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Many moons ago I was asked to perform a turnaround for a small media company.
The initial deal was a performance based one. It was a handshake deal where I would be paid part salary and part shares of the company. After an agreed upon time, salary would return at an agreed upon rate.
No big deal. They were looking to offload the company. This was an easy to preserve cash flow and have someone else take over.
It was a win/win for everyone.
Within 90 days, I had stopped the leaks, brought in new customers at a profit, and we were on our way to launch a newly re-positioned product.
The new product launched and brought in one of the biggest deals in the history of the company. And it happened within 90 days of launch.
Things looked bright.
But alas, our partnership wasn’t meant to be.
Turns out, the owners were shocked at how fast things were fixed. In less than 90 days, they went from sinking faster than a rotten boat to standing on their own legs.
Now, I’ll admit, the legs were wobbly like a newborn fawn, but, hey, we got to that point lickety-split in 90 days.
They thought they had made a big mistake, so instead of handing over shares, they stalled on the contract. Then stalled some more. Then more. I finally saw the writing on the wall and I fired that client.
Those guys, emboldened with how “easy” it was that I turned things around, hired some fresh blood to just continue what I had started.
Unfortunately, not a single one of them knew what they were doing.
Within 30 days, the new guys were cutting prices to win deals. Soon key staff members left. 6 months later, they shut down the offices. Not sure where the owners are today.
Back when it happened – I’m not going to lie – I felt avenged. There was definitely some schadenfreude. I’m told it’s a normal reaction.
But over the years, my attitude has changed. If we had stayed partners, we could have made some nice money together. Today I consider it a missed opportunity.
Here’s the moral of the story – Sometimes when things move fast, there’s some hidden mojo going on behind the scenes that you might not know about.
Let me show you some of that mojo and how to use it fast.
How To More Than Double Revenue In 12 Months
I’m going to show you how a smart company can more than double revenue in 12 month or less.
It’s as simple as a 30% across the board bump in a few major areas.
In this post, I’m going to give you specific numbers that should excite you and show you how easy it can be, with a little bit of guidance, to completely turn your marketing efforts around.
Now, before you read on, you should know that there are 3 main ways to boost your sales.
- Get more customers
- Sell more things more often
- Boost the average purchase of each customer
It’s that simple.
Focus on variations of these three areas and you can’t help but make money.
If you do them well, you’ll experience growth at an exponential rate.
It sounds crazy, but it’s true.
And what’s even more crazy than that, is that you can triple your revenue with just 4 simple metrics.
Let me show you.
The key to this stellar grow comes from 4 simple metrics.
Here they are:
- Average Touches per year
- Response rate
- New Customers Per Year
- New Add-On Purchases
OK, look. I know some people go bonkers when dealing with numbers.
But in this case, it’s quite straightforward.
Here’s a few notes about the chart below to calm your nerves.
Average Touches per year – This is the number of times a customer gets a promotion. If you have multiple media, you add all of them up. I’m doing some math in the background here to simplify this chart.
If you have email campaigns, it would be [Size of list times the number of emails sent per year] = Total email touches. If you use paid media it’s [Campaigns Per Year time the number of people who read your ad].
Easy peasy, right?
In the chart below, I’ve got the number at 2,000,000. If that seems high to you, it’s not. With email marketing, you can quickly get up to the tens of millions of touches over 12 months with even a modest size list.
The touches per year is the most dynamic number for your company. It’s simplified here to show you the principles.
You can break this number down per channel. Here I’m using a total number, but you can adapt this to break out results for email, paid media, etc.
Response rate – I’m assuming that these are sales, but these can be leads, webinar sign-ups, email sign-ups and so on. If you’re running a lead generation campaign, you will use leads as the first number, then an added step for conversion to a sale. Again, not a big deal, just a bit more math.
By the way, if this seems like a bunch of “accounting” work and math that you don’t like, let me tell you this. Once the initial work is done, it becomes simpler because you’re only updating it each month.
One last point.
If you’re doing this exercise for the first time, you don’t need the exact numbers. Just use estimates.
Generally an estimate within 30% of your actual numbers is outstanding, but for your first time you should shoot for 50% of the actual number.
Here’s why you don’t need to fret about actual number on your first pass.
After you do a rough first pass and you finally see how much money you’re actually making (or losing!), it will light a fire under your pants and you’ll be motivated to go dig into the details to get real numbers.
Remember, these are real dollars coming into your bank account and your pocket.
Ok, let’s get to the table.
More New Customer Acquisition Promotions
To get more customers in the door, a first step is to increase the number of touches each year.
This is often hard for some business owners to accept. It’s seen as too simple.
An increase in the number of promotions is easy today because you can simply add another media. This gives you a new channel and new audience to reach.
Even more basic than that is to simply do more of what you are already doing.
For example, if you use email marketing, you can find more ideas simply by running monthly promotions, in addition to a holiday promotion for each of the major holidays. Just this step alone gives you 20 to 30 new promotions to run a year, which easily gives you the 30% boost you’re looking for.
The key to this is structure and planning.
You see, for most monthly and holiday promotions, you can create a process for the rollout of your campaigns. So, for example, in January, you send an email announcing the monthly promotion on day 1 of the month, then send emails at predetermined times during the month, say Day 3, Day 5, Day 7, Day 11, and so on.
Then use this schedule as a template that you apply every month of the year. Once you determine the initial template, you can give the task to an intern to handle the remaining months.
Another boost can come from speeding up your creative process so you aren’t wasting days there. There’s a way to structure this also. It’s beyond the point of this blog post, so just know that it’s possible to cut down time in that area too.
New Customer Outreach
The end result of this step is an increase in number of touches.
In other words, more promotions means more eyeballs which means more money. This is an easy way to boost your sales volume.
But the big benefit comes, not from the 30% boost in touches, but in the 30% lift you can achieve in response rate.
This one is a little trickier. But it’s not impossible, in fact it’s quite possible. I’ve easily seen a boost in headlines and subject lines upwards of 30%… sometimes more.
Let’s say you’re getting a 1% response rate. So that means that 10 people in 1,000 are saying ‘yes’ and buying from you. To get your 30% boost, you only need to get 3 more buyers.
Piece of cake. You know why? Because in the step above you are sending out more touches, so you have more opportunities to test subject lines, copy, and offers. As I said earlier, the numbers above are modest, some might even say low, but you still have plenty of options to test and see what improves response.
Once you find a winner, roll it out aggressively. The best part is, you can usually stack results on top of each other. So, let’s say in month 1 you roll out some tests and find a boost of 20% to 30%. Those tests can be used in upcoming months as your new control, as you continue to test and find new ways to bump up the purchases.
Now, I could write 3 books on how to boost response rates. And after 20 years of marketing, there are stacks of books, manuals, training materials, test results and god knows what else on my bookshelves that talk about boosting conversions, response rates, and boosting buying psychology. Just rest assured that there’s more than enough material to get this 30% boost.
Jeez. There’s an ad I wrote for one of my clients now that has been packing out their store every week, all year round, for the past 2 years. The first version did ok, but after some revisions the final ad was pulling in 200% of the first run. So you can see that 30% is perfectly achievable with a little bit of testing and creative elbow grease.
There’s More Ways
This post is running a bit long and I’ve explained plenty already.
I hope you can see the possibilities in front of your for doubling your revenue.
Go back and review the chart. For each of the boosts, you’ll see the numbers add up right in front of your eye. Each of the major numbers are only boosted by 30% each.
And of course, for the remaining metrics, there are ways you can boost those too.
Actually, there are more than a few, but as I said, this post is getting long.
Here’s just a few more to get your brainstorming started.
- Offer
- Funnel
- Lifetime value
- Upsells
- Monthly subscriptions
- Referrals
- Premium versions
Use this chart as a simple template to more than double your revenue in 12 months!
Hope this gets your marketing juices flowing… and gives you some ideas for use in your own business.
Until next time….