Scaling up your business for multiple lead generation

Scaling up your business for multiple lead generation: by Jason Li 2012 ©

If you are a small business and working all hours of the day, but want more revenue as your reward, then scaling up your business is the next step.

Here are some answers if you’ve been wanting to generate a few more leads or customers every week for your business.

In fact, from what I’ve seen... being good at lead generation is vital to business success.

To help you scale up in terms of offering more for new and existing customers...

So that they can spend more money with you without adding much costs to you.

Scaling up

Scaling up your business is the way you can keep increasing your business so that it expands and brings in more revenue. So I’m going to share a several secrets that I’ve seen – and best of all they are all practically doable without needing too much training.

This can either be done yourself, or by working with other people.

Once you have found a way to begin scaling up, you can just keep on adding more add-ons until your business grows to a size that is much bigger than it is today.

Scaling up small businesses with more lead generation

When you are self employed then you do absolutely everything in the business...

In fact, small businesses with two or three people tend to work this way as well. So it can feel really hard to even contemplate ways of scaling up your business.

So here I’m going to share some kick-ass leverage and lead generation methods for those of you who think it would make a difference – because you’re busy and you want answers now.

Now scaling up a small business is not easy. I have seen businesses that have only one product range or a small amount of portfolio services or products on offer and really wanted to expand. Their only solution at the time was to maybe sell more of the same. An example would be a retailer locating another retail site so that they can now go from having one shop to two shops.

Obviously, this is great if you have a thriving business and can look to get a new retail shop financed with money in the bank. But not everyone can instantly afford to get another site up-and-running. What if you have no money? How long will you wait to get the money?

There is an alternative. I have seen many owners implement ways of scaling up small business in ingenious ways without having to wait years for a new site. In fact, just copying how the larger businesses do it in the following way will do you no harm.

Using ‘leverage’ in your business

Imagine you want to lift a boulder. Remember when you were kids and you came across sitting on swings and you went back-and-forth to get really high up; well in ancient times engineers used systems like these to move boulders with levers and ropes so they could move huge heavy objects that no human alone could move.

We are going to use the same practical method of using a lever to allow a small business or self employed person to leverage their business: so that a small amount of input using leverage will create a bigger output.

Leverage methods

The first and most important is using the internet: If you sell products then find a business that sells products in a similar nature to you on the internet and work out how you can apply it. Stick with this as it’s more than the obvious stated so far.

Let’s say you sell cartons of juice in packs of three, then you can start by looking at other juice etailers. Look at all the various methods they use to scale up. Next, look at businesses who sell other low cost items too that might not be juice but in multipacks; it could be packs of three tennis balls. How did they do things which your business can use as a solution? Look at the packaging, the offer, bundling with other products as examples.

Let’s say you are a dry cleaner, how could you get more passing traffic to stop and drop-off and pick-up? MacDonalds and car wash places have drive through mechanisms. Could your dry cleaner have one side of the business for drop-offs and one side for pick-ups in the shop? Could you even have a drive through for vehicles to pass clothes through a window on one lane, and collections on another window? Could you join up with a petrol station or grocery shop?

Your take away: leverage other business methods to increase your lead generation

Digital leverage methods

There will be a business out there with the same problem that came up with an internet solution that you can implement in your business. Imagine having an ecommerce site that worked in generating orders and leads without having to put money down on retail sites, or not waiting for another site in order to expand the business.

Is it possibly in any way for you to use the internet to leverage what you do? Read on for more ideas.

Digitise products

Is there any way possible for you to digitise what you do? What? Say that again? What I mean is, can you create a digital version of what you do; your products or services? Chefs and restaurants can create ebooks on how to cook meals that sell on the internet, teachers can create videos which students buy as standard lessons, teachers can provide one-to-one bespoke lessons on Skype, and businesses can create audio files to download to offer advice such as accountants, business coaches or nutritionists. These will reach people who have no time or cannot use your services immediately.

What about other products? If you have toys then you might have vlogs – video blogs - to teach kids how to do more such as Lego videos,  for business people on how to turn your smart phone into a business tool, or a hedge trimmer into ‘Average Joe’s’ favourite sculpturing tool.

Don’t just think of your local market, think country wide; worldwide even. Just think, your business could have a customer lying on deck chairs around a pool in sunny Monaco now, and she is telling her friends about your digital product that she can’t get locally.

Your take away: When you digitise, you get more people finding ways to use your products, reach more people, and give customers the opportunity to share with other people who might find your offer interesting.

Partnership Leverage methods

Partner with other product suppliers: Let’s say you are a photographer, could you create a website that includes promoting the photographic studio you use for a referral fee, partner with a wedding planner, partner with a video recording service, or add on a gallery to sell your product and exclusively other peoples stock, or partner with a camera shop to provide camera lessons to enthusiasts, or partner with a walking group, or partner with a site seeing tour.

Your take away: partnerships give you multiple ways of generating revenue and more touch points with potential clients.

Cash flow

Digital products allows you to scale up without having to spend lots of money upfront.

 In partnerships, as customers use other partner products and services, you can be promoted to them as a trusted partner. Doing it this way might be of no cost to you when using partners.

If it really succeeds, then it also provides you great feedback, and much more revenue. If you have a channel (partner) that brings in plenty of new customers then you will know what this type of customer likes. So if your leads keep coming from a walking group and they want your photography expertise you can expand on this area.

So how much can you scale up your business to a higher level from these ideas and practical methods?

Will any new lead generation ideas bring you new streams of income and more revenue? Will ideas like these add value to your business?

If you know of any businesses that may find the information here worth reading, please Pay It Forward.

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Can you get £100 million turnover one day by using Customer Lifetime Value (ltv)?

Can you get £100 million turnover one day by using Customer Lifetime Value (ltv)?: by Jason Li 2012 ©

You may have come across customer lifetime value (ltv) before...

But did you know it is one of the most important parts of maintaining a sustainable and growing business.

You also may have heard of ‘customer is king’...

And they are King if you treat them well over years as your profits will soar.

If you’ve heard of the phrase ‘scaling up’ then it is based on increasing the scale of your business in a sustainable way as you have a formula to look after a greater amount of customers.

(You can even estimate at which point you can start looking for that new car or holiday you always wanted with ltv analysis)

What is Customer Lifetime Value (ltv)

It is simply: ‘what is the customer worth to you over their lifetime of doing business with you’.

(Even though you knew, it’s good that we got that out of the way)

If you are a good company that keeps customers and clients happy, then you should be able to maintain repeat business. If not, then you will always have to rely on new business to sustain the business. Every morning and every week is a brand new slate.

When instant business setups (who just focus on one-off transactions sales) are struggling to find new customers that week, they may do unprofitable things such as over promise which means too much time spent on servicing the customer; or offer a huge discount which is close to making an offer at cost price.

Repeat business vs instant sale (one-off new business transactional businesses)

The repeat business type focuses on keeping a portfolio of customers who will come back to them to use their products and services regularly. In order to do this, there are three main ways:

1.       The emphasis is on building a good trusted relationship.

2.       Feedback loops so you can understand the ongoing needs of the customer better.

3.       Regular consistent contact with your customers

Businesses that focus on the instant sale are a lot less relationship focused. The aim is to take the order. After this, some instant sale businesses are not really too bothered about the customer after the purchase.

Although, you will find some excellent instant sale businesses that do focus on making sure the product or service matched the customer’s expectations and can gain referrals from those they just sold to: these are owners who know how to create a steady business by focusing on long-term stability and good reputation.

Unless you have an enormous market that you and your competitors are struggling to fulfil the orders for, then in an instant sale business setup you will be living one-day-to-the-next. If competition becomes really fierce, cash flow can be severely tested.

On the flip side, a good repeat business setup usually has a customer database that place orders on a regular basis, so cash flow is more predictable than instant sale business setups.

Repeat business setups grow the quickest

If your business focuses on building relationships and offers that gain repeat business then you will likely grow.

In fact, you can possibly predict pretty close to how your business will grow 6 months or even 2 years from now.

Referrals

Having a business that pleases customers over-and-over again will lead to referrals too in the long run.

This means a stream of new repeat customers. And even better for you, a huge saving in pre-sales acquisition costs on promotion and sales costs, so these customers are even more profitable for you in the long run.

How to calculate return on investment for ltv

Let’s say your product xxx costs the customer £100, and they buy 3 times a year. Over ten years that’s £3,000 of takings.

The upfront promotion costs of advertising and pre-sales (staff, business cards, leaflets, events etc) equal to a one-off £50 per customer.

Then you have an account manager with other business costs, and product costs which equal £30 for every time they buy a product.

So total earnings are: £3000

Total costs are: £50 upfront + (£30x10) = £350

The lifetime value is £3000 - £350 = £2650 profit over ten years.

The only way to keep a customer for ten years is to meet their requirement for customer value

What is customer value, and how do you use this to scale-up sales revenue?

Customer value is the basis of marketing strategy.

In a nutshell: to find the needs and wants of the customer so that you can create a product or service of value which they are willing to pay for.

Even if you are an instant business set-up, or sell products that don’t get replaced for a number of years, focus on generating high customer value; the best in your niche.

Once you have sold your product, look at high value add-ons such as other related products or service contracts to create a steady income stream. Eg, if you sell cars, why not do a deal with a top MOT service station that can provide annual service, tyre checks, and in-car entertainment: offer these add-ons to your existing customers, even if it’s just referrals.

Over time, your business has to find out what is customer value on a regular basis, even if they have been with you say for 3 or 5 years. The industry you work in can change very quickly so every-so-often the customer’s perception of value can change. If this does happen you want to prove you are up-to-date. If not, then even repeat customers have a look down their vendor list to see how other vendors compare and what they can offer.

Let’s look at two exceptional businesses that operate a large scale with millions of repeat customers.

Heinz Beans for example will not have an account manager. But they’ve spent years on understanding customers’ tastes so that the beans taste great when customers eat them.

Amazon will track what products you view and give you plenty of products similar to your searches so that you can see the whole of the market – and of course Amazon gets to cross sell you too when they email you new products on the market.

How much will the above ideas be worth to your business if you improved the ability to increase the amount of repeat sales you get from customers over the years?

Can you draw up one new product to cross-sell or up-sell that is of great value to your customer base? If yes, then do it this week!

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