solid reputation in the marketplace. We doubled and tripled our business year
after year and when we couldn’t keep up with the work we simply grew our team. Things were going very well, we had it all so we thought… great friends, great income, a 5 acre property, luxury car, two gorgeous kids, good health, a great marriage and friendship and a successful business. What more could we ask for?

We were young, and at the time we thought we had the rest of our lives to enjoy the fruits of our labour, so we were willing to work hard and that we did, working very long hours. Sure there was some down time and that was spent with our family and friends, but now, as a business coach & consultant looking back on how things were, our focus was completely out of balance.

My husband sadly passed away in 1999 and reality set in that we didn’t have the rest of our lives to enjoy the fruits of our labour. The gift is in the present moment, in the now. There is definitely a cost to success if your focus in unbalanced. Since then I have made it my life’s mission to help business owners grow, leverage and even franchise their business so they can build momentum faster, maximize their potential and create more time to do the things they love and want.

So today, let’s explore some quick ways that you can balance your focus, avoid looking at the downside to success and help you create a business & life you love.

Know your why and Balance Your Priorities

I love the teachings of Thought Leader Simon Sinek. Simon says it starts with Why. Knowing your why leads to inspired action. Why do you get up every day and do what you do? Is it to make a difference? Is it for your children? Is it for you? There’s no right or wrong answer, it’s a personal thing, however knowing your why acts as a driving force leading to inspired action and inspired action leads to you moving towards fulfillment. Fulfillment has never been lop-sided; it’s always balanced so this serves as a reminder of what’s important to you in all areas of business and life. If your why is for your children, then that means your children are a high priority in your life, so why do so many business owners work way too many hours and then realize they haven’t spent quality time to make a real impact in their children’s lives.

If you don’t know your why, take some time to reflect and get connected to your why. While you are working on that I encourage you to write down your top 10 priorities in your business and life. Put business on one side and life on the other. If they’re not balanced then you’ve got some work to do. Putting your priorities in a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual plan will provide some structure around what you want to achieve and need to achieve in the specific time frames. Planning provides a clear process to prioritize the activities that need to be done to ensure you achieve your business outcomes and leave room for the balance in your life.

Where Are You At Right Now?

Before you can make a change in anything it’s important to start with where you are right now. On a piece of paper answer the following questions:

  • How many hours do you work per day or per week?
  • How many business related items are on your to do list vs how many personal items ?
  • How often do you check your emails after hours?
  • Do you get through your daily activities with nothing left to do?
  • How many hours do you spend working after hours?
  • How often do you see friends and family?
  • How many quality time hours do you spend with your spouse and kids or other close family members?
  • How many hours per week / month do you spend on YOU? Meditation, Quiet, Reflective time, Massage, relax time.
  • How many times a week do you exercise?
  • How often are you eating out?
  • How do you naturally respond to stress? In other words what behaviours naturally come to the surface?

 

Now you know where you’re at right now, it’s time to write down what you’re prefer instead. Be honest with yourself and focus only on you. Don’t think about how it’s going to happen, just focus on what it is you want. We will cover the How briefly next.

Decide & Commit

Make a decision about when you will start to live your balanced life. A bit like goal setting be sure you put a date to it. It’s no use just dreaming about it and wishing for it. Make a decision to change.Commit to taking consistent daily action towards achieving your new balanced life. Being committed means you will do what ever it takes compared with just being interested which will see most doing what’s convenient. Do what ever it takes to make those daily changes towards what it is you want. It may be you finish at 5 every day or it may be you stay back half hour longer so when you get home you focus on you and your family. What ever it is be sure you make a commitment and take consistent action.

Plan and prioritize

Planning and prioritizing has been underestimated for centuries. Those who do it well, reap the rewards many times over.

  • Plan annually, quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily
  • Review the plan every quarter to ensure you’re on track
  • have a clear process to prioritize the activities that need to be done to ensure you move closer to your goals, not further away
  • Follow the rule of 5-learn to eliminate time wasting activities and implement the Rule of 5 by streamlining your focus and spending time only on tasks that will reap you the largest reward
  • What has to happen tomorrow?
  • Who do I have to call, see or spend time with?
  • Where do I need to allocate my efforts for the day (business & personally)

By writing it down and by ensuring you include your personal priorities too you will start each day knowing exactly what you should be doing in the time you have so you can start living a life outside of your work rather than your life just being your work.

Systemise and Automate

In todays fast paced world it’s imperative you systemize what you can and automate where you can. There are top systems out there to support you and the tasks you regularly perform. Take some time to determine what tasks are you doing over and over again that could be managed better, that could be systemized so you can delegate more freely or you can completely automate. Systemising and automating your business will give you your time back so you can start to live a life outside of your business. Some key areas to systemize and automate are lead generation and converting it. This is an important key area. Many business owners are working long hours to generate more leads. Stop chasing leads and instead turn to automating client attraction. This will bring in more ideal clients and literally put your lead generation on autopilot. Lead Nurturing and customer care is also vitally important so be sure this process is well laid out and systemised.

Systemization and automation will not only free up your time it will reduce the number of staff you need in your business, increase profitability and enable you to confidently delegate or have a task managed with confidence automatically so you have more time to do the things you love.

Delegate more of what you do

For most of us, delegating can seem to be more time consuming than doing the task ourselves. If you can successfully systemise and automate some key areas of your business, delegating will come easily and effortlessly as team members in house and those outsourced will be able to follow the systems and the processes to ensure the task is completed in the way you expect.Learn to lead and build culture.

Learn to become a true leader.

Gone are the days where being seen to be working longer hours makes you a better businessperson. In fact the opposite is said to be true. It’s about efficiency and with a world that is leaning towards more people focusing on balance, job sharing, 4 day work weeks, school hour shifts etc, it’s time you get into the flow of being more efficient and leading the way in the change. By leading the way and using leadership to build a new culture you will gradually re-educate your staff, your clients and suppliers about the new way of doing business. By becoming more efficient, delegating, systemizing and automating you will build a high performance culture, seize the day for what it is and give yourself more time to do the things that matter most to you.

Be the Change

It’s important to be the change. Don’t expect 100% change over night. Commit to taking daily consistent action and making a shift even it’s just a
1% shift every day will see you achieve so much more than you ever thought possible. Later never comes, so be sure you take advantage of today. As I always say Carpe Diem! Which means seize the day!