Here's a handy little checklist you can use to run your business:
1. Wake up and check emails.
2. Answer ordering questions.
3. Check support emails.
4. Check on fulfillment to make sure orders are shipping.
5. Check on Quality Control based on a customer complaint.
6. Check with vendors
7. Check with suppliers
8. Etc. Etc.
9. IF you have ANY time left, work on "business development"
10. Call it a day, go to bed, start again tomorrow.
If you're like 80% of small business owners today, that's what your day is like.
Stuck. Frozen. Unable to move forward.
If you don't change your operations TODAY, you're going to kill your business slowly (and drive yourself crazy), by doing the same thing everyone else does.
===== What You're Doing Wrong =====
From the time you start work until the time you quit for the day, you spend most of your time on fulfillment - making sure you meet your initial obligations to your first-time customers. Whether it's making sure your packages are shipping or following up on QC or support, most of your "work" time is spent on tiny, nitty gritty details of your business. By the time you're done, you have almost no energy or braincells left.
If you've got a small amount of time left over, you're doing what you THINK makes sense for growing your business. Your whole business development "plan" (if you could call it that) is all about finding NEW customers.
After all, NEW customers = more business, right? That's true. It does. But if you're like 80% of other small businesses, you're stuck in a vicious cycle just like this. You get NEW customers, spend almost all your time fulfilling their orders, and then you get more new customers, and spend almost all your time fulfilling their orders, and then you get... See what I mean? The more customers you get, the less time you have to work on getting more - eventually you hit a FREEZE point...
You just can't seem to grow your business, and you don't seem to have ANY time to even think about why. Well we're going to fix that right now. Tattoo this on your arm (or at least commit it to memory).
===== A NEW customer is the HARDEST kind to sell to. =====
Well, DUH! Sure, everyone in business who knows anything knows that. In fact, I'd say that almost every person suffering through the above scenario "knows" that fact too. But it doesn't do them one bit of good because they are in the FREEZE - they don't have time to do anything different. I even just heard some of you say it: "That's great and all, but I don't have time!" Here's how to break the vicious cycle.
You have to make your customers feel like they are SMART to buy from you, and that their purchase was a SAFE transaction. Well that can be an uphill battle. But once you've won that victory, you can (and SHOULD) continue to trade on that "warm fuzzy" feeling you've created for your customer. Unless you DON'T want to make as much money from as little work as possible... But like we stated before, most business owners are way to preoccupied with focusing on fulfillment of their initial sale. They never even get around to developing a portfolio of offers that they can make sequentially to the customers who already know, like, and trust them. They're easier to market to than new customers, too. You've already got their contact information, and you know what they've already bought. And best of all, they're easier to FULFILL than new customers. They're already in your system, you've already ironed out any issues they may have had with their first order. Hopefully, they're well satisfied, feeling SMART, SAFE and happy, too!
So the next time you get a spare minute to work on business development, try to come up with the SIMPLEST, FASTEST additional offer you can make. Upsell, Cross-sell, Bundle, whatever - just get ONE more item that you can sell to the folks who have already bought from you.
The key is SIMPLE and FAST. I'm not saying you need to lower the bar when it comes to quality, but you don't have to try nearly so hard to keep them happy with your subsequent offerings. They're no longer a skeptic, and they've lowered their defenses. You're no longer one of "them" - you're on the inside of their circle. So by shifting your focus onto your EXISTING customer base and selling more to them (even just a tiny bit), you will actually REDUCE the amount of time you have to spend focusing on fulfillment yourself. And considering how easy it is to automate the process of marketing new offers to your existing customers, you'll be making even MORE MONEY at the same time.
My suggestion for what to do next? Use some of that extra cash to HIRE HELP to handle ALL the fulfillment day-to-day hassle. Get yourself out of that J.O.B. at your own business and get a little taste of FREEDOM. What you do with it is up to you, of course. You can just slack off with that free time and extra cash, OR... You can reinvest your time on MORE "big-picture" activities that will REALLY grow your business and your bottom line.
Once you're maximizing your income from every customer you have, THEN it's time to focus on getting new customers. You'll simply have way more resources to work with - more time to spend and more cash to invest in marketing, lead generation, and everything else.
How can this plan work for you? Just like this: Check out Scott Voelker - we did a video case study with Scott just the other day so we could share it with you.
Due to his application of our FREE video tutorials, he was able to increase profits on a new product he had developed and pocket $5100 dollars in PURE PROFIT in just a few days.
Now he's got the ability to focus on the next step in his business - focus on REALLY building up his profits from his existing customer base. After all, he's been in business for a decade - that's a lot of leads he ALREADY HAS! When he rolls out the membership site idea he's working on, he'll be rolling in CASH, too!
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