The Most Profitable Top Line Revenue Growth
April 15th, 2021 // 11:10 am @ Scott Manning
When you think about your business there are only so many parts to it. Marketing, Sales, Product/Service Development, Delivery, Accounting, Human Resources. No matter how big or small, that’s about it. What else is there?
You can expand into many different variables or areas of focus but business just isn’t complicated unless you make it so.
Now, fitting all of these together and managing all the moving parts and people, well that’s another story.
None the less, when you look at the areas of your business that need to be managed and maintained there is one big missing part from this and of course you notice it right away that is… your customers.
Most businesses put so much energy into their “departments” but very little if any into the actual development of their customers. They tend to give up on taking any responsibility for what the customer does in or with their business.
They go to work on all the bells and whistles, the systems and strategies, and the pieces and parts of the product without ever really considering that the customer is the greatest constant in the entire process.
Instead they treat them as the variable. If we just make a better xyz we will increase our revenue or hit our goals or be more profitable.
Ultimately though, working on your customer is the single greatest focus a business can have because the transactions created by your customer – we don’t want to see them as transactions remember, instead relationships – but the actual act of the customer giving you money and transacting business with you is the highest quantity multiplier you have in your business. If we grow the value of this, we grow the value of everything else without changing anything else.
While top line revenue doesn’t necessarily translate to bottom line revenue. If you keep all other things equal, the fastest way to grow top line revenue is by making your customers more valuable to you and it will translate instantly to the bottom line.
Now, we’ve covered the power of price and fee strategy several times here and I’ve talked with you about educating your customer. We have also invested a lot of time together talking about how to build value in your customers’ minds with testimonials, with consequences and benefits, with future focused language, with reshaping how you present the value proposition with them.
For the next few weeks, I want to talk more directly in line with our theme from last week about tangible ways to be more valuable to customer.
Here’s one every business should tackle…
Is your sales experience leading to the best, highest value, most optimal solution (or solutions) for your customers as their first and most obvious choice?
This is best done with some type of assessment or consultatively. An interactive way to determine a customized product or service specifically for them.
This is not an off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all answer to everyone’s unique problem. That simply opens you up for comparisons and price shopping.
Instead, you want to work with your customers to create an ideal picture perfectly suited for their needs. It’s a one-of-a-kind approach that eliminates comparison.
My doctors got it easy (though some make it harder than it should be) because patients are coming in to be diagnosed and they want the doctor’s guidance. Then they can show them pictures of their mouth and compare those against “optimal” versions.
But every business has this whether decorating or cooking or homes or clothes or car or whatever – the idea of showcasing the possibilities that exist for their unique problem or circumstance.
This is an important psychological approach to selling. It makes the customer experience more fun if they are involved and have a hand in helping determine the solution.
This is the fastest customer value multiplier principle. Are you guiding and raising up your customer to the best solution for themselves as a first option? In addition, is there anything else they should be buying that makes sense to include in the sale?
My doctors have the chance to add on cosmetic enhancement on the back end of restoring patients’ bite. It could be as simple as whitening or clear aligners or other treatments they could be incorporating as automatic considerations. Because you are doing this… it makes sense (financially, convenience, time savings) to consider that.
In your business what does this look like?
What do some buy that others don’t?
What do some come looking for that others aren’t?
What are ancillary products that could be integrated to others sales?
The bottom line to your top line is – you should easily be able to sit down and brainstorm a dozen ways to inch up your revenue with just added lines on a page, a step or two in a sales process, more thorough engagement with customers, and checking through your processes to see where there are gaps.
And you should be able to find a few big ones, some obvious opportunities to bring other products and services into one connected and integrated concept for your customers. As a result, you will dramatically increase their overall value to you without increasing any of the other variables.
As I always remind you, your customers are only worth as much to you as your experience serves as facilitator and creator of value to them.
You can pick what parts of your business you want to focus on but if I were you I’d focus on the ones that really matter; the one that gives you the greatest across the board multiplier of impact and top line transferred to the bottom line result.
And that’s this right here.
There’s a lot more opportunities to discuss and discover. We’ll pick up on this point next week.
Category : Blog
